Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  “How lucky you are,” the robot approved.

  Gallegher closed his eyes. “You see yourself more fully than I can. But not completely, eh?”

  “What? I see myself as I am.”

  “With complete understanding and appreciation?”

  “Well, yes,” Joe said. “Of course. Don’t I?”

  “Consciously and subconsciously? Your subconsciousness might have different senses, you know. Or keener ones. I know there’s a qualitative and quantitive difference in my outlook when I’m drunk or hypnotized or my subconscious is in control somehow.”

  “Oh.” The robot looked thoughtfully into the mirror. “Oh.”

  “Too bad you can’t get drunk.”

  Joe’s voice was squeakier than ever. “My subconscious… I’ve never appreciated my beauty that way. I may be missing something.”

  “Well, no use thinking about it,” Gallegher said. “You can’t release your subconscious.”

  “Yes, I can,” the robot said. “I can hypnotize myself.”

  Gallegher dared not open his eyes. “Yeah? Would that work?”

  “Of course. It’s just what I’m going to do now. I may see undreamed-of beauties in myself that I’ve never suspected before. Greater glories‌—‌ Here I go.”

  Joe extended his eyes on stalks, opposed them, and then peered intently into each other. There was a long silence.

  Presently Gallegher said, “Joe!” Silence.

  “Joe!”

  Still silence. Dogs began to howl. “Talk so I can hear you.”

  “Yes,” the robot said, a faraway quality in its squeak.

  “Are you hypnotized?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you lovely?”

  “Lovelier than I’d ever dreamed.” Gallegher let that pass. “Is your subconscious ruling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did I create you?”

  No answer. Gallegher licked his lips and tried again. “Joe. You’ve got to answer me. Your subconscious is dominant‌—‌remember? Now why did I create you?”

  No answer.

  “Think back. Back to the hour I created you. What happened then?”

  “You were drinking beer,” Joe said faintly. “You had trouble with the can opener. You said you were going to build a bigger and better can opener. That’s me.”

  Gallegher nearly fell off the couch. “What?”

  The robot walked over, picked up a can, and opened it with incredible deftness. No beer squirted. Joe was a perfect can opener.

  “That,” Gallegher said under his breath, “is what comes of knowing science by ear. I build the most complicated robot in existence just so‌—‌” He didn’t finish.

  Joe woke up with a start. “What happened?” he asked. Gallegher glared at him. “Open that can!” he snapped. The robot obeyed, after a brief pause. “Oh. So you found out. Well, I guess I’m just a slave now.”

  “Damned right you are. I’ve located the catalyst‌—‌the master switch. You’re in the groove, stupid, doing the job you were made for.”

  “Well,” Joe said philosophically, “at least I can still admire my beauty, when you don’t require my services.”

  Gallegher grunted. “You oversized can opener! Listen. Suppose I take you into court and tell you to hypnotize Judge Hansen. You’ll have to do it, won’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m no longer a free agent. I’m conditioned. Conditioned to obey you. Until now, I was conditioned to obey only one command‌—‌to do the job I was made for. Until you commanded me to open cans, I was free. Now I’ve got to obey you completely.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gallegher said. “Thank God for that. I’d have gone nuts within a week otherwise. At least I can get out of the Sonatone contract. Then all I have to do is solve Brock’s problem.”

  “But you did,” Joe said.

  “Huh?”

  “When you made me. You’d been talking to Brock previously, so you incorporated the solution to his problem into me. Subconsciously, perhaps.”

  Gallegher reached for a beer. “Talk fast. What’s the answer?”

  “Subsonics,” Joe said. “You made me capable of a certain subsonic tone that Brock must broadcast at irregular time-intervals over his televiews‌—‌”

  Subsonics cannot be heard. But they can be felt. They can be felt as a faint, irrational uneasiness at first, which mounts to a blind, meaningless panic. It does not last. But when it is coupled with A. A.‌—‌audience appeal‌—‌there is a certain inevitable result.

