Pan Sagittarius (2509 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  “Do you think,” I inquired (in what was, I realized even while saying it, an absurd non sequitur), “that so-called intuition can be accepted as a perfectly realistic psychological process which conforms to laws that we will understand eventually?” I was baiting the bishop: I knew for sure that he must reject this kind of rationalism, insisting on a mystical treatment of intuition.

  O’Duffy smiled at that remarkable horizon which had no business being there among all those mountains. “I think,” he ultimately replied, “whatyou think.”

  “You can’t!” I protested, feeling unfairly outplayed by evasion. “I may be jeopardizing my job by saying so—but I am an atheist!”

  “That is to say,” he queried mildly, “you have specified, inspected, and rejected all the meanings of divinity?”

  I shrugged. “I’m a scientist. Most of the meanings are unscientific, and all the scientific meanings can be put into material categories.”

  “Ah, so!” murmured O’Duffy in a tone that somehow left me wondering whether there might be a soft spot in my own logic.

  We were silent after that, jogging on into the endless ups and downs. The effect of concavity was still present, and I occupied myself with evaluating it. The sensations discomforted me.

  Suddenly, turning to look back, I was shattered by apparently convincing evidence that it was no illusion! For the rickety station at West Gleam, several miles away, still was visible in the lowering gloom—although between me and the station arose a cluster of mountain pinnacles that ought to have hidden the station totally!

  Thereafter for a good hour I stared straight ahead, thinking methodically, eliminating successive hypotheses. The effect of altitude? no, I rejected that. Some refraction of light waves, no doubt, owing to an eccentric distribution of vapor in the atmosphere. But what vapor? this atmosphere was the clear, dry, distance-annihilating western variety. Yet this was obviously a mirage of some sort; and as such, it must be subject to the laws of optics. I pondered; and as twilight closed in on us, I became conscious of fatigue, chill, and hunger. I turned to ask the bishop how far we still had to go.

  I then became conscious of a fourth condition that didn’t seem physical. Just above the bishop’s head I was seeing a halo.

  Quickly I turned my eyes away. Since it was objectively impossible, why dwell on it? Staring into distant darkness breeds after-images of light. If I had projected such an after-image on the gray, balding head of O’Duffy—why, then I had so projected it.

  I did not look again at the bishop. To help me avoid looking at him, I stared past him at the head of the horse. And I chose not to recognize the fact that the horse did not have a halo.

  Contrary to my expectation, the men of West Gleam were men, virile and active. Their women added to my admiration of the little settlement whose cabins nestled in a snug valley. There was much beauty on these women, but it was a beauty simple-frocked and unadorned. These people seemed to have returned to first principles, but with a new departure: the women knew their places, but so did the men. There were no inferiorities, no superiorities: all knew where they fitted into the cooperative commonwealth.

  I was neither a political scientist nor a philosopher. Nevertheless I meditated this curiously successful culture, contrasting it with my preconceptions about Socialism. Tentatively I formed a hypothesis that there must be some critical size of a society which is a cutoff size distinguishing Communistic success from Communistic failure. Maybe Communism, if undistorted by the stylization of Marx, could work if the society were small enough so that all the people could know and trust or realistically mistrust each other. This was a little place, and it worked; in some other places that were damn big places, it broke down into oligarchy, it was Communism no longer even though it claimed the name.

  All the people adored the bishop. He was their common denominator. Their common denominator.

  Once I had met the people and had shaken hands with them firmly, they had oriented me. They were simple workers; I was a scientific thinker. That was that. They had heard of me and had looked forward to my coming, and their regard of me blended admiration and acceptance. It was as though they had said: “Science is a necessary component of our society, as long as we keep it from being more than an interwoven component; go to, we shall get us a scientist.”

  On the morning after my arrival, the bishop conducted me into the mountain field. O’Duffy’s arthritic bends did not, somehow, prevent him from moving through the surprising mountainscape at a speed that would have done credit to me at rugged thirty. Increasingly I was sensing the bishop’s essential adequacy as a man: his appearance of naïvete turned out to be the sophistication of the mountains and the kind of subcivilized comprehension that is occasionally called basic human wisdom.

