The Human Edge

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Sorry, Milt," said Jerry softly and lightheadedly. "I'm not ready yet to burn the hoose about my ears. This business of you wanting to blow up the ship's the same sort of impulse to suicide that got Wally and the rest. I'm off to face the natives now and let them have their way with me. I'll be back later, to let you oot."

  "Jerry!"

  Jerry heard Milt's voice behind him as he went off down the corridor.

  "Jerry!" There was a fusillade of pounding fists against the door, growing fainter as Jerry moved away. "Don't you see?—that growth in you is finally getting you! Jerry, come back! Don't let them take over one of us! Jerry . . ."

  Jerry left the noise and the ship together behind him as he stepped out of the air lock. The jungle, he saw, was covering the ship's hull again, already hiding it for the most part. He went on out to the translator console and began taking off his clothes. When he was completely undressed, he unhooked the transceiver he had brought back from the native village, slung it on a loop of his belt, and hung the belt around his neck.

  He headed off down the trail toward the village, wincing a little as the soles of his shoeless feet came into contact with pebbles along the way.

  When he got to the village clearing, a naked shape he recognized as that of Communicator tossed up its arms in joy and came running to him.

  "Well," said Jerry. "I've grown. I've got rid of the poison of dead things and the sickness. Here I am to join you!"

  "At last!" gabbled Communicator. Other natives were running up. "Throw away the dead thing around your neck!"

  "I still need it to understand you," said Jerry. "I guess I need a little help to join you all the way."

  "Help? We will help!" cried Communicator. "But you must throw that away. You have rid yourself of the dead things that you kept wrapped around your limbs and body," gabbled Communicator. "Now rid yourself of the dead thing hanging about your neck."

  "But I tell you, if I do that," objected Jerry, "I won't be able to understand you when you talk, or make you understand me!"

  "Throw it away. It is poisoning you! Throw it away!" said Communicator. By this time three or four more natives had come up and others were headed for the gathering. "Shortly you will understand all, and all will understand you. Throw it away!"

  "Throw it away!" chorused the other natives.

  "Well . . ." said Jerry. Reluctantly, he took off the belt with the transceiver, and dropped it. Communicator gabbled unintelligibly.

  " . . . come with me . . ." translated the transceiver like a faint and tinny echo from the ground where it landed.

  Communicator took hold of Jerry's hand and drew him toward the nearest whitish structure. Jerry swallowed unobtrusively. It was one thing to make up his mind to do this; it was something else again to actually do it. But he let himself be led to and in through a crack in the structure.

  * * *

  Inside, the place smelled rather like a mixture of a root cellar and a hayloft—earthy and fragrant at the same time. Communicator drew him in among the waist-high tangle of roots rising and reentering the packed earth floor. The other natives swarmed after them. Close to the center of the floor they reached a point where the roots were too thick to allow them to pick their way any further. The roots rose and tangled into a mat, the irregular surface of which was about three feet off the ground. Communicator patted the root surface and gabbled agreeably.

  "You want me to get up there?" Jerry swallowed again, then gritted his teeth as the chained fury in him turned suddenly upon himself. There was nothing worse, he snarled at himself, than a man who was long on planning a course of action, but short on carrying it out.

  Awkwardly, he clambered up onto the matted surface of the roots. They gave irregularly under him and their rough surfaces scraped his knees and hands. The natives gabbled, and he felt leathery hands urging him to stretch out and lie down on his back.

  He did so. The root scored and poked the tender skin of his back. It was exquisitely uncomfortable.

  "Now what—?" he gasped. He turned his head to look at the natives and saw that green tendrils, growing rapidly from the root mass, were winding about and garlanding the arms and legs of Communicator and several other of the natives standing by. A sudden pricking at his left wrist made him look down.

  Green garlands were twining around his own wrists and ankles, sending wire-thin tendrils into his skin. In unconscious reflex of panic he tried to heave upward, but the green bonds held him fast.

  "Gabble-gabble-gabble . . ." warbled Communicator reassuringly.

