He paused. A black frown twisted his long face. He whirled like the tiger man he was, snatching at his gun — as Leigh stood up.
The man Leigh was no longer surprised at — anything. At the way the hard cords fell rotted from his wrists and legs. At the way the Dreegh froze rigid after one look into his eyes. For the first shock of the tremendous, the almost cataclysmic, truth was already in him.
“There is only one difference,” said Leigh in a voice so vibrant that the top of his head shivered from the unaccustomed violence of sound. “This time there are two hundred and twenty-seven Dreegh ships gathered in one concentrated area. The rest — and our records show only a dozen others — we can safely leave to our police patrols.”
The Great Galactic, who had been William Leigh, smiled darkly and walked toward his captives. “It has been a most interesting experiment in deliberate splitting of personality. Three years ago, our time manipulators showed this opportunity of destroying the Dreeghs, who hitherto had escaped by reason of the vastness of our galaxy.
“And so I came to Earth, and here built up the character of William Leigh, reporter, complete with family and past history. It was necessary to withdraw into a special compartment of the brain some nine-tenths of my mind, and to drain completely an equal percentage of life energy.
“That was the difficulty. How to replace that energy in sufficient degree at the proper time, without playing the role of vampire. I constructed a number of energy caches, but naturally at no time had we been able to see all the future. We could not see the details of what was to transpire aboard this ship, or in my hotel room that night you came, or under Constantine’s restaurant.
“Besides, if I had possessed full energy as I approached this ship, your spy ray would have registered it; and you would instantly have destroyed my small automobile-spaceship.
“My first necessity, accordingly, was to come to the meteorite, and obtain an initial control over my own body through the medium of what my Earth personality called the ‘blackness’ room.
“That Earth personality offered unexpected difficulties. In three years it had gathered momentum as a personality, and that impetus made it necessary to repeat a scene with Patricia Ungarn, and to appear directly as another conscious mind, in order to convince Leigh that he must yield. The rest of course was a matter of gaining additional life energy after boarding your ship, which” — he bowed slightly at the muscularly congealed body of the woman — “which she supplied me.
“I have explained all this because of the fact that a mind will accept complete control only - if full understanding of — defeat — is present. I must finally inform you, therefore, that you are to remain alive for the next few days, during which time you will assist me in making personal contact with your friends.”
He made a gesture of dismissal: “Return to your normal existence. I have still to coordinate my two personalities completely, and that does not require your presence.”
The Dreeghs went out blank-eyed, almost briskly; and the two minds in one body were — alone!
For Leigh, the Leigh of Earth, the first desperate shock was past. The room was curiously dim, as if he was staring out through eyes that were no longer — his!
He thought, with a horrible effort at-self-control: “I’ve got to fight. Some thing is trying to possess my body. All the rest is lie.”
A soothing, mind-pulsation stole into the shadowed chamber where his — self — was cornered:
“No lie, but wondrous truth. You have not seen what the Dreeghs saw and felt, for you are inside this body, and know not that it has come marvelously alive, unlike anything that your petty dreams on Earth could begin to conceive. You must accept your high destiny, else the sight of your own body will be a terrible thing to you. Be calm, be braver than you’ve ever been, and pain will turn to joy.”
Calm came out. His mind quivered in its dark corner, abnormally conscious of strange and unnatural pressures that pushed in at it like winds out of unearthly night. For a moment of terrible fear, it funked that pressing night, then forced back to sanity, and had another thought of its own, a grimly cunning thought:
The devilish interloper was arguing. Could that mean — his mind rocked with hope — that coordination was impossible without his yielding to clever persuasion?
Never would he yield.
“Think,” whispered the alien mind, “think of being one valuable facet of a mind with an I.Q. twelve hundred, think of yourself as having played a role; and now you are returning to normalcy, a normalcy of unlimited power. You have been an actor completely absorbed in your role, but the play is over; you are alone in your dressing room removing the grease paint; your mood of the play is fading, fading, fading — “
“Go to hell!” said William Leigh, loudly. “I’m William Leigh, I.Q. one hundred and twelve, satisfied to be just what I am. I don’t give a damn whether you built me up from the component elements of your brain, or whether I was born normally. I can just see what you’re trying to do with that hypnotic suggestion stuff, but it isn’t working. I’m here, I’m myself, and I stay myself. Go find yourself another body, if you’re so smart.”
Silence settled where his voice had been; and the emptiness, the utter lack of sound brought a sharp twinge of fear greater than that which he had had before he spoke.
He was so intent on that inner struggle that he was not aware of outer movement until — With a start he grew aware that he was staring out of a port window. Night spread there, the living night of space.
A trick, he thought in an agony of fear; a trick somehow designed to add to the corroding power of hypnotism.
A trick! He tried to jerk back — and, terrifyingly, couldn’t. His body wouldn’t move. Instantly, then, he tried to speak, to crash through that enveloping blanket of unholy silence. But no sound came.
Not a muscle, not a finger stirred; not a single nerve so much as trembled.
He was alone.
Cut off in his little corner of brain.
Lost.