  After nearly an hour of swift up-and-down foot travel, the bishop came to a decisive halt, turned, studied me. I leaned on my spade, waiting, confident and even vain about my image. Lusterless in mufti, now I was in my element and dressed for it. I was tall and broad-shouldered, and my blond hair and gray eyes were set off to perfection by my khaki shirt and high-top boots; I rested easily and flexibly on my spade handle, the squareness of my shoulders accentuated by the pack I carried. In and around this light pack reposed my field equipment: binoculars, magnifying glasses, specimen cases, rope, trowel, and a little kit of well-cushioned bottles containing reagents for spot-screening. At my belt hung a geologist’s hammer. The bishop had to be appreciating that Lewis Paige was ready—and able.

  “Here,” said O’Duffy, “is one of the very best sources. Now, before we begin, are you clear about this phase of your job?”

  Precisely I asserted: “I have to examine a stuff that abounds in this vicinity, a stuff that seems to be a rare erth. I am to give it a geological and chemical analysis and report as to (a) its classification, (b) its properties, and (c) its utilitarian value.”

  O’Duffy chuckled. “That’s it,” he murmured. Then his eyes, usually somewhat bleary, grew searching-sharp as he began to inspect the rocks about us.

  I watched him carefully. We were in a col far up a side of a peak; this hollow, worn by a prehistoric glacier, had been weathered by elements other than ice, and our footing was as pebbly as the surroundings were rugged.

  I remarked: “My spade is de trop. I should have brought a pickax.”

  “I have one,” replied the bishop, who thereupon fumbled at his own pack and brought out a pick that was not much larger than my pick-ended hammer, only heavier and with more handle for swing. “Where do you suppose the devil has hidden that stuff?”

  “That it?” I queried, my practiced eyes having spotted something unfamiliar.

  “Urn,” he confirmed, stooping and pointing to a pocket in which reposed a dark substance that unaccountably sparkled. “It is abundant around here, Paige. We have a couple of geologists in our crowd, but they haven’t been able to make anything of it. Do you know the stuff?”

  “No—”

  I ruminated. Then I drew my hammer. “Ax?” asked O’Duffy, offering his. I shook my head: I was preoccupied, and maybe I wanted my own tools to prove adequate. Shedding my pack, I opened it and drew out a small metal flask with a wide top. I opened the flask and set it nearby. After that, I bent and chipped slowly and carefully at the lode.

  Pausing, I turned to O’Duffy. “Could it be radioactive?”

  “Possibly. I see what you mean. But I’ve been handling it for half a year with no ill effects.”

  I nodded, my face a little hot and probably red—why hadn’t I brought a Geiger counter?

  With a small trowel, I scraped up a quantity of the stuff; I straightened, held it to skylight, and poised a lens above it. For a while I lost myself; the bishop, half-bent as usual, regarded me with curiosity.

  “Nothing,” finally I announced, “that I ever saw or heard of—that is, it arouses no associations at the moment.”

  He smiled: “I’m not surprised.”

  I deposited the stuff in the
flask, closed the flask, replaced flask in pack, swung the pack onto my shoulders, and looked at the bishop. “Ready to go?”

  O’Duffy was disappointed. “So soon? I thought you’d like to explore a little—”

  I snapped: “Later. This junk ought to be looked into.” My stomach lining was puckering…

  All that afternoon I kept to my room, pacing, examining the queer dust, fuming because my trunk of equipment hadn’t arrived. It came late that evening—either because next week’s train had missed connections and come in early, or because I had arrived yesterday afternoon on the previous week’s train. I pounced on the trunk, tore it open, and pull-hauled miscellaneous apparatus, littering the floor and the scanty furniture. Alternately sweating from my work and chilling in the night air of the mountains, I worked with fury; and at last I stood panting and triumphant amid stacks of laboratory debris. The only free surface in the room was the floor of the trunk.