  With sudden alarm, Jerry realized that the green tendrils were growing right into the arms and legs of the natives as well. He was abruptly conscious of further prickings in his own arms and legs.

  "What's going on—" he started to say, but found his tongue had gone unnaturally thick and unmanageable. A wave of dizziness swept over him as if a powerful general anesthetic was taking hold. The interior of the structure seemed to darken; and he felt as if he was swooping away toward its ceiling on the long swing of some monster pendulum . . .

  It swung him on into darkness. And nightmare.

  * * *

  It was the same old nightmare, but more so. It was nightmare experienced awake instead of asleep; and the difference was that he had no doubt about the fact that he was experiencing what he was experiencing, nor any tucked-away certainty that waking would bring him out of it.

  Once more he floated through a changing soup of uncertainty, himself a changing part of it. It was not painful, it was not even terrifying. But it was hideous—it was an affront to nature. He was not himself. He was a thing, a part of the whole—and he must reconcile himself to being so. He must accept it.

  Reconcile himself to it—no! It was not possible for the unbending, solitary, individualistic part that was him to do so. But accept it—maybe.

  Jerry set a jaw that was no longer a jaw and felt the determination in him to blast through, to comprehend this incomprehensible thing, become hard and undeniable as a sword-point of tungsten steel. He drove through—

  And abruptly the soup fell into order. It slid into focus like a blurred scene before the gaze of a badly myopic man who finally gets his spectacles before his eyes. Suddenly, Jerry was aware that what he observed was a scene not just before his eyes, but before his total awareness. And it was not the interior of the structure where he lay on a bed of roots, but the whole planet.

  It was a landscape of factories. Countless factories, interconnected, intersupplying, integrated. It lacked only that he find his own working place among them.

  Now, said this scene. This is the sane universe, the way it really is. Reconcile yourself to it.

  The hell I will!

  It was the furious, unbending, solitary, individualistic part that was essentially him speaking again. Not just speaking. Roaring—snarling its defiance, like a tiger on a hillside.

  And the scene went—pop.

  Jerry opened his eyes. He sat up. The green shoots around and in his wrists and ankles pulled prickingly at him. But they were already dying and not able to hold him. He swung his legs over the edge of the mat of roots and stood down. Communicator and the others who were standing there, backed fearfully away from him, gabbling.

  * * *

  He understood their gabbling no better than before, but now he could read the emotional overtones in it. And those overtones were now of horror and disgust, overlying a wild, atavistic panic and terror. He walked forward. They scuttled away before him, gabbling, and he walked through the nearest crack in the wall of the structure and out into the sunlight, toward the transceiver and the belt where he had dropped them.

  "Monster!" screamed the transceiver tinnily, faithfully translating the gabbling of the Communicator, who was following a few steps behind like a small dog barking behind a larger. "Brute! Savage! Unclean . . ." It kept up a steady denunciation.

  Jerry turned to face Communicator, and the native tensed for flight.

  "You know what I'
m waiting for," said Jerry, almost smiling, hearing the transceiver translate his words into gabbling—though it was not necessary. As he had said, Communicator knew what he was waiting for.

  Communicator cursed a little longer in his own tongue, then went off into one of the structures, and returned with a handful of what looked like lengths of green vine. He dropped them on the ground before Jerry and backed away, cautiously, gabbling.

  "Now will you go? And never come back! Never . . ."

  "We'll see," said Jerry. He picked up the lengths of green vine and turned away up the path to the ship.

  The natives he passed on his way out of the clearing huddled away from him and gabbled as he went.

  When he stepped back into the clearing before the ship, he saw that most of the vegetation touching or close to the ship was already brown and dying. He went on into the ship, carefully avoiding the locked sick-bay door, and wound lengths of the green vine around the wrists of each of the men in restraints.