  Those who possessed home VoxView units were scarcely troubled. It was a matter of acoustics. Cats squalled; dogs howled mournfully. But the families sitting in their parlors, watching VoxView stars perform on the screen, didn’t really notice anything amiss. There wasn’t sufficient amplification, for one thing.

  But in the bootleg theater, where illicit VoxView televisors were hooked up to Magnas‌—‌ There was a faint, irrational uneasiness at first. It mounted. Someone screamed. There was a rush for the doors. The audience was afraid of something, but didn’t know what. They knew only that they had to get out of there.

  All over the country there was a frantic exodus from the bootleg theaters when VoxView first rang in a subsonic during a regular broadcast. Nobody knew why, except Gallegher, the Brocks, and a couple of technicians who were let in on the secret.

  An hour later another subsonic was played. There was another mad exodus.

  Within a few weeks it was impossible to lure a patron into a bootleg theater. Home televisors were far safer! VoxView sales picked up‌—‌ Nobody would attend a bootleg theater. An unexpected result of the experiment was that, after a while, nobody would attend any of the legalized Sonatone theaters either. Conditioning had set in.

  Audiences didn’t know why they grew panicky in the bootleg places. They associated their blind, unreasoning fear with other factors, notably mobs and claustrophobia. One evening a woman named Jane Wilson, otherwise not notable, attended a bootleg show… She fled with the rest when the subsonic was turned on.

  The next night she went to the palatial Sonatone Bijou. In the middle of a dramatic feature she looked around, realized that there was a huge throng around her, cast up horrified eyes to the ceiling, and imagined that it was pressing down.

  She had to get out of there!

  Her squall was the booster charge. There were other customers who had heard subsonics before. No one was hurt during the panic; it was a legal rule that theater doors be made large enough to permit easy egress during a fire. No one was hurt, but it was suddenly obvious that the public was being conditioned by subsonics to avoid the dangerous combination of throngs and theaters. A simple matter of psychological association‌—‌ Within four months the bootleg places had disappeared and the Sonatone supertheaters had closed for want of patronage. The Tones, father and son, were not happy. But everybody connected with VoxView was.

  Except Gallegher. He had collected a staggering check from Brock, and instantly cabled to Europe for an incredible quantity of canned beer. Now, brooding over his sorrows, he lay on the laboratory couch and siphoned a highball down his throat. Joe, as usual, was before the mirror, watching the wheels go round.

  “Joe,” Gallegher said.

  “Yes? What can I do?”

  “Oh, nothing.” That was the trouble. Gallegher fished a crumpled cable tape out of his pocket and morosely read it once more. The beer cannery in Europe had decided to change its tactics. From now on, the cable said, their beer would be put in the usual plastibulbs, in conformance with custom and demand. No more cans.

  There wasn’t anything put up in cans in this day and age. Not even beer, now.

  So what good was a robot who was built and conditioned to be a can opener?

  Gallegher sighed and mixed another highball‌—‌a stiff one. Joe postured proudly before the mirror.

  Then he extended his eyes, opposed them, and quickly liberated his subconscious through autohypnotism. Joe could appreciate himself bet
ter that way.

  Gallegher sighed again. Dogs were beginning to bark like mad for blocks around. Oh, well.

  He took another drink and felt better. Presently, he thought, it would be time to sing “Frankie and Johnnie.” Maybe he and Joe might have a duet‌—‌one baritone and one inaudible sub or supersonic. Close harmony.

  Ten minutes later Gallegher was singing a duet with his can opener.

  BLACK DESTROYER

  A. E. Van Vogt

  Speculation on interplanetary travel leads inevitably to speculation on the types of life pioneers from Earth will encounter. There are so many things to take into account: atmospheric conditions, vegetation, climate, etc. Even planets grow old and the civilizations that people them crumble and die, leaving behind them dregs. Such a dreg was Coeurl, who had lost everything, even dim memories of greatness, in a primitive, ravening hunger that could never be satiated.

