by Jerry Sohl
“Yes,” she said calmly. “I know.”
“Then—then?”
“Don’t you suppose I have feelings?” she retorted. “I knew those manifestations would let you know where I was, but I thought perhaps you wouldn’t care.” Her lower lip quivered. “I thought this would show you how I felt as nothing else would.” She looked at her hands clasped in her lap.
“There are those of your own kind,” her father said reproachfully.
“But Dad! I found no one on my own plane. On this one I have found someone toward whom I respond.”
“Him?” Her father looked directly at Martin.
“What’s wrong with me?” Martin managed to say.
“I’m sorry, Virginia, but I’m going to have to ask you to return with me.”
“And what about Martin?”
“Don’t be a fool, Virginia. You know there is no hope for him.” Then he added abjectly, “For all I know there may be no hope for you. If you would come now perhaps we could convince The Three.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t go with you.”
“If only you had said something,” he pleaded. “We could have provided someone. I never guessed you really felt this way.”
“I told you.”
“But it was too late!”
“I don’t think it was, Dad.”
“But how can this ever end?” Dr. Penn was beside himself in mixed grief, bewilderment and anger. “They will find you. There are many of them, you know. I will have to report this entire incident.”
Virginia put fingers over her father’s hand on the door of the car. “Don’t report us right away, Dad. Please give us a little time.”
He shook his head. “You’ve got him protected. How do I know what you’ll do next? I must report you. I’m sorry, Virginia.” He started to move away from the car. “I didn’t expect a child of mine...”
He stopped talking and stood there for a moment, not moving. Martin looked intently at him, wondering what had happened.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Virginia said, opening the door. Her father fell to one side on the lawn beside the street. She got out of the car, walked up to the door of the nearest house.
Martin sidled over to where she had been sitting, took a look at Dr. Penn who was as one asleep on the grass.
“I guess I’m just a not-so-innocent bystander,” Martin said when Virginia returned. “Would you mind explaining?”
“Later.” The girl bent over, kissed her father on the forehead. “Good-bye, Dad,” she said. Then she got in the car, told Martin to head out of town. There were tears in her eyes.
She wiped the last of the tears away when they were miles from Avon Ridge and had taken more than a score of turns on various roads to shake possible pursuit.
The night was cool. There was nothing but moonlight and the open road and the rush of wind past the car.
“Dad let his guard down when he was talking to me,” she explained suddenly, slumping in her seat, leaning toward him and putting her head on his shoulder. “I didn’t do the same. Otherwise he might have put me out and your envelope would have gone with me.
“I merely paralyzed his neural centers temporarily. All functions, except those necessary for living, such as breathing and the beating of the heart, were halted. He’ll recover soon.”
“What did you do at the house?”
“I told the people a man had fainted while talking to us. I said I didn’t know his name but suggested they call the hospital or the police. Dad didn’t need it, but I just didn’t like the idea of leaving him there on the grass so lonely and—and unprotected.”
She dabbed at her eyes again.
“Now he’ll be really angry,” she said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.”
Chapter 11
Among other things, the face of Managing Editor Lovett Wilson and his omnipresent cigar came to Martin’s mind as he drove along the road with the girl at his side. An unreal road. An unreal girl. No, he could touch her if he wanted to. She was real. But everything was so disjointed, so crazy... Did the New York office think I’d run into anything like this, Willie?
And you, Chonkey. You ought to be with me. You’d have the time of your life photographing the things that have happened to me. Only nobody would believe it. Something for your morgue, Jimmy Simpson. Something for you to do research on. Put it in the file for good old National Scene. Tell Senior Editor Denton Myers to stand by with pad and pencil...
Then there was FBI man Kenneth Aldrich and General Walter Deems... Want to know what happened to Forrest Killian, General? If you promise not to laugh at me, I’ll tell you: He was annihilated and the particles of his being were strewn through the cosmos. Do you believe that? I find it hard to believe myself, General. And then there was Dr. Merrill. Martin felt a sharp pang of regret about Dr. Merrill. He had liked him.
The crazy thoughts, the separating of the living from the dead, Bobby and his sphere, Virginia and her hazy eyes that he looked into once when they weren’t hazy. Why did she bring me back? Why did she go against her father and her people? What people? Why? Why? Why?
Suddenly Martin pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped.
“What are you doing?” Virginia said, sitting up in alarm.
“This is no good,” he said firmly.
“Why?”
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “Why? That’s all that’s been running through my head. Why?”
“But someone will find us here,” she said, looking up and down the road. “State police—or Father!”
“How can you expect me to go on like this, not knowing why these things are happening, not knowing whether I should report what I know to General Deems—”
“O my God, no!” she cried. “I’m sorry, Martin. I’ve been thinking so much about myself and what I ought to do I haven’t given a thought to you. Reporting to General Deems would be the worst thing you could do. Can’t you find a lane we can turn down? Then I will try to explain a few things.”
