by William Tenn
But the crew lay silently in their bunks. Smathers had evidently reached Stage Four too. There was the same restless head motion, the same terrible look whenever his eyes met O’Brien’s.
And then, as he turned to Belov’s bunk, he saw that it was empty! Had the man got up in his delirium and wandered off? Was he feeling better? Where had he gone?
O’Brien began to search the ship methodically, calling the Russian by name. Section by section, compartment by compartment, he came at last to the control room. It, too, was empty. Then where could Belov be?
As he wandered distractedly around the little place, he happened to glance through the porthole. And there, outside, he saw Belov. Without a space-suit!
It was impossible—no man could survive for a moment unprotected on the raw, almost airless surface of Mars—yet there was Nicolas Belov walking as unconcernedly as if the sand beneath his feet were the Nevsky Prospekt! And then he shimmered a little around the edges, as if he’d been turned partially into glass—and disappeared.
“Belov!” O’Brien found himself yelping. “For God’s sake! Belov! Belovi”
“He’s gone to inspect the Martian city,” a voice said behind him. “He’ll be back shortly.”
The navigator spun around. There was nobody in the room. He must be going completely crazy.
“No, you’re not,” the voice said. And Tom Smathers rose slowly through the solid floor.
“What’s happening to you people?” O’Brien gasped. “What is all this?”
“Stage Five of Belov’s Disease. The last one. So far, only Belov and I are in it, but the others are entering it now.”
O’Brien found his way to a chair and sat down. He worked his mouth a couple of times but couldn’t make the words come out.
“You’re thinking that Belov’s Disease is making magicians out of us,” Smathers told him. “No. First, it isn’t a disease at all.”
For the first time, Smathers looked directly at him and O’Brien had to avert his eyes. It wasn’t just that horrifying look he’d had lying on the bed in the hospital. It was—it was as if Smathers were no longer Smathers. He’d become something else.
“Well, it’s caused by a bacillus, but not a parasitical one. A symbiotical one.”
“Symbi—”
“Like the intestinal flora, it performs a useful function. A highly useful function.” O’Brien had the impression that Smathers was having a hard time finding the right words, that he was choosing very carefully, as if—as if—. As if he were talking to a small child!
“That’s correct,” Smathers told him. “But I believe I can make you understand. The bacillus of Belov’s Disease inhabited the nervous system of the ancient Martians as our stomach bacteria live in human digestive systems. Both are symbiotic, both enable the systems they inhabit to function with far greater effectiveness. The Belov bacillus operates within us as a kind of neural transformer, multiplying the mental output almost a thousand times.”
“You mean you’re a thousand times as intelligent as before?”
Smathers frowned. “This is very difficult. Yes, roughly a thousand times as intelligent, if you must put it that way. Actually, there’s a thousandfold increase in mental powers. Intelligence is merely one of those powers. There are many others such as telepathy and telekinesis which previously existed in such minuscule state as to be barely observable. I am in constant comminication with Belov, for example, wherever he is. Belov is in almost complete control of his physical environment and its effect on his body. The movable objects which alarmed you so were the results of the first clumsy experiments we made with our new minds. There is still a good deal we have to learn and get used to.”
“But what about—” O’Brien searched through his erupting brain and at last found a coherent thought. “But you were so sick!”
“The symbiosis was not established without difficulty,” Smathers admitted. “And we are not identical with the Martians physiologically. However, it’s all over now. We will return to Earth, spread Belov’s Disease—if you want to keep calling it that—and begin our exploration of space and time. Eventually, we’d like to get in touch with the Martians in the—the place where they have gone.”
“And we’ll have bigger wars than we ever dreamed of!”
The thing that had once been Tom Smathers, second assistant engineer, shook its head. “There will be no more wars. Among the mental powers enlarged a thousand times is one that has to do with what you might call moral concepts. Those of us on the ship could and would stop any presently threatening war; but when the population of the world has made neural connection with Belov’s bacillus all danger will be past. No, there will be no more wars.”
A silence. O’Brien tried to pull himself together. “Well,” he said. “We really found something on Mars, didn’t we? And if we’re going to start back for Earth, I might as well prepare a course based on present planetary positions.”
Again that look in Smathers’ eyes, stronger than ever. `”That won’t be necessary, O’Brien. We won’t go back in the same manner as we came. Our way will be—well, faster.”
“Good enough,” O’Brien said shakily and got to his feet. “And while you’re working out the details, I’ll climb into a spacesuit and hustle down to that Martian city. I want to get me a good strong dose of Belov’s Disease.”
The thing that had been Tom Smathers grunted. O’Brien stopped. Suddenly he understood the meaning of that frightening look he had had first from Belov and now from Smatters.