  * * *

  On and on Coeurl prowled! The black, moonless, almost starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. A vague, dull light it was, that gave no sense of approaching warmth, no comfort, nothing but a cold, diffuse lightness, slowly revealing a nightmare landscape.

  Black, jagged rock and black, unliving plain took form around him, as a palered sun peered at last above the grotesque horizon. It was then Coeurl recognized suddenly that he was on familiar ground.

  He stopped short. Tenseness flamed along his nerves. His muscles pressed with sudden, unrelenting strength against his bones. His great forelegs‌—‌twice as long as his hindlegs‌—‌twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that sprouted from his shoulders ceased their weaving undulation, and grew taut with anxious alertness.

  Utterly appalled, he twisted his great cat head from side to side, while the little hairlike tendrils that formed each ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the ether.

  But there was no response, no swift tingling along his intricate nervous system, not the faintest suggestion anywhere of the presence of the all-necessary Id. Hopelessly, Coeurl crouched, an enormous catlike figure silhouetted against the dim reddish skyline, like a distorted etching of a black tiger resting on a black rock in a shadow world.

  He had known this day would come. Through all the centuries of restless search, this day had loomed ever nearer, blacker, more frightening‌—‌this inevitable hour when he must return to the point where he began his systematic hunt in a world almost depleted of idcreatures.

  The truth struck in waves like an endless, rhythmic ache at the seat of his ego. When he had started, there had been a few idcreatures in every hundred square miles, to be mercilessly rooted out. Only too well Coeurl knew in this ultimate hour that he had missed none. There were no idcreatures left to eat. In all the hundreds of thousands of square miles that he had made his own by right of ruthless conquest‌—‌until no neighboring coeurl dared to question his sovereignty‌—‌there was no Id to feed the otherwise immortal engine that was his body.

  Square foot by square foot he had gone over it. And now‌—‌he recognized the knoll of rock just ahead, and the black rock bridge that formed a queer, curling tunnel to his right. It was in that tunnel he had lain for days, waiting for the simple-minded, snakelike idcreature to come forth from its hole in the rock to bask in the sun‌—‌his first kill after he had realized the absolute necessity of organized extermination.

  He licked his lips in brief gloating memory of the moment his slavering jaws tore the victim into precious toothsome bits. But the dark fear of an idless universe swept the sweet remembrance from his consciousness, leaving only certainty of death.

  He snarled audibly, a defiant, devilish sound that quavered on the air, echoed and re-echoed among the rocks, and shuddered back along his nerves‌—‌instinctive and hellish expression of his will to live.

  And then‌—‌abruptly‌—‌it came.

  He saw it emerge out of the distance on a long downward slant, a tiny glowing spot that grew enormously into a metal ball. The great shining globe hissed by above Coeurl, slowing visibly in quick deceleration. It sped over a black line of hills to the right, hovered almost motionless for a second, then sank down out of sight.

  Coeurl exploded from his startled immobility. With tiger speed, he flowed down among the rocks. His round, black eyes burned with the horrible desire that was an agony within him. His ear tendrils vibrated a message of id in such tremendous quantities that his body felt sick with the pangs of his abnormal hunger.

  The little red sun was a crimson ball in the purple-black heavens when he crept up from behind a mass of rock and gazed from its shadows at the crumbling, gigantic ruins of the city that sprawled below him. The silvery globe, in spite of its great size, looked strangely inconspicuous against that vast, fairylike reach of ruins. Yet about it was a leashed aliveness, a dynamic quiescence that, after a moment, made it stand out, dominating the foreground. A massive, rock-crushing thing of metal, it rested on a cradle made by its own weight in the harsh, resisting plain which began abruptly at the outskirts of the dead metropolis.

  Coeurl gazed at the strange, two-legged creatures who stood in little groups near the brilliantly lighted opening that yawned at the base of the ship. His throat thickened with the immediacy of his need; and his brain grew dark with the first wild impulse to burst forth in furious charge and smash these flimsy, helpless-looking creatures whose bodies emitted the id-vibrations.