  Then he sat down to await results. He had never been so tired in his life. The minute he touched the chair, his eyes started to close. He struggled to his feet and forced himself to pace the floor until the green vines, which had already sent hair-thin tendrils into the ulnar arteries of the arms around which they were wrapped, pumped certain inhibitory chemicals into the bloodstreams of the seven men.

  When the men started to blink their eyes and look about sensibly, he went to work to unfasten the homemade straitjackets that had held them prisoner. When he had released the last one, he managed to get out his final message before collapsing.

  "Take the ship up," croaked Jerry. "Then, let yourself into the sick bay and wrap a vine piece around the wrists of Milt, and Art, and Ben. Ship up first—then when you're safely in space, take care of them, in the sick bay. Do it the other way and you'll never see Earth again."

  They crowded around him with questions. He waved them off, slumping into one of the abandoned bunks.

  "Ship up—" he croaked. "Then release and fix the others. Ask me later. Later—"

  . . . And that was all he remembered, then.

  IV

  At some indefinite time later, not quite sure whether he had woken by himself, or whether someone else had wakened him, Jerry swam back up to consciousness. He was vaguely aware that he had been sleeping a long time; and his body felt sane again, but weak as the body of a man after a long illness.

  He blinked and saw the large face of Milt Johnson, partly obscured by a cup of something. Milt was seated in a chair by the side of the bunk Jerry lay in, and the Team captain was offering the cup of steaming black liquid to Jerry. Slowly, Jerry understood that this was coffee and he struggled up on one elbow to take the cup.

  He drank from it slowly for a little while, while Milt watched and waited.

  "Do you realize," said Milt at last, when Jerry finally put down the three-quarters-empty cup on the nightstand by the bunk, "that what you did in locking me in the sick bay was mutiny?"

  Jerry swallowed. Even his vocal cords seemed drained of strength and limp.

  "You realize," he croaked, "what would have happened if I hadn't?"

  "You took a chance. You followed a wild hunch—"

  "No hunch," said Jerry. He cleared his throat. "Art found that growth on Wally's brain had quit growing before Wally killed himself. And I'd been getting along without tranquilizers—handling the nightmares better than I had with them."

  "It could have been the growth in your own brain," said Milt, "taking over and running you—working better on you than it had on Wally."

  "Working better—talk sense!" said Jerry weakly, too pared down by the past two weeks to care whether school kept or not, in the matter of service courtesy to a superior. "The nightmares had broken Wally down to where we had to wrap him in a straitjacket. They hadn't even knocked me off my feet. If Wally's physiological processes had fought the alien invasion to a standstill, then I, you, Art, and Ben—all of us—had to be doing even better. Besides—I'd figured out what the aliens were after."

  "What were they after?" Milt looked strangely at him.

  "Curing us—of something we didn't have when we landed, but they thought we had."

  "And what was that?"

  "Insanity," said Jerry grimly.

  * * *

  Milt's blond eyebrows went up. He opened his mouth as if to say something disbelieving—then closed it again. When he did speak, it was quite calmly and humbly.

  "They thought," he asked, "Communicator's people thought that we were insane, and they could cure us?"

  Jerry laughed; not cheerfully, but grimly.

  "You saw that jungle around us back there?" he asked. "That was a factory complex—an infinitely complex factory complex. You saw their village with those tangles of roots inside the big whitish shells?—that was a highly diversified laboratory."

  Milt's blue eyes slowly widened, as Jerry watched.

  "You don't mean that—seriously?" said Milt, at last.

  "That's right." Jerry drained the cup and set it aside. "Their technology is based on organic chemistry, the way ours is on the physical sciences. By our standards, they're chemical wizards. How'd you like to try changing the mind of an alien organism by managing to grow an extra part on to his brain—the way they tried to do to us humans? To them, it was the simplest way of convincing us."

  Milt stared again. Finally, he shook his head.

  "Why?" he said. "Why would they want to change our minds?"

  "Because their philosophy, their picture of life and the universe around them grew out of a chemically oriented science," answered Jerry. "The result is, they see all life as part of a closed, intra-acting chemical circuit with no loose ends; with every living thing, intelligent or not, a part of the whole. Well, you saw it for yourself in your nightmare. That's the cosmos as they see it—and to them it's beautiful."

