The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  The Director said in a tolerantly shocked tone:

  “Dr. Braden! You speak as if he were not a human being!”

  “He isn’t,” said Braden. “His body temperature is a hundred and five. Human tissues simply would not survive that temperature. He has extra vertebrae and extra ribs. His joints are not quite like ours. He has two hearts. We were able to check his circulatory system just under the skin with infrared lamps, and it is not like ours. And I submit that he has been a patient in this asylum for one hundred and sixty-two years. If he is human, he is at least remarkable!”

  The man from Washington said interestedly:

  “Where do you think he comes from, Dr. Braden?”

  Braden spread out his hands. He said doggedly:

  “I make no guesses. But I sent photostats of the sketches he made to the Bureau of Standards. I said that they were made by a patient and appeared to be diagrams of atomic structure. I asked if they indicated aknowledge of physics. “You”, he looked at the man from Washington, “turned up thirty-six hours later. I deduce that he has such knowledge.”

  “He has!” said the man from Washington, mildly, “The X-ray sketches were interesting enough, but the others… Apparently he has told us how to get controlled atomic energy out of silicon, which is one of earth’s commonest elements. Where did he come from, Dr. Braden?”

  Braden clantped his jaw.

  “You noticed that the commitment papers referred to shooting stars then causing much local comment? I looked up the newspapers for about that date. They reported a large shooting star which was observed to descend to the earth. Then, various credible observers claimed that it shot back up to the sky again. Then, some hours afterward, various large shooting stars crossed the sky from horizon to horizon, without ever falling.”

  The Director of Meadeville Mental said humorously:

  “It’s a wonder that New Bedlam, as we were then, was not crowded after such statements!”

  The man from Washington did not smile.

  “I think,” he said meditatively, “that Dr. Braden suggests a spaceship landing to permit John Kingman to get out, and then going away again. And possible pursuit afterward.”

  The Director laughed appreciatively at the assumed jest.

  “If,” said the man from Washington, “John Kingrnan is not human, and if he comes from somewhere where as much was known about atomic energy almost two centuries ago as he has showed us, and, if he were insane there, he might have seized some sort of vehicle and fled in it because of delusions of persecution. Which in a sense, if he were insane, might be justified. He would have been pursued. With pursuers close behind him he might have landed here.”

  “But the vehicle!” said the Director, humorously. “Our ancestors would have recorded finding a spaceship or an airplane.”

  “Suppose,” said the man from Washington, “that his pursuers had something like … say … radar. Even we have that! A cunning lunatic would have sent off his vehicle under automatic control to lead his pursuers as long and merry a chase as possible. Perhaps he sent it to dive into the sun. The rising shooting star and the other cruising shooting stars would be accounted for. What do you say, Dr. Braden?”

  Braden shrugged.

  “There is no evidence. Now he is insane. If we were to cure him…”

  “Just how,” said the man from Washington, “would you cure him? I thought paranoia was practically hopeless.”

  “Not quite,” Braden told him. “They’ve used shock treatment for dementia praecox and schizophrenia, with good results. Until last year there was nothing of comparable value for paranoia. Then Jantzen suggested euphoric shock. Basically, the idea is to dispel illusions by creating hallucinations.”

  The Director fidgeted disapprovingly. The man from Washington waited.

  “In euphoric shock,” said Braden carefully, “the tensions and anxieties of insane patients are relieved by drugs which produce a sensation of euphoria, or well being. Jantzen combined hallucination-producing drugs with those. The combination seems to place the patient temporarily in a cosmos in which all delusions are satisfied and all tensions relieved. He has a rest from his struggle against reality. Also he has a sort of supercatharsis, in the convincing realization of all his desires. Quite often he comes out of the first euphoric shock temporarily sane. The percentage of final cures is satisfyingly high.”

  The man from Washington said, “Body chemistry?”

  Braden regarded him with new respect. He said, “I don’t know. He’s lived on human food for almost two centuries, and in any case it’s been proved that the proteins will be identical on all planets under all suns. But I couldn’t be sure about it. There might even be allergies. You say his drawings were very important. It might be wisest to find out everything possible from him before even euphoric shock was tried.”

  “Ah, yes!” said the Director, tolerantly. “If he has waited a hundred and sixty-two years, a few weeks or months will make no difference. And I would like to watch the experiment, but I am about to start on my vacation… ”

  “Hardly,” said the man from Washington.

  “I said, I am about to start on my vacation.”

  “John Kingman,” said the man from Washington mildly, “has been trying for a hundred and sixty-two years to tell us how to have controlled atomic energy, and pocket X-ray machines, and God knows what all else. There may be, somewhere about this institution, drawings of antigravity apparatus, really efficient atomic bombs, spaceship drives or weapons which could depopulate the earth. I’m afraid nobody here is going to communicate with the outside world in any way until the place and all its personnel are gone over … ah rather carefully.”

  “This,” said the Director indignantly, “is preposterous!”

