"Eli!" he said. "Sit down. Sit down! How are you feeling?"
Eli found himself a seat upon a tall four-legged stool.
"As well as can be expected," he answered cheerfully. "How's yourself?"
"Oh, I'm fine," replied Ntoane, laying the towel aside. "Well, if you feel as fine as that, what brings you in here?"
Eli smiled.
"Nothing to do with my state of health," he answered. "Or perhaps it has. I've just been having another little talk with Mel about his tinkering with the inside of my brain."
"I take it you still haven't agreed," said Ntoane.
"No. And I won't." Eli looked keenly at the dark-skinned man. "Mel seems to be something of the fanatic." Ntoane frowned, and glanced aside at the equipment he had been washing, before answering.
"He's a very good physician," Ntoane said, "as young as he is."
"If it was your mind, your ego," said Eli, bluntly, "would you trust him with it?"
"Unreservedly," replied Ntoane.
"Even if you suspected that his interest was not all a doctor's might be, in that part of your existence that was concerned with the person of a young lady?" said Eli, grinning twistedly. Ntoane eyes went noncommittally blank.
"That's something I can't judge," he said.
"You see," said Eli, "why I consider important that he's a fanatic. Fanatics are liable to make judgements in terms of their own values of right and wrong—not only for themselves but for others as well. And act upon those decisions, where others are concerned." Ntoane shook his head. His voice was soft and a little gentle.
"We're all fanatics, in one way or another, Eli," he said. "You. I…" he spread his hands, in a yielding gesture.
"I can see it for myself," said Eli, watching him. "That's—or it was—part of my business. But don't tell me you're a fanatic."
"I consider myself one," said Ntoane. "I also have my own standards of right and wrong. And I would like to see those standards imposed on more people than they are."
"And just what is it you'd like to impose?" queried Eli.
"The principles of peace and progress," said Ntoane, looking back at him. "Progress toward peace, and peaceful progress thereafter."
"I would say," retorted Eli dryly, "that, far from being a fanatic, you're simply a somewhat impractical man, Ntoane."
Ntoane spread his hands again, without answering.
"So you don't think I should worry about Mel?" said Eli.
"You might do better," said Ntoane, "to worry about me."
Eli shook his head.
"I might do best of all," he said soberly, "to worry about myself. Where did Howell go to, do you know?
"I think he's getting some sleep," said Ntoane. "He works all hours, you know." His glance at Eli just then had something almost of a pleading quality. "That's one reason he was somewhat short-tempered just a little bit ago. He hadn't had any sleep for quite some time. It's the way he is."
"Ah? I hadn't realized that. Well, I can see him any other time," said Eli. He got up from the stool. "I guess I'll run up to the solar and rest a bit in the sun." He turned and went off toward the door.
"Eli," Ntoane's voice turned him around. "Eli, you have to start opening up to the world somewhere along the line."
Eli smiled a little lopsidedly, shook his head, and went out the door.
Going once more up in the elevator, Eli found himself experiencing an unusual regret, a regret concerned with his unfairness to Howell.
The fault might lie with the older man, but that did not excuse Eli to himself. He knew what Howell's nature was before he committed himself to this business of bodily reconstruction. It was not in Howell to yield the importance of his work to any other thing or person. Eli, who could adapt, told himself that it was therefore up to him to take the initiative.
But no poking around in his mind. No, not now or ever. This was no casual psychosis which had walled off one whole section of himself; but one consciously won by hard dint of agony and long effort. It was over twenty years ago that he had slipped the last block into place, resquiescat in pace, but there was no resting in peace, for it—for the love of God, Montressor!—it was part of him and would not die, though buried and forgotten. Yes, forgotten; and he could not remember now what it truly was; but he could remember that he must not remember, for hell is this: to be conscious of suffering and helpless before it.
"Eli."
He looked. Tammy.
"Eli," she came toward him, with a gentle smile, "you came out of the elevator as if you didn't even see me."
"With my head in the clouds," said Eli, smiling at her. "I was making plans for the future."
She looked shy and changed the subject.
"How do you feel?"
"Fine," he told her. "Except for the incisions." He reached a deck chair halfway across the solar and sank into it gratefully. "Where's Alan Clyde?"
She sat down opposite him.
"He left, Eli."
"And Seth?"
She sobered, looking at him. "He left, too, Eli."
"Well, that's too bad," he said. "I haven't seen him for some years. I was looking forward to having some more time to talk to him."
She looked down at the floor.
"Does it make much difference?" she asked in a low voice.
He peered at her, with puzzlement. "Does what make much difference?" he asked.
"That you didn't have more chance to talk to him."
"Oh?" said Eli. "Well, I suppose it doesn't make too much difference. Why?"
"Then you didn't turn on the screen in your room!" Tammy looked up with sudden gladness on her face. "I thought you'd heard but you were pretending to ignore it."
"Ignore what?"
Instead of answering, she jumped to her feet and pulled his chair around so that he faced the solar's screen, just a few feet in the center of the floor. Then she stepped across and turned the screen on. The image of an announcer at his desk took form in the bubble.
"It started yesterday," she said.
The announcer's voice came clearly to them.