  "But why did they want us to see it the way they did?"

  "Out of sheer kindness," said Jerry and laughed barkingly. "According to their cosmology, there's no such thing as an alien. Therefore we weren't alien—just sick in the head. Poisoned by the lumps of metal like the ship and the translator we claimed were so important. And our clothes and everything else we had. The kind thing was to cure and rescue us."

  "Now, wait a minute," said Milt. "They saw those things of ours work—"

  * * *

  "What's the fact they worked got to do with it? What you don't understand, Milt," said Jerry, lying back gratefully on the bunk, "is that Communicator's peoples' minds were closed. Not just unconvinced, not just refusing to see—but closed! Sealed, and welded shut from prehistoric beginnings right down to the present. The fact our translator worked meant nothing to them. According to their cosmology, it shouldn't work, so it didn't. Any stray phenomena tending to prove it did were simply the product of diseased minds."

  Jerry paused to emphasize the statement and his eyes drifted shut. The next thing he knew Milt was shaking him.

  " . . . Wake up!" Milt was shouting at him. "You can dope off after you've explained. I'm not going to have any crew back in straitjackets again, just because you were too sleepy to warn me they'd revert!"

  " . . . Won't revert," said Jerry thickly. He roused himself. "Those lengths of vine released chemicals into their bloodstreams to destroy what was left of the growths. I wouldn't leave until I got them from Communicator." Jerry struggled up on one elbow again. "And after a short walk in a human brain—mine—he and his people couldn't get us out of sight and forgotten fast enough."

  "Why?" Milt shook him again as Jerry's eyelids sagged. "Why should getting their minds hooked in with yours shake them up so?"

  " . . . Bust—bust their cosmology open. Quit shaking . . .I'm awake."

  "Why did it bust them wide open?"

  "Remember—how it was for you with the nightmares?" said Jerry. "The other way around? Think back, about when you slept. There you were, a lone atom of humanity, caught up in a nightmare like one piece
of stew meat in a vat stewing all life together—just one single chemical bit with no independent existence, and no existence at all except as part of the whole. Remember?"

  He saw Milt shiver slightly.

  "It was like being swallowed up by a soft machine," said the Team captain in a small voice. "I remember."

  "All right," said Jerry. "That's how it was for you in Communicator's cosmos. But remember something about that cosmos? It was warm, and safe. It was all-embracing, all-settling, like a great, big, soft, woolly comforter."

  "It was too much like a woolly comforter," said Milt, shuddering. "It was unbearable."

  "To you. Right," said Jerry. "But to Communicator, it was ideal. And if that was ideal, think what it was like when he had to step into a human mind—mine."

  * * *

  Milt stared at him.

  "Why? "Milt asked.

  "Because," said Jerry, "he found himself alone there!"

  Milt's eyes widened.

  "Think about it, Milt," said Jerry. "From the time we're born, we're individuals. From the moment we open our eyes on the world, inside we're alone in the universe. All the emotional and intellectual resources that Communicator draws from his identity with the stewing vat of his cosmos, each one of us has to dig up for and out of himself!"

  Jerry stopped to give Milt a chance to say something. But Milt was evidently not in possession of something to say at the moment.

  "That's why Communicator and the others couldn't take it, when they hooked into my human mind," Jerry went on. "And that's why, when they found out what we were like inside, they couldn't wait to get rid of us. So they gave me the vines and kicked us out. That's the whole story." He lay back on the bunk.

  Milt cleared his throat.

  "All right," he said.

  Jerry's heavy eyes closed. Then the other man's voice spoke, still close by his ear.

  "But," said Milt, "I still think you took a chance, going down to butt heads with the natives that way. What if Communicator and the rest had been able to stand exposure to your mind. You'd locked me in and the other men were in restraint. Our whole team would have been part of that stewing vat."