  “Quite so. A thousand years of human advance locked in the skull of a lunatic. Nearly two hundred years more of progress and development wasted because he was locked up here. But it would be most preposterous of all to let his information loose to the other lunatics who aren’t locked up because they’re running governments! Sit down!”

  The Director sat down. The man from Washington said:

  “Now, Dr. Braden…”

  John Kingman spent days on end in scornful, triumphant glee. Braden watched him somberly. Meadeville Mental Hospital was an anned camp with sentries everywhere, and especially about the building in which John Kingman gloated. There were hordes of suitably certified scientists and psychiatrists about him, now, and he was filled with blazing satisfaction.

  He sat in regal, triumphant aloofness. He was the greatest, the most important, the most consequential figure on this planet. The stupid creatures who inhabited it, they were only superficially like himself, had at last come to perceive his godliness. Now they clustercd about him. In their stupid language which it was beneath his dignity to learn, they addressed him. But they did not grovel. Even groveling would not be sufficiently respectful for such inferior beings when addressing John Kingman. He very probably devised in his own mind the exact etiquette these stupid creatures must practice before he would condescend to notice them.

  They made elaborate tests. He ignored their actions. They tried with transparent cunning to trick him into further revelations of the powers he held. Once, in malicious amusement, he drew a sketch of a certain reaction which such inferior minds could not possibly understand. They were vastly excited, and he was enormously amused. When they tried that reaction and square miles turned to incandescent vapor, the survivors would realise that they could not trick or force him into giving them the riches of his godlike mind. They must devise the proper etiquette to appease him. They must abjectly and humbly plead with him and placate him and sacrifice to him. They must deny all other gods but John Kinginan. They would realize that he was all wisdom, all power, all greatness when the reaction he had sketched destroyed them by millions.

  Braden prevented that from happening. When John Kingusan gave a sketch of a new atomic reaction in response to an ela
borate trick one of the newcomers had devised, Braden protested grimly.

  “The patient,” he said doggedly, “is a paranoid. Suspicion and trickiness is inherent in his mental processes.At any moment, to demonstrate his greatness, he may try to produce unholy destruction. You absolutely cannot trust him! Be careful!”

  He hammered the fact home, arguing the sheer fact that a paranoid will do absolutely anything to prove his grandeur.

  The new reaction was tried with microscopic quantities of material, and it only destroyed everything within a fifty-yard radius. Which brought the final decision on John Kingman. He was insane. He knew more about one overwhelmingly important subject than all the generations of men. But it was not possible to obtain trustworthy data from him on that subject or any others. while he was insane. It was worth while to take the calculated risk of attempting to cure him.

  Braden protested again:

  “I urged the attempt to cure him,” he said firmly, “before I knew he had given the United States severe centuries head-start in knowledge of atomic energy was thinking of him as a patient. For his own sake, any risk was proper. Since he is not human, withdraw my urging. I do not know what will happen. Anything could happen.”

  His refusal held up treatment for a week. Then a Presidential executive order resolved the matter. The attempt was to be made as a calculated risk. Dr. Braden would make the attempt.

  He did. He tested John Kingman for tolerance of euphoric drugs. No unfavorable reaction.He tested him for tolerance of drugs producing hallucination. No unf avorable reaction. Then he injected into one of John Kingman’s veins a certain quantity of the combination of drugs which on human beings was most effective for euphoric shock, and whose separate constituents had been tested on John Kingman and found harmless. It was not a sufficient dose to produce the full required effect. Braden expected to have to make at least one and probably two additional injections before the requisite euphoria was produced. He was taking no single avoidable chance. He administered first a dosage which should have produced no more than a feeling of mild but definite exhilaration.

  And John Kingman went into convulsions. Horrible ones.

  There is such a thing as allergy and such a thing as synergy, and nobody understands either. Some patients collapse when given aspirin. Some break out in rashes from penicillin. Some drugs, taken atone, have one effect, and taken together quite another and drastic one. A drug producing euphoria was harmless to John Kingman. A drug producing hallucinations was harmless. But, synergy or allergy or whatever, the two taken together were deadly poison.

  He was literally unconscious for three weeks, and in continuous convulsion for two days. He was kept alive by artificial nourishment, glucose, nasal feeding everything. But his coma was extreme. Four separate times he was believed dead.

  But after three weeks he opened his eyes vaguely. In another week he was able to talk, From the first, his expression was bewildered. He was no longer proud. He began to learn English. He showed no paranoid symptoms. He was wholly sane. In fact, his I.Q., tested later, was ninety, which is well within the range of normal intelligence. He was not over-bright, but adequate. And he did not remember who he was. He did not remember anything at all about his life before rousing from coma in the Meadeville Mental Hospital. Not anything at all. It was apparently, either the price or the cause of his recovery.

  Braden considered that it was the means. He urged his views on the frustrated scientists who wanted now to try hypnotism and “truth serum” and other devices for picking the lock of John Kingman’s brain.