"—and in other large cities the story remains the same. All known centers of Member activity, all hospitals, Foundations, and laboratories have been raided by impromptu citizens' associations. In some cases the civil or local group authority has attempted to give sanctuary to known Members and this has resulted in fighting between local people—"
"What's this?" snapped Eli, turning on Tammy. "That first raid on the Members in Geneva City," said Tammy. "That was the beginning. All at once it began to happen in other cities. Clyde left right away."
"Spokesmen of all groups are attempting to restore order. Some cities have been blacked out so that we do not know what is taking place there now. Indications are that full scale riots are in progress in these localities. Among those which we have no information are the cities of Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Prague, Belfast, Ireland, and most of the Atlantic seaboard cities in North America. In other localities provisional local governments are being set up to prevent looting and other criminal disorder; and various organizations, in particular the Transportation people qualified for first-aid and assistance armbands, have been particularly helpful. At present—"
"Turn it off!" said Eli, speaking through tight-clenched teeth. He was frozen in his chair, as rigid as if he had been suddenly paralyzed. Only when Tammy jumped to obey and the picture dwindled and disappeared, did he let go of himself, almost collapsing in his seat.
"Oh, Eli, Eli!" She was on her knees beside the chair, trying against the top of the chair back. "I didn't know. I didn't know!"
Sweat was pouring down his face.
"I'll be all right," he gasped. "Get—get me a drink."
Sleekly humped against the floor, a tiny modernistic bar squatted beside the elevator shaft. Tammy ran to it and returned with a glass half full. He choked on it but got it down; and then slumped back, letting the tumbler fall from his hand.
Slowly his face relaxed; the
lines of twisted pain smoothed and a little color came back to his skin. He began to breathe easier. Tenderly, Tammy wiped the perspiration from his face and waited.
Finally he heaved a great sigh.
"That's all right," he said. "I'm all right now."
"I'm sorry, Eli," said Tammy. "Oh, I'm so sorry."
"Not your fault," he said. "How were you to know anything about me? Took me by surprise, too."
"But what was it?" she asked, sinking down on a hassock beside his chair and taking his cold hand in hers. He did not look at her.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing. Sometimes things bother me." He was silent for a moment; then he spoke again. "Seth went, you say?"
"As soon as the news reports began to get bad," she answered. "He—he told me you two were related, Eli."
Eli looked at her with such sudden horror that she shrunk back.
"Eli!" her voice shook. "What kind of a secret is it?"
On the arm of his chair Eli's hand curled into a fist and he fought himself back into self-possession.
"No one," he said, "ever knew but the two of us, before."
"But I don't understand."
Eli drew a deep breath.
"I'll tell you," he said. He looked away from her. "My father, himself, never knew Seth was his son. I never suspected that I had a brother. I thought I was an only child.
"I was an odd child," he went on painfully. "Things bothered me, and I couldn't seem to make anybody understand why. Ordinary things that didn't bother other people. Once, for example, when I was very young, I remember I'd picked up the notion that if I tried hard enough, I could talk to animals. And I tried hard for a long time without getting any place, so finally I asked my father about it. If I remember correctly, I asked him to send me to a man who'd teach me how to speak to animals, like the man who was teaching me to play the violin. And he told me"—Eli smiled a little bleakly—"in a very kindly way, of course, that no one knew how to talk to animals. And when he told me I never could or never would be able to talk to a single creature except another human, I thought I couldn't stand it. All the living things that moved and felt; would never be able to tell me how it was."
Tammy laid her cheek against the back of his hand where it rested on the arm of the chair. Eli went on talking.
"And as I grew older," he said, "it got worse. Because I couldn't explain to other people. Everything that lived had some power to touch me. When the growing things budded in the spring, I woke with them, and during the long summer as they grew, I grew with them, and in the fall the pride of their maturity was my pride, so that the onset of winter was like one last flaming great and glorious battle with honorable death. My longing went down with the salmon to the ocean; and never got free again, for whale and diatom held it tight to them. In the end, there was nothing with life in it that I wasn't compelled to feel my kinship with."
Eli stopped and sighed.
"And then, as I grew up," he went on. "I began to be aware of people."
He stopped. Tammy lifted her face and looked at him.
"This," he said, "is the part I cannot explain, never explain, to anyone. I can say I started to feel for them, too, and that's all I can say. From this point on, there are no words."
He stopped again, and was silent for so long, that Tammy spoke up, gently.
"But what about Seth?"
"Oh yes, Seth," he took up his story again. "You see I didn't have any person I could get this across to—all this that bothered me. So, when I was very young, I first started to make up an imaginary friend, who would understand, without my telling him. I got to know my imaginary friend very well, and he grew in my mind until he had a personality of his own, until he was a real person, with his own problems, that only I understood."
He paused and looked at Tammy.
"And then when I was fourteen, my high aptitude rating on the General Tests allowed me to be sent to the School for Special Intelligences on Bermuda. And there my imaginary friend and I came face to face; and he was Seth."
"And had he—" said Tammy.
Eli nodded.
"I had been his, too. When we put our minds together at last, we discovered a great many things, among them that we were half-brothers."
