The Expert Dreamers (1962) Anthology

by Frederik Pohl (ed. )

  ‘‘Harla knows carbon.”

  “Now we add zinc. Zinc is a light metal easily extracted from the ore. It is fairly abundant, and it is used by early civilizations for making brass or bronze long before the culture has advanced enough to recognize zinc as an element. Does Harla know zinc?”

  “He may,” said Teresa very haltingly. “What happens if Harla gets the wrong metal?”

  “Not very much,” said Lou. “Any of the light, fairly plentiful metals that are easily extracted from the ore will suffice. Say tin, magnesium, sodium, cadmium, so on.”

  “Harla says go on.”

  “Now we make an electrolyte. Preferably an alkaline salt.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “Or you’ll be asking Harla to identify stuff from a litmus paper.”

  “No,” said Lou. He faced Teresa and said, “An alkaline substance burns the flesh badly.”

  “So do acids,” I objected.

  “Alkaline substances are found in nature,” he reminded me. “Acids aren’t often natural. The point is that an acid will work. Even salt water will work. But an alkaline salt works better. At any rate, tell Harla that the stuff, like zinc, was known to civilized peoples many centuries before chemistry became a science. Acids, on the other hand, are fairly recent.”

  “Harla understands.”

  “Now,” said Lou Graham triumphantly, “we make our battery by immersing the carbon and the zinc in the electrolyte. The carbon is the positive electrode and should be connected to the start of our electromagnet, whereas the end of the winding must go to the zinc. This will place the north pole to the left hand.”

  “Harla understands,” said Teresa. “So far, Harla can perform this experiment in his mind. But now we must identify which end of the steel bar is north-pole magnetic.”

  “If we make the bar magnetic and then immerse it in acid, the north magnetic pole will be selectively etched.”

  “Harla says that this he does not know about. He has never heard of it, although he is quite familiar with electromagnets, batteries, and the like.”

  I looked at Lou Graham. “Did you cook this out of your head, or did you use a handbook?”

  He looked downcast. “I did use a handbook,” he admitted. “But—”

  “Lou,” I said unhappily, “I’ve never said that we couldn’t establish a common frame of reference. What we lack is one that can be established in minutes. Something physical—” I stopped short as a shadowy thought began to form.

  Paul Wallach looked at me as though he’d like to speak but didn’t want to interrupt my train of thoughts. When he could contain himself no longer, he said, “Out with it, Tom.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered. “Surely there must be something physical.”

  “How so?”

  “The tunnel car must be full of it,” I said. “Screws?”

  I turned to Saul Graben. Saul is our mechanical genius; give him a sketch made on used Kleenex with a blunt lipstick and he will bring you back a gleaming mechanism that runs like a hundred-dollar wrist watch.

  But not this time. Saul shook his head.

  “What’s permanent is welded and what’s temporary is snapped in with plug buttons,” he said.

  “Good Lord,” I said. “There simply must be something!”

  “There probably is,” said Saul. “But this Harla chap would have to use an acetylene torch to get at it.”

  I turned to Teresa. “Can this psi-man Harla penetrate metal?”

  “Can anyone?” she replied quietly.

  Wallach touched my arm. “You’re making the standard, erroneous assumption that a sense of perception will give its owner a blueprint-clear grasp of the mechanical details of some machinery. It doesn’t. Perception, as I understand it, is not even similar to eyesight.”

  “But—” I fumbled on—“surely there must be some common reference there, even granting that perception isn’t eyesight. So how does perception work?”

  “Tom, if you were blind from birth, I could tell you that I have eyesight that permits me to see the details of things that you can determine only by feeling them. This you might understand basically. But you could never be made to understand the true definition of the word ‘picture’ nor grasp the mental impression that is generated by eyesight.”

  “Well,” I persisted, “can he penetrate flesh?”

  “Flesh?”

  “Holly’s heart has stopped,” I said. “But it hasn’t been removed. If Harla can perceive through human flesh, he might be able to perceive the large, single organ in the chest cavity near the spine.”

  Teresa said, “Harla’s perception gives him a blurry, incomplete impression.” She looked at me. “It is something like a badly out-of-focus, grossly under-exposed X-ray solid.”

  “X-ray solid?” I asked.

  “It’s the closest thing that you might be able to understand,” she said lamely.

  I dropped it right there. Teresa had probably been groping in the dark for some simile that would convey the nearest possible impression. I felt that this was going to be the nearest that I would ever get to understanding the sense of perception.

  “Can’t he get a clear view?”

  “He has not the right.”

  “Right!” I exploded. “Why-”

  Wallach held up his hand to stop me. “Don’t make Teresa fumble for words, Tom. Harla has not the right to invade the person of Holly Carter. Therefore he can not get a clearer perception of her insides.”

  “Hell!” I roared. “Give Harla the right.”

  “No one has authority.”

  “Authority be damned!” I bellowed angrily. “That girl’s life is at stake!”

