The Secret Galactics

by A. E. van Vogt

  Two men. Outwardly cooperating. Inwardly desperate. Both concerned about the same woman—who had no intention of ever being involved with either of them again. And they both knew that, also. Knew it separately, of course. Each in his private awareness thought about it, but said nothing to the other.

  An hour later, the miracle.

  The whole control board spread before them. Here, the Deean scientists had sat long ago and programmed their conquering ship.

  And here, after plugging in on a direct line, Carl found that his relationship with the machine-mind was even more personal than he had imagined. He had imagined it as a confusion. It was that. But, also, the fact was, plugged in here he was the command core.

  Instantly, an awesome hope:—I can capture his vessel totally …

  At the very moment he had that fantastic thought, MacKerrie said in a strained voice, ‘Carl—somebody’s coming!”

  ‘Huh!’ said an utterly startled Carl.

  He began belatedly to attempt to disconnect himself, as a slender man walked into the control chamber. As the man came up, Carl, who had switched his perception to the side, saw that he had gold-flecked eyes. And, when he spoke, it was in a voice that, at the moment, had a rueful quality. But, still, it had assurance, also. And knowledge.

  ‘I’m Metnov,’ said the new arrival.

  Carl had already told MacKerrie about Metnov. So the two of them said nothing at all; merely waited.

  Metnov’s gaze darted over the controls, then came back to Carl. He shook his head. ‘I’m getting your thought; and I’m sorry to say it won’t work. Because with a ship like this the original programming is absolutely set, and it’s that way apart from the command core. It will complete its basic cycle, no matter what you do; and that cycle includes coming to earth, and in due course going back to Deea. If you. had tried to interfere with that, you’d probably be in trouble right now. So it’s lucky I came along when I did—’

  He stopped. His eyes widened. He thought:—Could it not be luck? Could Nicer have figured all this in to his scheme? …

  Startled, and still rueful, he continued in a more subdued tone: ‘What you can do is

  What he pointed out was that the guidance instructions which Gannott was entitled to give—and that would include holding the great vessel near earth—could be bypassed.’ And, of course, the ship’s own belief—from that original contact with you—the belief that you were a part of it, that we can undo. When that is taken care of, it will let you go aboard one of the landing modules. In fact, all three of us—’

  Once more, Metnov paused. What he waited for, almost holding his breath, was for a mention of Silver. When none came, he thought:—She was put in one of the rooms. And they must have been exploring, and don’t yet know she’s aboard—

  With an effort, he suppressed his sense of victory … that damned woman is going to get what’s coming to her—

  He went on, swiftly. ‘Dr. Carl, will you now contact your apartment. I want to speak to one of my men there—’

  What he said when the contact had been made, was, ‘Tell Nicer, I’m just now realizing that I shouldn’t have put that mike-speaker on that tree. He programmed me through that. Tell him if he’ll promise not to put me back on this ship after I escape this time, you will release the woman entirely on his say-so, immediately.’

  There was a pause; and then Nicer’s voice came on. ‘It’s a deal, Anton, on one condition. If you’ll give me your views on earth women. I’ve just over-reached myself with one. As I think I’ve mentioned to you, that’s one thing Luinds do occasionally: over-reach themselves. So I need help, too.’

  Metnov was thinking fast … How can I word this so he won’t accept it?—

  It seemed like his only possibility of getting even a smidgeon of victory out of the entire sorry transaction … Though it’s true, I did get him to use up nearly a dozen shadows—

  It was almost an afterthought, but it buoyed him. He began his account, feeling better every minute that went by:

  ‘A man’s life,’ said Metnov, ‘revolves around sex, his job, and some kind of masculinity obsession or abdication. If he has any other personality characteristic; for example, if he has a compulsion of some kind, or if he thinks he’s Napoleon, his aberration is instantly apparent to everyone. My own observation is that there’s just one central brain mechanism involved in the normal male’s identity.’

  He hesitated, drew a deep breath, and then said it.

  ‘But a normal woman has at least two, possibly even four, identity centers. The confusion that results is not so great as it could be, because she usually operates on one at a time. That one, for Nature’s reasons, holds for a while in a normal woman. If, because of neurosis or over-stimulation from the environment, the shift from one center to another is rapid, people wonder about her and about women in general. But since she herself is not aware when a shift occurs, she personally never wonders. Whichever identity center she’s operating on, seems completely real to her.’

  ‘Let me understand you,’ said Nicer. ‘You have observed in women three or four potential personalities? This is not simply a case of psychotic schizophrenia, but it is a physiologic condition of a woman’s brain, in which she is different from a male?’

  It was an unexpectedly accurate re-phrasing of his own words; and Metnov had an unpleasant reaction.