It was a look of enormous pity.
“That’s right,” said Smathers with infinite gentleness. “You can’t ever get Belov’s Disease. You are naturally immune.”
Winthrop Was Stubborn
That was the trouble right there. That summed it up. Winthrop was stubborn.
Mrs. Brucks stared wildly at her three fellow-visitors from the twentieth century. “But he can’t!” she exclaimed. “He’s not the only one—he’s got to think of us! He can’t leave us stranded in this crazy world!”
Dave Pollock shrugged his shoulders inside the conservative gray suit that clashed so mightily with the decor of the twenty-fifth century room in which they sat. He was a thin, nervous young man whose hands had a tendency to perspire. Right now, they were extremely wet.
“He says we should be grateful. But whether we are or aren’t grateful isn’t important to him. He’s staying.”
“That means we have to stay,” Mrs. Brucks pleaded. “Doesn’t he understand that?”
Pollock spread his moist palms helplessly. “What difference does it make? He’s absolutely set on staying. He likes the twenty-fifth century. I argued with him for two hours; I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I can’t budge him, and that’s all I know.”
“Why don’t you talk to him, Mrs. Brucks?” Mary Ann Carthington suggested. “He’s been nice to you. Maybe you could make him act sensible.”
“Hm.” Mrs. Brucks patted her hairdo which, after two weeks in the future, was beginning to get straggly. “You think so? Mr. Mead, you think it’s a good idea?”
The fourth person in the oval room, a stoutish middle-aged man, whose face bore an expression of a cat that might swallow a canary in the interests of Decency, considered the matter for a moment, and nodded. “Can’t do any harm. Might work. And we’ve got to do something.”
“All right. So I’ll try.”
Mrs. Brucks sniffled deep inside her grandmotherly soul. She knew what the others were thinking, weren’t quite saying. To them, Winthrop and she were the “old folks”—both over fifty. Therefore, they should have something in common they should be able to communicate sympathetically.
The fact that Winthrop was ten years her senior meant little to Mr. Mead’s forty-six years, less to Dave Pollock’s thirty-four and in all probability was completely meaningless to Mary Ann Carthington’s even twenty. One of the “old folks” should be able to talk sense to the other, they would feel.
What could they see
, from the bubbling distance of youth, of the chasms that separated Winthrop from Mrs. Brucks even more finally than the others? It was unimportant to them that he was a tight and unemotional old bachelor, while she was the warm and gossipy mother of six children, the grandmother of two, with her silver wedding anniversary proudly behind her. She and Winthrop had barely exchanged a dozen sentences with each other since they’d arrived in the future: they had disliked each other deeply from the moment they had met in Washington at the time-travel finals.
But—Winthrop was stubborn. That fact remained. Mr. Mead had roared his best executive-type roars at him. Mary Ann Carthington had tried to jog his senility with her lush, lithe figure and most fluttery voice. Even Dave Pollock, an educated man, a high school science teacher with a master’s degree in something or other, Dave Pollock had talked his heart out to him and been unable to make him budge.
So it was up to her. Someone had to change Winthrop’s mind. Or they’d all be stuck in the future, here in this horrible twenty-fifth century. No matter if she hated it more than anything she’d had to face in a lifetime of troubles—it was up to her.
She rose and shook out the wrinkles in the expensive black dress her proud husband had purchased in Lord & Taylor’s the day before the group had left. Try to tell Sam that it was purely luck that she had been chosen, just a matter of fitting the physical specifications in the message from the future! Sam wouldn’t listen: he probably boasted all over the shop, to each and every one of the other cutters with whom he worked, about his wife—one of five people selected in the whole United States of America to make a trip five hundred years into the future. Would Sam still be boasting when the six o’clock deadline passed that night and she didn’t return?
This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and exploded tinily at her nose.
Mary Ann Carthington crooned back sympathetically. “Shall I ring for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?”
“I’m crazy?” Mrs. Brucks shot back at her angrily. “A little walk down the hall, I need that headache-maker? A little walk I can walk.”
She started for the door rapidly before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing. But she paused for a moment and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she’d spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls; here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century.
Then she swallowed hard, said “Ah-h!” with regretful finality and closed the door behind her. She walked rapidly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side.
At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in a scowl of distaste, to the square. “Mr. Winthrop?” she inquired tentatively.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Mrs. Brucks!” the square boomed back at her. “Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks.”
The patch of yellow showed a tiny hole in the center which dilated rapidly into a doorway. She stepped through gingerly, as if there might be a drop of several stories on the other side.
The room was shaped like a long, narrow isosceles triangle.