  I sank onto a chair (first shoving off a gunnysack which plopped on the floor in abject discouragement) and wiped my forehead. But I was not resting: I was planning my next move; in that mess, I needed to plan…

  I snapped to; and with swift deft movements I put the broad table in order: it was a slab top of virgin pine that formed a workbench on one side of my large room. From the melee emerged a gleaming array of slides, hand lenses, tweezers, assorted microscopes, reonic instrumentation, a delicate scales encased in glass, handbooks, and an odds-and-ends case that was full of them (with each article in its own compartment built to size). Then—since the bishop’s local arrangements generated only AC adequate for flickering bulbs—I crawled under the table and unpacked a storage battery from a crate; I filled the battery with distilled water from a ten-gallon jug that materialized from nowhere, ran a cable or two behind the table to its work surface, and hooked up a powerful lamp that I had mummified in old rags. The metal shade of this lamp was unique: it swiveled; one side exposed the two-hundred-watt bulb to a ground-glass screen that diffused the light over the table with relative softness; the other side, elongated into a projecting tube, framed a lens that concentrated the light into a dazzling beam about two inches in diameter.

  Must hook up the waterpower generator tomorrow, I told myself. Meanwhile this charge ought to hold for tonight— For an instant I stood, my vision darting desperately around the room. Vaguely I knew that I was excessively, feverishly excited; but then my excitement swamped my realization. My frantic looking around for what-came-next ended when I saw the chair again. I dragged it to the table and sat, quivering. I held myself in check for a moment, breathing staccato; then my hands went to the flask that sat in the exact geometrical center of the table surface. I opened the flask, seized a dish of polished enamel, and thereon poured (with flexible fingers that didn’t quite tremble) the queer dust I had gathered that morning.

  My hand swiveled the lampshade, and the concentrated finger of light probed the dust. It leaped into light, this dust, seeming almost to move and crackle…

  For many minutes I inspected it beneath my hand lens.

  Then my tight hand sought the least remarkable of the microscopes.

  I went to work…

  The Paige-dreaming faded, grew semiobjective: I, Pan, semiawoke to the degree that I seemed to be watching Paige at work; semiawoke with a semisense that already there was a concern, that it would not be very long before Pan-alertness in full Pan-identity would be indicated…

  Not yet, though. I lapsed back into Paige-dreaming…

  When dawn began to sneak into my room, there was possibly no knock at the door, since I didn’t hear one. I continued to work vigorously, viciously; and thus the bishop found me when he stole noiselessly in like the dawn.

  The spare and kindly bishop contemplated me silently for a long time, standing with his hands in his pockets; a tenth of my back-mind was fleetingly aware of him; only his chronic midbend saved his head from damage against the low ceiling. I was hunched over my table, my hands moving and my head bobbing; to my right, a pile of notes was growing with visible speed; my pencil danced over paper; now and then I would drop pencil long enough to flash the light once again on the little plate of sparkling dust that now had advanced to my ultramicroscope…

  Ultimately I soughed out a sigh, paused in my work, and ran my hand through my tousled blond hair; then I turned my chair. For a moment I gazed blank and slowly realized that someone had straightened the things in my room. In a dim corner sat the bishop, informally pontifical; my floodlight indirectly relieved the dimness in that corner just enough to reveal that the bishop was beaming.

  I tightened lips; then I smiled small. “Thanks, Your Grace. I had intended to finish that straightening job in the morning; but I don’t suppose I would have been up to it, at that.”

  “Are you progressing?”

  At that my smile was rueful. “In a negative sort of way. I’ve got to the point where I know what the dust isn’t. I knew that anyway, but now I think I can prove it.”

  “So what isn’t it?”

  “Anything now known to science. It’s a new thing, Bishop—”

  “What’s the next step?”