  “As a diagnosis,” said Braden, moved past the tendency to be technical, “the poor devil smashed up on something we can’t even guess at. His normal personality couldn’t take it, whatever it was, so he fled into delusions, into insanity. He lived in that retreat over a century and a half, and then we found him out, And we wouldn’t let him keep his beautiful delusions that he was great and godlike and all-powerful. We were merciless. We forced ourselves upon him. We questioned him. We tricked him. In the end, we nearly poisoned him! And his delusions couldn’t stand up. He couldn’t I admit that he was wrong, and he couldn’t reconcile such experiences with his delusions. There was only one thing he could do, forget the whole thing in the most literal possible manner. What he’s done is to go into what they used to call dementia praecox. Actually, it’s infantilism. He’s fled back to his childhood. That’s why his I.Q. is only ninety, instead of the unholy figure it must have been when he was a normal adult of his race. He’s mentally a child. He sleeps, right now, in the foetal position. Which is a warning! One more attempt to tamper with his brain, and he’ll go into the only place that’s left for him, into the absolute blankness that is the mind of the unborn child!”

  He presented evidence. The evidence was overwhelming. In the end, reluctantly, John Kingman was left alone.

  He gets along all right, though. He works in the records department of Meadeville Mental now, because there his six-fingered hands won’t cause remark. He is remarkably accurate and perfectly happy.

  But be is carefully watched. The one question he can answer now is, how long he’s going to live. A hundred and sixty-two years is only part of his lifetime. But if you didn’t know, you’d swear he wasn’t more than fifty.

  A story of tomorrow’s frontiers and the space-trails leading there.

  Doughnut Jockey

  By Erik Fennel

  FAINTLY THE unmistakable howl of a driver rocket drifted across the ten-mile-wide safety strip surrounding Mukilteo Spaceport. The new guard heard it, and frowned inquiringly.

  Mike Kelly cocked one ear, yanked the lever opening the main gate, then jerked the new man bodily into the low pillbox-like gatehouse. He kicked the heavy door shut.

  “That’s Doughnut Merrill turning off the highway,” he lectured. “If the gate ain’t open, he’d as soon drive that hell-wagon automobile right through it. He’s got a miniature Haskell driver bolted into the back deck of that roadster. Fixed it himself. The cops would throw away the keys if they caught him using it on the roads, so he plays out here like he’s flying low. Wild as a coot, that fellow.”

  “But won’t he stop to check in?” The new man took his duties seriously.

  Kelly snorted. “He never does. And this morning he has a good excuse, for once.”

  “What’s it all about, anyhow?”

  Kelly looked serious. “Must be something bad wrong. Interplanet don’t break schedule for fun.”

  Walter Merrill glanced toward the blast pits as he passed the perimeter fence. The squatty, ludicrous shape of Doughnut II was already on the supports. Fireball lay beside it in the retrieving cradle on which it had been dragged from Puget Sound after its last run, sleek and slender and, to anyone with an engineering brain, breathtakingly beautiful.

  The three tall cranes were in position, their boom tips interlocked to form the stable tripod needed to set a Fire-class ship upright. They always made Merrill think of gawky long-necked geese whispering secrets.

  Soon Fireball would be positioned in the hole of Doughnut, ready to go out. The scene was perfectly familiar, but this time it carried a special thrill. Merrill smiled happily. This was his big day.

  He cut the jet, tromped brakes, and from sheer exuberance made it a spectacular squealing stop— one that streaked hot rubber across the parking lot beside the administration building. He felt eager and well disposed toward all mankind as he headed for Jerry Slidell’s office.

  The operations manager of Interplanet started to jump up, then remembered what long accelerations in the pre-Gravinol days had done to his heart valves, and rose more sedately. He was in his thirties, but his hair was white from radiation leakage, and his face was deeply lined.

  “How long to blast-off?” Merrill began. “Tape ready? What’s wrong at Mars Colony to need a special hop?” Slidell eased himself back into his chair.

  “A pneumonia carrier—one of those people who have it in their systems without showing any
symptoms—must have got through the medical check-up. And you know what high-level meson stuff and Rho shower-effect discharges from the hull plates do to viruses. This mutation is so damnably virulent it stands to wipe out the Colony.”

  Merrill whistled in dismay.

  “Benson and his relief pilot were both coming down with it when they splashed Firefly in last night. But the doctors say this new serum should hold even a mutant virus—if we get it out there in time. We found a supply in Seattle—pure luck—and it’s being loaded now to stand acceleration and shock.

  “So Fireball goes out light, no load but the serum, no relief pilot even, and it’ll be full boost, open throttle, and jets all the way.”

  “But—”

  “I know, I know! She’ll get in without enough fuel to come back, and there she sits out of action until the Marsport plant starts producing. It messes up the whole schedule, but there’s nothing else to do.”

  Merrill leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of Slidell’s desk.

  “Jerry, I’ll set you a speed record that will stand a long time,” he declared.

  He had a disturbing thought then, but before he could put it into words, the operations manager looked him in the eye.

  “Walter!” He avoided the nickname he knew Merrill detested. “Just a minute. Don’t you think—”

  Instantly the smile was gone from Merrill’s lean face. “Again?” he barked.