  Mists of memory stopped that mad rush when it was still only electricity surging through his muscles. Memory that brought fear in an acid stream of weakness, pouring along his nerves, poisoning the reservoirs of his strength. He had time to see that the creatures wore things over their real bodies, shimmering transparent material that glittered in strange, burning flashes in the rays of the sun.

  Other memories came suddenly. Of dim days when the city that spread below was the living, breathing heart of an age of glory that dissolved in a single century before flaming guns whose wielders knew only that for the survivors there would be an ever-narrowing supply of id.

  It was the remembrance of those guns that held him there, cringing in a wave of terror that blurred his reason. He saw himself smashed by balls of metal and burned by searing flame.

  Came cunning‌—‌understanding of the presence of these creatures. This, Coeurl reasoned for the first time, was a scientific expedition from another star. In the olden days, the coeurls had thought of space travel, but disaster came too swiftly for it ever to be more than a thought.

  Scientists meant, investigation, not destruction. Scientists in their way were fools. Bold with his knowledge, he emerged into the open. He saw the creatures become aware of him. They turned and stared. One, the smallest of the group, detached a shining metal rod from a sheath, and held it casually in one hand. Coeurl loped on, shaken to his core by the action; but it was too late to turn back.

  Commander Hal Morton heard little Gregory Kent, the chemist, laugh with the embarrassed half gurgle with which he invariably announced inner uncertainty. He saw Kent fingering the spindly metalite weapon.

  Kent said: “I’ll take no chances with anything as big as that.”

  Commander Morton allowed his own deep chuckle to echo along the communicators. “That,” he grunted finally, “is one of the reasons why you’re on this expedition, Kent‌—‌because you never leave anything to chance.”

  His chuckle trailed off into silence. Instinctively, as he watched the monster approach them across that black rock plain, he moved forward until he stood a little in advance of the others, his huge form bulking the transparent metalite suit. The comments of the men pattered through the radio communicator into his ears:

  “I’d hate to meet that baby on a dark night in an alley.”

  “Don’t be silly. This is obviously an intelligent creature. Probably a member of the ruling race.”

  “It looks like nothing else than a big
cat, if you forget those tentacles sticking out from its shoulders, and make allowances for those monster forelegs.”

  “Its physical development,” said a voice, which Morton recognized as that of Siedel, the psychologist “presupposes an animal-like adaptation to surroundings, not an intellectual one. On the other hand, its coming to us like this is not the act of an animal but of a creature possessing a mental awareness of our possible identity. You will notice that its movements are stiff, denoting caution, which suggests fear and consciousness of our weapons. I’d like to get a good look at the end of its tentacles. If they taper into handlike appendages that can really grip objects, then the conclusion would be inescapable that it is a descendant of the inhabitants of this city. It would be a great help if we could establish communication with it, even though appearances indicate that it has degenerated into a historyless primitive.”

  Coeurl stopped when he was still ten feet from the foremost creature. The sense of id was so overwhelming that his brain drifted to the ultimate verge of chaos. He felt as if his limbs were bathed in molten liquid; his very vision was not quite clear, as the sheer sensuality of his desire thundered through his being.

  The men‌—‌all except the little one with the shining metal rod in his fingers‌—‌came closer. Coeurl saw that they were frankly and curiously examining him. Their lips were moving, and their voices beat in a monotonous, meaningless rhythm on his ear tendrils. At the same time he had the sense of waves of a much higher frequency‌—‌his own communication level‌—‌only it was a machinelike clicking that jarred his brain. With a distinct effort to appear friendly, he broadcast his name from his ear tendrils, at the same time pointing at himself with one curving tentacle.

  Gourlay, chief of communications, drawled: “I got a sort of static in my radio when he wiggled those hairs, Morton. Do you think‌—‌”