  “Spectroscope!” I snapped febrile; probably my eyes gleamed. “And I think we may as well get to it right now—eh?”

  I jerked to my feet, looked quickly around for orientation to O’Duffy’s relocation of my stuff, and spied a largish box, unopened, near the rustic excuse for a chiffonier. En route thereto, I stopped and glanced at a window. “My God!” I blurted. “Uh—I beg your pardon, Your Grace—”

  “Okay,” said the bishop. “Name’s O’Duffy.”

  “Dawn’s breaking!”

  “These mountains. Peculiar. Dawn does that.”

  “But,” I exploded, “that kills the spectroscopies!”

  “Can’t you pull down the shades?”

  In despond: “No use. This delicate study would be worthless except in absolute darkness.”

  “I’m a photography addict,” the bishop averred.

  I patterned and swung. “You have a dark room?”

  “A very good dark room. My own bedroom. It has no windows at all. I found that starlight keeps me awake; it’s too pretty for sleep.”

  “Great! Let’s go there!”

  “—But I don’t advise it now,” he qualified. “You’ve been working all night. How about some rest?”

  “Rest? Oh…Rest. Of course! I’d forgotten—”

  I dropped into a chair: now I thought about it, I was shot. Snapping off my light, I regarded the bishop…

  I rubbed a hand over my eyes and looked again.

  That damned halo!

  I started to blurt an inquiry. I clamped my jaw shut, reflecting: I am a tired man. My retinas are playing tricks. I’m so tired that I’m admitting it.

  My gaze shifted to my table; and I noted with some relief that a microscope on which my gaze happened to fix was indulging in unnatural mitosis. I chose not to recognize that this kind of illusion was physiologically different from a halo. If I would close my eyes for a few minutes, it would all go away…

  “I found your bed,” whispered the bishop, shaking my shoulder gently. “It was right over here, under a suit of clothes.”

  Although I wasn’t soft, my mattress of cross-laced pine boughs bothered me: I slept several hours without exactly awakening, yet all the time I half-knew that I was not perfectly asleep. Eventually I had to accept the fact that I was no longer asleep at all. Before my eyes came frankly open, I had visions of halos dancing in front of me; then, in a brief lapse, I myself became a halo—a great broad halo, encircling myself who was also the Erth. Halo-Paige-Erth—regarding chains of halos, and among them stalking a long lank shadow bent arthritically at the midriff…

  Ultimately I was awake, lead-footed but at least oriented. Squinting at a window, I saw that it was well into the afternoon; sunlight was just beginning to splash on my floor, and I told myself that the heat was doubtless at fault for my fever-dreams—at least
, in part the heat. I struggled to my feet: they hit my floor thudding, reminding me that I had gone to bed with boots on. I toyed with the idea of going for a swim, but the prospect of having to take off my brogans was too much in my weakened state…

  “Damned dust!” I grunted, thinking about its eccentric sparkle. I sat on bedside in something like stupor; my mind was excessively sodden…

  The door creaked open; a head thrust itself cautiously in.

  I muttered: “Ah, there.”

  “You up?” drawled some Texan.

  “More or less. Come in.”

  A heavy boot kicked open my door. A short chunky man entered, carrying a tray.

  “Oh—Shorty, isn’t it?” I queried with a lambent gleam of intelligent recognition.

  “You hit it,” Shorty countered while he carried the tray to my table. There he paused uncertainly: “I’d be glad to set this thing down, but—”

  I saw what he meant, got up, cleared a square yard of table. “Won’t you join me? Mighty nice of you to bring my—breakfast, is it? supper?”

  “Brunch. No thanks, I don’t want to spoil my supper. You’re a privileged character here, Mr. Paige. The bishop has given orders that whenever you want to eat, or sleep, or make love, or whatever, you’re to be accommodated.”

  The third of the four whatevers affected me somewhat as the halo had. But—“Hell!” I protested, pausing halfway through an intriguing glass of unfamiliar citrus fruit juice. “I don’t want to be that much trouble!”