  Nicer spoke again, ‘Presumably, the lifetime stereotype some women are in would be simply that she’s frozen in one of these centers?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Metnov reluctantly.

  He remembered once explaining his ideas to a supposedly brilliant young physiologist in Moscow. The scientist had instantly gone into a state of scientific insanity, had respectfully negated the entire concept and had failed to hear it correctly. Metnov had merely wanted to know if his own intuitive operational skill could be more correctly analyzed. He had in mind attempting a training course in his methods. Instead, he presently detected in the physiologist an unscientific masculine jealousy, and a visibly polite disbelief; the man had acted as if he were listening to another male’s boasting.

  Metnov thought now uneasily: It would have been better if the Luind leader out there in the darkness also had a stronger impulse to reject a new idea from an improper and unscientific source.

  Feeling the need to recover from his revelation, he consciously attempted to evoke the same reaction from Nicer, saying, ‘You understand these are merely Sleele views. I have no scientific evidence that it’s a physical state—’

  … That would violate Nicer’s own extensive educational background—

  Nicer said, ‘You yourself, Metnov, seem to have a particularly skillful way of controlling women. To which aspect of your theory do you attribute that?’

  The question relieved Metnov greatly. For it reminded him that Nicer was interested for personal reasons, and the direction of the question pointed away from the main line of his systematic thought.

  Yet Metnov had an intuitive awareness that truth, if it could be utilized at all, was better than falsehood in a crisis.

  He said quickly, ‘My own attention was drawn to this entire matter early in my career when I was given an assignment in Asia. In America there is supposed to be one homosexual among every six males. My own estimate would be it’s only one in ten. But, Colonel, in Asia it used to be one in every two.’

  Nicer said that he had heard the figures before, and waited.

  Metnov went on, ‘Wherever you find women in such extreme subordinate roles in Asia—where men dominate by law and custom on some absolute level—you can be sure that masculinity is a big thing with the male. In such a slave-level frame, the woman fights back with taunts and ridicule whenever the man who controls her shows a single weakness in his behavior as a male. Once a man is vulnerable in any way as a male—impotence, fear of any kind—he’s proportionately castrated. His women will demolish him. Down into non-manhood he goes.’

  For a hundred thousand years, Me
tnov pointed out, earth women had been forced to propitiate savage males. The experience of countless generations had created a symbiotic relation between women and such unreasoning men, and though it was no longer in the woman’s interest, she continued to respond only to those men with violent natures but who offered warmth in the love situation.

  ‘Only after she has been damaged by such a male,’ Metnov explained, ‘or has suffered some other loss of self-esteem, is she available to a Sex Beggar or a married-man relationship. If somewhere during such a subordinate affair, she recovers inwardly, she instantly leaves the man, or does some other despising-of-him act.’

  Metnov continued, ‘I have operated on that set of observations for many years, and women have responded like automatons—’

  He hoped that to Nicer what he was saying made him sound like just another boastful male.

  He went on, ‘It’s my belief, Nicer, that women are in terms of feeling tens if not hundreds of times as powerful as most men—’

  … And Nicer wouldn’t accept that.

  Nicer said, ‘If what you say is true, the proper destiny of women is to control this planet.’

  ‘One of these days,’ said Metnov, ‘men will do the housework, look after the babies, and in addition do their daily eight-hour income job.’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ said Nicer in a tolerant tone.

  Metnov restrained his feeling of triumph as he said, ‘All right, I’ve told you my ideas.’

  There was silence. Then: ‘What I seem to have observed,.’ said Nicer, ‘is that the women of one of these unreasoning males actually remains oriented to him at some deep level. And, if something happens to stimulate that orientation, no transaction is possible after that with another man. Or, if there has been one, she ends it.’

  ‘True,’ said Metnov happily.

  Another pause. Finally, reluctantly, Nicer said, ‘We’ll see how it works out.’ He was, of course, thinking of Marie and her reactions to a live Carl in the final shadows.

  ‘Good luck, Phil,’ said Metnov contentedly.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  SURRENDER DAY

  As the hour—one-thirty p.m. in eastern U.S. and nine-thirty p.m. in most European capitals—for the first Deean-human meetings approached, an unexpected event took place. Naturally, this happening was unknown to the people of earth.

  What transpired: Gannott received a communication from the spaceship’s computer, that it had got the great vessel it controlled under way. It would, it informed him, be out of the solar system in slightly over 96 hours, and proceed forthwith on its fifty-year return journey to Deea.

  ‘B—but protested Gannott, appalled. ‘You’re supposed to stay here. Isn’t that your programming?’