There was no furniture in it, and no other exits, except for what an occasional yellow square suggested. Streaks of color chased themselves fluently along the walls and ceilings and floors, shifting the predominant hue of the interior up and down the spectrum, from pinkish grey to a thick, dark ultra-marine. And odors came with the colors, odors came and filled the room for a brief spell, some of them unpleasant, some of them intriguing, but all of them touched with the unfamiliar and alien. From somewhere behind the walls and above the ceiling, there was music, its tones softly echoing, gently reinforcing the colors and the odors. The music too was strange to twentieth-century ears: strings of dissonances would he followed by a long or short silence in the midst of which an almost inaudible melody might be heard like a harmonic island in an ocean of sonic strangeness.
At the far end of the room, at the sharp apex of the triangle, an aged little man lay on a raised portion of the floor. Periodically, this raised portion would raise a bit of itself still further or lower a section, very much like a cow trying to find a comfortable position on the grass.
The single garment that Winthrop wore similarly kept adjusting itself upon him. At one moment it would be a striped red and white tunic, covering everything from his shoulders to his thighs; then it would slowly elongate into a green gown that trickled over his outstretched toes; and, abruptly, it would contract into a pair of light brown shorts decorated with a complex pattern of brilliant blue seashells.
Mrs. Brucks observed all this with an almost religious disapproval. A man was meant, she felt dimly, to be dressed approximately the same way from one moment to the next, not to swoop wildly from one garment to another like a montage sequence in the movies.
The shorts she didn’t mind, though her modest soul considered them a hit too skimpy for receiving lady callers. The green gown, well, she didn’t think it went with Winthrop’s sex —as she’d been brought up—but she could go along with it; after all, if he wanted to wear what was essentially a dress, it was his business. Even the red and white tunic which reminded her strongly and nostalgically of her granddaughter Debbie’s sunsuit was something she was willing to be generous about. But at least stick to one of them, show some will-power, some concentration!
Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. “Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet,” he suggested jovially.
Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host’s gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and sat, her tentative rear making little more than a tangent to it. “How—how are you, Mr. Winthrop?”
“Fine, just fine! Couldn’t be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look.”
He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers.
Mrs. Brucks leaned forward, really interested, and inspected the mouthful of white, shining enamel. “A good job,” she pronounced at last, nodding. “The dentists here made them for you so fast?”
“Dentists!” He spread his bony arms wide in a vast and merry gesture. “They don’t have dentists in 2487 A.D. They grew these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks.”
“Grew? How grew?”
“How should I know how they did it? They’re smart, that’s all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It’s a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said ‘I want new teeth’ to the machine that they’ve got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three—and bingo! there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?”
She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. “Maybe—but I better wait until it’s perfected.”
Winthrop laughed again. “You’re scared,” he announced. “You’re like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. Only me, only Winthrop, I’m the only one that’s got guts. I’m the oldest, but that doesn’t make any difference —I’m the only one with guts.”
Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. “But Mr. Winthrop, you’re also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock’s just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We’d all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop.”
“Mary Ann is engaged?” A lewd chuckle. “I’d never have guessed it from the way she was squirming round that tempora
l supervisor fellow. That little blondie is on the make for any guy she can get.”
“Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she’s engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office she’s engaged. A fine, hardworking boy. And she wants to go back to him.”
The old man pulled up his back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulder blades and scratched him gently. “Let her go back, then. Who gives a damn?”
“But, Mr. Winthrop—” Mrs. Brucks wet her lips and clasped her hands in front of her. “She can’t go back, we can’t go back—unless we all go back together. Remember what they told us when we arrived, those temporal supervisors? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the time machine building at six o’clock on the dot, when they’re going to make what they call the transfer. If we aren’t all there on time, they can’t make the transfer, they said. So, if one of us, if you, for instance, doesn’t show up—”
“Don’t tell me your troubles,” Winthrop cut her off savagely. His face was deeply flushed and his lips came back and exposed the brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner’s mood. All around them the music chanced to a staccato, vicious rumble. “Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?”
“Umh?” Mrs. Brucks inquired. “I don’t understand you.”
“You’re damn tooting you don’t understand me. When I was a kid, my old man used to come home drunk every night and beat the hell out of me. I was a small kid, so every other kid on the block took turns beating the hell out of me, too. When I grew up, I got a lousy job and a lousy life. Remember the depression and those pictures of the breadlines? Well, who do you think it was on those breadlines, on every damn breadline in the whole damn country? Me, that’s who. And then, when the good times came back, I was too old for a decent job. Night-watchman, berrypicker, dishwasher, that’s me. Cheap flophouses, cheap furnished rooms. Everybody gets the gravy, Winthrop got the garbage.”