Martin started the car, drove a short distance and turned off on the first byway. The lane went deep into a wooded area where bushes and branches scratched the side of the car. Eventually they came to a clearing where he stopped the car and turned off the lights.
“Well?” He looked at her, a face of even greater beauty in the soft moonlight, bright spots in the eyes that were the moon’s reflection, full red lips made dark by the moonglow.
“Don’t be backward,” she said softly, putting a hand behind his head, bringing it toward her.
“I was under your spell once,” he said, hesitating. The urge to take her in his arms nearly neutralized the memory of his awakening from her mental hold over him.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I love you.” She looked up at him with wide eyes, eyes without guile or mockery. Eyes of desire.
“Your explanation...”
“This is partly it, darling.”
“No tricks!”
“Tricks? For heaven’s sake, darling...”
The electric touch of her lips unleashed an overwhelming love for her in Martin. The kiss was long; it was unearthly and as ethereal as her eyes. It took them to between earth and the moon and there they hung in space between two worlds, alone with the silent stars, the warmth of their love emanating in every direction like the light of the sun, erasing the bitter chill of outer space....
When he released her, he sat with her, stroking her hair, kissing her eyes, her nose. Once in a while she clung to him as if she were afraid he would run away. They said nothing.
“That,” she said finally, “is not telling everything.”
They lighted cigarettes and were silent again, listening to the faint sounds of the autumn night: a cricket near by, the crackle of dry leaves not yet fallen from branches as they brushed one against another in the light breeze. Then she spoke.
“About fifty thousand years ago,” Virginia said slowly, “a man and a woman from the fourth planet of a
star in the constellation your astronomers call Auriga came to Earth.”
She looked up at the moon and studied its full face. “They were two people sent by their advanced culture to seek a planet where there was life. They were to colonize the planet and use the life they found there to help create more of themselves.”
Virginia faced Martin. “They were not people as you would think of people, Martin. Millenniums ago they might have been like you and your kind. But in millions of years they had advanced so far beyond you that it is impossible for you to comprehend them, for their natural life-form is much different from yours now. For you to conceive it would be like trying to explain cybernetics to a savage—please don’t get angry by the comparison. It’s the only way I have of explaining.” She laid a hand on his arm.
“Go on,” he said.
“These two people found, much to their delight, an early world here. Europe was then a wilderness inhabited by hippopotamuses, elephants and mammoths, to say nothing of a few saber-toothed tigers. To their amazement, they also found a creature who resembled what they had looked like millions of years before. It was early man, a creature who was accustomed to squatting about an open fire and near a source of water.”
She tamped the cigarette out in the ashtray. “The two travelers from the planet so far away—Capella Four—decided Earth was the world for them. They had searched many galaxies for such a place. They informed their parent civilization and landed here. They saw that it would be millions of years before the animal they had found—man—would evolve to the point they desired. They felt that he might not survive at all; he might not become the dominant life form. So they impregnated this animal with reasoning power.
“You, Martin, are a descendant of that animal. In you the reasoning power instilled in the first man is carried on as it has been through the years. We have kept your reasoning power alive, pushing you ahead of other life-forms. You have won out over other challenging life-forms because you were able to reason.”
“But why did they do this?” Martin asked.
“These people were—are—immortal,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “They are still alive. From these two original people of ours have grown a society of Capellans numbering in the thousands, some living among you, but all living, thinking, growing side by side with your civilization, waiting for the day when they will return to live forever on Capella Four. For them these thousands of years that have passed since the first couple came here have been but a moment, considering their immortality.”
“Why couldn’t these people of yours reproduce on Capella Four?”
“There is no life-form such as yours there to be used,” she said patiently. “Actually, the first animals found here resembling you were valueless. They did not possess enough reasoning power. They were like a radio set that was receiving no radio waves, although that’s oversimplifying it. Once this reasoning power was instilled in these first men—oh, understand me, they had a little reasoning power, but not enough for us—you started to progress. You have evolved in the past fifty thousand years as far as you would have gone without us in two or three million years.
“So it was that the first two people from Capella decided to instill man with definite intelligence—a thought force. It was like growing a garden, you see. Your brain was the soil; our devices accelerated the growth of the seed we planted much as the sun would have helped grow a flower. Without the thought force field you would revert back to the early days—the pre-Neanderthal period. We nourished your reasoning power and it has grown as man has grown. It has been carried on to man’s children and to his children’s children, always kept alive by the power we supply it. I won’t try to explain it. It would be like trying to explain what happens when a migrating bird makes its journey. It is a concept beyond physics and chemistry and radio. You have seen examples of the power of the thought force in what I have done.