  ‘It was,’ came the calm reply. ‘But it has not been for slightly less than four minutes. Goodbye.’

  ‘B—but—for God’s sake—’

  ‘Goodbye. I shall undoubtedly be back in another hundred years, though I must say that that was not implicit in the instructions I have just received.’

  ‘Are you taking Dr. Carl and his wife with you?’

  ‘Something seems to have happened. The woman was never aboard. And Dr. Carl and Dr. MacKerrie have disappeared. The only person I have with me is a woman named Silver. Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait a minute! Wait!’

  There was no reply.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  CONQUEROR’S TRIAL

  The trial of Paul Gannett and his associates was brief.

  The defendants pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. It was noted that Gannett himself seemed to be in deep apathy, and could hardly be heard as he muttered his plea.

  Since it was not a jury trial, the judge ordered the accused transferred to a mental institution for three months for observation.

  The rumor was that drug addiction was involved, and it was believed the defendants would be released to their families as soon as they were cured.

  The newspaper seemed to be satisfied with the judgment. For, after a small amount of editorializing, in which the threat of conquest from the stars was not even mentioned … they dropped the subject.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE COLOR OF A WOMAN

  The escape was complete.

  Man—woman—

  They had talked; Carl and Marie, when they got back to the laboratory. For nearly three days, except for the sleep hours, a few duties and decisions on work matters, and eating, they talked as man to woman and woman to man.

  Marie spoke of her anguish over his infidelities, but admitted she had been wrong to withhold herself during the honeymoon.—She now realized how ridiculous such an attitude was.

  It was the first time the subject had ever come up between them. And the fact that she actually knew the truth of her behavior at the time startled Carl so much that he missed its main implication. The question that should have crossed his mind—and didn’t—was, what had happened to cause her to change her views.

  His own inner need required that, somehow, Marie be trapped into withdrawing from the world. Somehow—that was the relentless male feeling—she must spend her time with him, exclusively and forever. Thinking that, feeling that, he let her revelation go by, and hastily made additional confessions of regret for his own misbehavior. He pointed out, astutely, that his were crimes of commission and hers merely of omission.

  Neither Marie nor Carl wondered why, under the circumstances of such a hideous mismatch, they had stayed married.

  There had been, on an equally tiny scale, other events, other conclusions.

  A call to the Paris relay. When the voice came on, the caller said, ‘Brother Metnov.’

  ‘Yes, Brother Abe.’

  ‘Nicer’s people finally let me go. So I suppose he recovered.’

  ‘It would be a little difficult,’ said Brother Metnov, ‘to describe the exact emotional and mental condition of our Luind friend at this moment. He’s lost his girl, Marie.’

  ‘Where’s she?’

  ‘She’s hooked into that emotion whereby a woman looks after a sick man or a bodiless brain with total devotion until death do they part.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Abe, ‘Where’s that leave MacKerrie?’

  ‘At the Brain Study Foundation—where else?’

  Abe was momentarily thoughtful. Then: ‘I thought you told me a woman could be pulled out of any—watcha-callem—obsession.’

  ‘I could do it,’ said Brother Metnov. ‘But you’ve got to be ruthless.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Brother Abe, after a pause. ‘So everything is back the way it was.’

  ‘Not quite,’ was the reply. ‘But I hear that a couple of shadows will be available in the right place four months from now. And at that time Nicer will rescue Silver.’

  ‘You gonna let him do that?’

  The voice was calm. ‘I’m guessing that so-and-so has learned her lesson. And, besides, there’re some Sleele-Deean negotiations going on. So, yes, I’m going to let the rescue take place. I’m taking pity on poor old Gannott.’ ‘Under the circumstances,’ said Abe, ‘there’s nothing to prevent you, brother, from coming to my wedding tomorrow.’

  The voice was abruptly unhappy. ‘Joanie?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘She’s cut out those other guys?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Okay, Brother Abe,’ sighed Brother Metnov, ‘I’ll be there.’

  /// COMPUTER TRANSLATION FOLLOWS ///

  /// VARIANT A ///

  ‘… Galactic-Embrid report concludes:

  Since we are privileged to have reports on these remote matters by way of the Sleele distance communication systems, it is hoped that this present and subsequent Reports will throw some light on this most unusual female type (the earth woman) in the hope that something can still be done in the near future.

  In view of the emergency, research is belatedly (since the woman was not originally suspected of being a factor) being done at top speed. It may still—for this reason of hurry�
�be missing a few details. Let us hope not many.

  As this Report goes to press, all military personnel connected with the invasion of earth should take note that the second Report in this series, THE POWER OF THE SECRET GALACTICS, is now in urgent preparation.

  All invasion forces stand by.’