"But how did you find that out?"
"It became obvious to us," answered Eli. "I can't explain."
"And then—" prompted Tammy.
"And then?" said Eli.
"What happened to the two of you after that?"
"Oh," said Eli. "We went different ways."
Tammy looked up at him; but with that one flat statement, his face was set in unyielding lines.
"He thinks a lot of you, Eli," she said finally. Eli looked away, out through the transparency of the solar roof, out over the blue waves to the horizon.
"When he left," Tammy went on, "he left a letter for you."
Eli's head came around suddenly, surprise on his face.
"A letter?"
"Yes," Tammy looked troubled and uncertain. "He said to give it to you when I thought it was the right time. I don't know if it's the right time now, or not. Is it, Eli?"
"I don't know," he answered. "Let me see it."
She got up and went over to a table in the solar. From a drawer beneath its polished top she took a single sheet of folded plastic which she handed to him. At the touch of his fingers, it unfolded. He sat, staring blankly at it.
"I'll go downstairs," said Tammy softly. "I'll see you later." She touched his shoulder lightly and went.
Left alone, Eli looked at the letter and read it.
Dear Eli:
I had hoped to talk to you once more before I left, but there's no time. I write these words instead of leaving my message otherwise, because I would like to leave you something lasting and concrete of myself, and this is all there is to leave.
I'm sorry that our paths of life have differed. Had we been born in a different time, you and I, there might have been a job where we could have worked shoulder to shoulder. But there is no point to regret where greater things persist. For a moment, a few days back, my faith in you wavered. It no longer does. I cannot see the future, but I trust in it—and you.
Seth
Eli carefully refolded the letter; and laid it on the small round coffee table next to his chair, as if it was something precious.
7
During the busy days that followed, the station, with its four men and one woman, went about its business of Eli's body rebuilding in the same atmosphere of spurious peace that characterized a small chip bobbing in the sheltered back-eddy while the main torrent of a river at full flood smashes by just a few feet away. It was, in fact, a moment of historical upheaval and revolution, a convulsion of the race such as had never been possible before, because never before had all people on the face of the globe been interconnected and interrelated in what was, for practical purposes, a single society. The reasons for this were twofold. First the establishment of the groups, with their announced purpose of destroying the old sectionalism that had given rise to so much conflict, and had inevitably had a much greater effect on the minds of men and women than their founders had originally intended. The intention was to replace an outmoded system with a new and more practical one. The reality was that the death-knoll of all systems that attempted to divide the race arbitrarily, was sounded.
For the eyes of the average human were thereby opened to the fact that the world was not naturally in bits and parts which could be assembled to make a whole; but rather an original whole which could be divided to suit, as you would cut up a pie. And almost at once the foolishness of cutting it up at all became apparent.
Yet the groups endured for eighty years from the first moment of their establishment and mutual recognition. And the reasons for this formed the secondary reasons for the present chaos. First, people were used to some kind of organization. Fear of the stranger still remained a historical habit in a little back corner of many minds and, like most habits, it sought its own
justification by demanding a classification into which strangers could be placed. Secondly, though the dynamics of historical progress had been accelerating steadily through the passage of all known time, some years were still required for any universal change to gather enough momentum to overcome the natural inertia of things-as-they-are.
For the group it took eighty years, which is very good time indeed, when compared with the parallel period of the Dark Ages.
But there was the other, second, reason of major importance. And this was a social and emotional one. The society that emerged from the twenty-first century can be compared to the bloom of a plant that finally stops growing and directs its energy to flowering. With the peaceful harnessing of atomic energy and the refinements and developments built upon the sturdy sub-structure of scientific and other discoveries of the previous centuries, there emerged an everyday existence for the average person that can only be described as free and easy. Population was stabilized, power was unlimited, and necessity had almost ceased to be a driving factor in life.
The result was that, once the second and third generations had accustomed themselves to the novelty of a practical utopia, that the lack of a progressive drive began to be felt. The people of Eli and Tammy's generation found themselves both bored and uncertain in a time when old truths had been rendered obsolete and new ones had yet to take their place. The restless energy that had brought the race up from prehistoric primitive savagery, dammed up, sought for an outlet. Finding nothing, it turned on itself, the beast-instinct that was still a part of man, blindly recognizing man's unhappiness and blindly seeking a physical cause of that un-happiness to blame and battle.
Thus the world was a loaded bomb to which Sellars' pogrom against the Members provided the arming device.
Starting first in the crowded cities and then spreading like fire in dry grass to the smaller towns and countrysides, fanned by the discontent and soul-sickness of man, the last and greatest witch hunt of the human race wrapped the globe in flame and violence. From the few simple original indictments against the Members sprang a veritable Pandora's box of accusations and superstitions. All the ancient monsters of folk-tale and legend came alive again in the name of Members. They were warlocks, hagwives, vampires. They were satanists, voodoo-workers, Frankensteins. Does your neighbor act strangely? Perhaps he is a Member, or a Member changeling. Or perhaps his mind, his soul has been possessed by the Members. Or still and yet, perhaps he is no man at all, but a clever mechanical imitation.
Time To Teleport Page 7