  Wallach nodded unhappily. ‘‘Were this a medical emergency, a surgeon might close his eyes to the laws that require authorization to operate. But even if he saved the patient’s life, he is laying himself open to a lawsuit. But this is different, Tom. As you may know, the ability of any psi-person is measured by their welcome to the information. Thus Teresa and Harla, both willing to communicate, are able.”

  “But can’t Harla understand that the entire bunch of us are willing that he should take a peek?”

  “Confound it, Tom, it isn’t a matter of our permission! It’s a matter of fact. It would ease things if Holly were married to one of us, but even so it wouldn’t be entirely clear. It has to do with the invasion of privacy.”

  “Privacy? In this case the very idea is ridiculous.”

  “Maybe so,” said Paul Wallach. “But I don’t make the rules. They’re natural laws. As immutable as the laws of gravity or the refraction of light. And Tom, even if I were making the laws I might not change things. Not even to save Holly Carter’s life. Because, Tom, if telepathy and perception were as free and unbounded as some of their early proponents claimed, life would be a sheer, naked hell on earth.”

  “But what has privacy to do with it? This Harla isn’t at all humanoid. A cat can look at a king^-”

  “Sure, Tom. But how long would the cat be permitted to read the king’s mind?”

  I grunted. “Has this Harla any mental block about examining the outside?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re thinking about a scar or some sort of blemish?”

  “Yes. Birthmark, maybe. No one is perfect.”

  “You know of any?”

  I thought.

  It was not hard for me to conjure up a picture of Holly Carter. Unfortunately, I looked at Holly Carter through the eyes of love; which rendered her perfect. If she had bridgework, I hadn’t found it out. Her features were regular and her hair fell loose without a part. Her complexion was flawless … at least the complexion that could be examined whilst Holly sunned herself on a deck chair beside the swimming pool.

  I shook my head. Then I faced an unhappy fact. It hurt, because I wanted my goddess to be perfect, and if she were made of weak, mortal flesh, I did not want to find it out by asking the man who knew her better than I did.

  Still, I wanted her al
ive. So I turned to Frank Crandall.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Do I what?”

  “Know of any scars or birthmarks?”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, hell,” I snapped. “Such as an appendix scar that might be used to tell left from right.”

  “Look, Tom, I’m not her physician, you know. I can only give you the old answer: ‘Not until they wear briefer swim suits.’”

  My heart bounced lightly. That Holly was still in mortal danger was not enough to stop my elation at hearing Frank Crandall admit that he was not Holly’s lover, nor even on much better terms than I. It might have been better to face the knowledge that Holly was all woman and all human even though the information had to come from someone who knew her well enough to get her home.

  Then I came back to earth. I had my perfect goddess—in deadly peril—instead of a human woman who really did not belong to any man.

  I hadn’t seen Saul Graben leave, but he must have been gone because now he opened the door and came back. He was carrying a heavy rim gyroscope that was spinning in a set of frictionless gymbals. He looked most confused.

  He said, “I’ve spent what seems like an hour. You can’t tell me that this gizmo is inseparable from the selfish, insular intellect of terrestrial so-called homo sapiens.”

  He turned the base and we all watched the gymbal rings rotate to keep the gyro wheel in the same plane. “It should be cosmic.” he said. “But every time I start, I find myself biting myself on the back of the neck. Look. If you make the axle horizontal in front of you and rotate the gyro with the top edge going away from you, you can define a common reference. But motion beyond that cannot be explained. If the axle is depressed on the right side, the gyro will turn so the far edge looks to the right. But that’s defining A in terms of A. So I’m licked.”

  Frank Crandall shook his head. “There’s probably an absolute to that thing somewhere, but I’m sure none of us know it. We haven’t time to find it. In fact, I think the cause is lost. Maybe we’d better spend our time figuring out a plausible explanation.”

  “Explanation?” blurted Wallach.

  “Let’s face it,” said Crandall. “Holly Carter’s life is slipping away. No one has yet come close to finding a common reference to describe right from left to this Harla creature.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “Death is for the dying,” Crandall said in a monotone. “Let them have their hour in peace and dignity. Life is for the living, and for the living there is no peace. We who remain must make the best of it. So now in about five minutes Holly will be at peace. The rest of us have got to answer for her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “How do you propose to explain this unfortunate incident?” asked Crandall. “Someone will want to know what happened to the remains of Holly Carter. I can see hell breaking loose. And I can see the whole lot of us getting laughed right off the Earth because we couldn’t tell right from left. And I can see us all clobbered for letting the affair take place.”

  “You seem to be more worried about your professional reputation than about Holly Carter’s life!”

  “I have a future,” he said. “Holly doesn’t seem to. Hell,” he groaned, “we can’t even gamble on it.”

  “Gamble?”

  “How successful do you think you’d be in getting this Venusian to risk his life by closing his eyes and making a fifty-fifty stab in the dark at one of those buttons?”

  “Well—” started Wallach—“we’d be gambling too, you know. But—”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “I’ve got a sort of half-cracked theory. May I try?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not ‘of course.’ I’ll have to have quiet, with just Teresa to communicate through.”

  “If you have any ideas, try them,” said Wallach.

  “Do you really know what you’re doing?” demanded Frank Crandall.