“Each of you Earth people holds in his brain a fraction of the thought force that each of the Capellans possesses. The thought force in man is most vigorous at his most vigorous age—between eighteen and thirty-five. Do you follow me?”
Martin sighed. “I follow you, but I don’t understand.”
“Your progress has been fast, though history as you write it says it has been slow. Ours, Martin, was really slow. There were no outsiders around to help us. We didn’t evolve for millions of years. But we have edged you forward. Eventually you might have been able to communicate with yourselves by sheer brain waves as we do.”
“You are one of them, then?” Martin asked with a sinking heart.
“I was,” Virginia replied. “But I am here now, a woman just as you are a man, endowed with what a woman is endowed with.... Does it bother you to know?”
“It—it will take some getting used to.”
“Think of me!” Virginia said. “I’ve got to get used to you, too. Think of that.”
“But—”
“Look,” Virginia said. “In our own place, on our own plane where I come from, which I explained is co-existent with yours, we look at each other much as you and I do. There we have the same desires, the same feelings—there is sex there, too. Otherwise how could we reproduce? We are subject to the same natural laws as you people, except that they are vastly advanced.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“You needn’t have. Of course it’s different, from what I’ve been told.” Martin could not see the blush because it was night.
“Naturally,” he said drily.
Virginia laughed. “You can be jealous, can’t you? Well, you needn’t be. I have loved no one else.”
“I still don’t understand why these two people you talk about came here in the first place,” Martin said.
“To grow a garden. To grow men’s minds. When the garden has grown so much, then the harvest.”
“Harvest?”
“Wars. Plague. This releases the thought forces from the new dead in tremendous quantities. It is this thought force released that is the ultimate goal of our people.”
“You mean when people die in quantities, the thought force is released in concentration? Is that right?”
Virginia nodded. “The thought force so released is gathered much as microwaves would be gathered on a dishlike antenna. Our offspring benefit by this force. It is directed into and becomes part of their brains. Each of our children, as he or she is born, must have implanted in the brain the concentration of thousands of adult, ripe thought forces from men. Otherwise they would have no more thought force than you. They would be mortal and of relatively low intelligence, by our standards.”
“You kill people to do this?” Martin asked in horror.
“You people kill yourselves,” she said without emotion. “Occasionally we lend a hand when a sudden surge of thought force is necessary.”
“It’s ghastly!” He drew away from her.
“I suppose it would appear so at first glance.”
“Then to you we are like—like cattle, like the animals we raise to eat!”
“Has anyone asked the cows and the pigs how they like what you are doing to them?”
“But that’s different! They’re dumb animals!”
“Have you ever thought of what you must be to us?”
“Then you are to me what I would be if I were to tell a sow that I had fallen in love with her!” he cried, shaken.
“Nonsense!” She lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. “If you changed yourself into a pig it is conceivable a sow might look attractive to you. But you haven’t. The fact that I am here as Virginia Penn has no parallel in that thought. It so happens I am in love with you even though I am aware of my other existence. Could you do that with a sow? Doesn’t that tell you that your analogy doesn’t make sense?”
Martin was silent.
“I suppose it is tragic to you to think of all the wars and campaigns and terrible catastrophes from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions that have taken place merely to relea
se the thought force. But mankind has grown with it as he was intended. He has harnessed nature. He has become a thinker. None of these things would have been possible without the seed planted by the first people from Capella—the star Alpha Aurigae.
“Your reasoning power has existed only through the courtesy of our people, much as your radio picks up its programs from the various radio waves you have invented—invented because the idea was implanted by us. We have, in a sense, kept the sun shining for you.
“You’ve heard the flashes of insight inventors sometimes have, the sudden discoveries, the waking of a man in the middle of the night with the answer to a problem he has tried to solve for years. These are implanted by us when we have felt you were ready for them, ahead of their logical discovery in what would have been your natural evolution. We have profited by your existence, using you while we have made possible the increasing numbers of you. Your civilization could not have progressed without us. Oh, you could have advanced to where you are in millions of years, but you certainly could not have done it in a mere fifty thousand years.
“We have not been idle as you have been growing. We have been at your sides, though you didn’t know it. We have harvested some of you, let others of you go to seed. We have helped you progress. We have let you increase your population. Now we are waiting for word that the thousands of us who have been born during those thousands of years may go back to our star system.
“We let you invent the atomic bomb. We directed you toward its solution, so that those thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be wiped out so that several of our children could be imbued with their thought force heritage at once. We are now waiting for word whether or not we should let you use the fusion bomb—the H-Bomb—so that most of your two billion will be killed and release enough thought force for more than a hundred births, the last act before we leave your planet and head for home. We have been waiting for a long time. The children have not yet been conceived for this, however.”