  “I think so,” I replied. “If it works, it’ll be because I happen to feel close to Holly.”

  “Could be,” he said with a shrug. I almost flipped. Duels have been fought over less. But instead of taking offense, Crandall topped it off by adding, “You could have been a lot closer if you’d tried. She always said you had the alert, pixie-type mind that was pure relaxation instead of a dead let-down after a period of deep concentration. But you were always scuttling off somewhere. Well, go ahead and try, Tom. And good luck!”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Teresa?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Lincoln?”

  “Tell Harla to concentrate on the buttons.”

  “He is.”

  “There is a subtle difference between them.”

  “This he knows, but he does not know what it is.”

  “There is a delicate difference in warmth. One button will be faintly warmer than the other.”

  “Harla has felt them.”

  I dropped the third-person address and spoke to Teresa as if she were but one end of a telephone line. “Harla,” I said, “only part of the difference lies in the warmth to physical touch. There should be another kind of warmth. Are you not affected by a feeling that one is better than the other?”

  Harla’s reply came direct through Teresa: “Why yes, I am indeed drawn to the warmer of the two. Were this a game I would wager on it. But that is emotion and hardly suitable as a guide.”

  “Ah, but it is!” I replied quickly. “This is our frame of reference. Press the warmer of the but—”

  I was violently interrupted. Wallach shook me violently and hurled me away from Teresa. Frank Crandall was facing the girl, shouting, “No! No! The warm one will be the red one! You must press the green—”

  And then he, too, was interrupted.

  Displaced air made a near-explosive woosh! and the tunnel car was there on its pad. In it was a nightmare horror holding a limp Holly Carter across its snakelike tentacles. A free tentacle opened the door.

  “Take her while I hold my breath,” said Harla, still talking through Teresa. “T11 return the tunnel car empty. I can, now that I know that warmth is where the hearth is.”

  Harla dropped the unconscious girl in my arms and snapped back into the car. It disappeared, then returned empty just as the doctor was bending over Holly.

  So now I have my Holly, but every now and then I lie awake beside her in a cold sweat. Harla could have guessed wrong. Just as Wallach and Crandall had been wrong in assuming the red button would be warmer than the green. Their reaction was as emotional as Harla’s.

  I hope Harla either forgives me or never finds out that I had to sound sure of myself, and that I had to play on his emotions simply to get him to take the fifty-fifty chance on his—hers—our lives.

  And I get to sleep only after I’ve convinced myself that it was more than chance … that somehow our feelings and emotions guided Harla where logic and definition fail.

  For right and left do not exist until terrestrial man defines them.

  THE MARK GABLE FOUNDATION

  LEO SZILARD

  Leo Szilard’s credentials as a scientist are of the highest order, his work as a pioneer in nuclear studies having contributed very greatly to the present state of advancement of the field. To this towering reputation he has recently added two new ones. The first is as a utelevision personality”— particularly in the assorted panel shows dealing with nuclear testing and atomic warfare, where his polemical remarks add the weight of authority and the reason of a keen mind to the debate. The second is as a sort of belle-lettrist of science—and science fiction—with the publication of his book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphin.

  Pointed and revealing, Szilard’s comments on world affairs are even better expressed through science fiction stories than over the television air, as attested by the present story, The Mark Gable Foundation.

  As soon as I saw the temperature of the rabbit come back to normal, I knew that we had licked the problem. It took twenty-four hours to bring h
is temperature down to one degree centigrade, injecting three grains of dorminol every ten minutes during that period. Sleep set in between the third and fourth hours, when the body temperature fell below twenty-six centigrade; and after twenty-four hours, at one centigrade, there was no longer any appreciable metabolic activity. We kept him at that low temperature for one day, after which time, having completed our measurements, we injected metaboline and allowed the temperature to rise to normal within one hour.

  There was never any doubt in my mind that once we got this far, and got the temperature down to one centigrade, we could keep the rabbit “asleep” for a week, a year or a hundred years just as well as for a day. Nor had I much doubt that if this worked for the rabbit it would work for the dog; and that if it worked for the dog, it would work for man.

  I always wanted to see what kind of place the world will be three hundred years hence. I intended to “withdraw from life” (as we proposed to call the process) as soon as we had perfected the method, and to arrange for being returned to life in 2260. I thought my views and sentiments were sufficiently advanced, and that I had no reason to fear I should be too much behind the times in a world that had advanced a few hundred years beyond the present. I would not have dared, though, to go much beyond three hundred years.

  I thought at first that one year should be plenty for perfecting the process as well as for completing the arrangements; and that I should be in statu dormiendi before the year was over. As a matter of fact, it took only six months to get ready; but difficulties of an unforeseen kind arose.

  A section of public opinion was strongly opposed to “withdrawal from life,” and for a time it looked as though the Eighty-sixth Congress would pass a law against it. This, fortunately, did not come to pass. The A.M.A., however, succeeded in obtaining a court injunction against my “withdrawal” on the basis that it was “suicide.” and suicide was unlawful. Since a man in statu dormiendi cannot of his own volition return to life—so the brief argued—from the legal point of view he is not living while in that state.