Yes, lost, came a strangely pitying sibilation of thought, lost to a cheap, sordid existence, lost to a life whose end is visible from the hour of birth, lost to a civilization that has already had to be saved from itself a thousand times. Even you, I think, can see that all this is lost to you forever — Leigh thought starkly: The thing was trying by a repetition of ideas, by showing evidence of defeat, to lay the foundations of further defeat. It was the oldest trick of simple hypnotism for simple people. And he couldn’t let it work — You have, urged the mind inexorably, accepted the fact that you were playing a role; and now you have recognized our oneness, and are giving up the role: The proof of this recognition on your part is that you have yielded control of — our — body.
— Our body, our body, OUR body — The words re-echoed like some Gargantuan sound through his brain, then merged swiftly into that calm, other-mind pulsation:
— Concentration. All intellect derives from the capacity to concentrate; and, progressively, the body itself shows life, reflects and focuses that gathering, vaulting power.
— One more step remains: You must see — Amazingly, then, he was staring into a mirror. Where it had come from, he had no memory. It was there in front of him, where, an instant before, had been a black porthole — and there was an image in the mirror, shapeless at first to his blurred vision.
Deliberately — he felt the enormous deliberateness — the vision was cleared for him. He saw — and then he didn’t.
His brain wouldn’t look. It twisted in a mad desperation, like a body buried alive, and briefly, horrendously conscious of its fate. Insanely, it fought away from the blazing thing in the mirror. So awful was the effort, so titanic the fear, that it began to gibber mentally, its consciousness to whirl dizzily, like a wheel spinning faster, faster —
> The wheel shattered into ten thousand aching fragments. Darkness came, blacker than Galactic night. And there was — Oneness!
QUIETUS
Ross Rocklynne
Quietly, inexorably, the earth moves forward through the centuries toward inevitable change. Even now, astronomers have mapped out such changes and can predict a reasonably accurate picture of the globe’s geography and climate as far in the future as forty thousand years. Predicated on such theory, “Quietus” is a story of heartbreak and disaster. One might well conclude that the essentially tragic significance of this tale is its brilliant portrayal of the historical struggle of the feminine mind to cope with logic a priori.
* * *
The creatures from Alcon saw from the first that Earth, as a planet, was practically dead; dead in the sense that it had given birth to life, and was responsible, indirectly, for its almost complete extinction.
“This type of planet is the most distressing,” said Tark, absently smoothing down the brilliantly colored feathers of his left wing. “I can stand the dark, barren worlds which never have, and probably never will, hold life. But these that have been killed by some celestial catastrophe! Think of what great things might have come from their inhabitants.”
As he spoke thus to his mate, Vascar, he was marking down in a book the position of this planet, its general appearance from space, and the number and kind of satellites it supported.
Vascar, sitting at the controls, both her claws and her vestigial hands at work, guided the spherical ship at slowly decreasing speed toward the planet Earth. A thousand miles above it, she set the craft into an orbital motion, and then proceeded to study the planet, Tark setting the account into his book, for later insertion into the Astronomical Archives of Alcon.
“Evidently,” mused Vascar, her brilliant, unblinking eyes looking at the planet through a transparent section above the control board, “some large meteor, or an errant asteroid—that seems most likely—must have struck this specimen a terrible blow. Look at those great, gaping cracks that run from pole to pole, Tark. It looks as if volcanic eruptions are still taking place, too. At any rate, the whole planet seems entirely denuded—except for that single, short strip of green we saw as we came in.”
Tark nodded. He was truly a bird, for in the evolutionary race on his planet, distant uncounted light-years away, his stock had won out over the others. His wings were short, true, and in another thousand years would be too short for flight, save in a dense atmosphere; but his head was large, and his eyes, red, small, set close together, showed intelligence and a kind benevolence. He and Vascar had left Alcon, their planet, a good many years ago; but they were on their way back now. Their outward-bound trip had taken them many light-years north of the Solar System; but on the way back, they had decided to make it one of the stop-off points in their zigzag course. Probably their greatest interest in all this long cruise was in the discovery of planets—they were indeed few. And that pleasure might even be secondary to the discovery of life. To find a planet that had almost entirely died was, conversely, distressing. Their interest in the planet Earth was, because of this, a wistful one.
The ship made the slow circuit of Earth—the planet was a hodgepodge of tumbled, churned mountains; of abysmal, frightfully long cracks exuding unholy vapors; of volcanoes that threw their fires and hot liquid rocks far into the sky; of vast oceans disturbed from the ocean bed by cataclysmic eruptions. And of life they saw nothing save a single strip of green perhaps a thousand miles long, a hundred wide, in the Western Hemisphere.
“I don’t think we’ll find intelligent life,” Tark said pessimistically. “This planet was given a terrific blow—I wouldn’t be surprised if her rotation period was cut down considerably in a single instant. Such a charge would be unsupportable. Whole cities would literally be snapped away from their foundations—churned, ground to dust. The intelligent creatures who built them would die by the millions—the billions—in that holocaust; and whatever destruction was left incomplete would be finished up by the appearance of volcanoes and faults in the crust of the planet.”
Vascar reminded him, “Remember, where there’s vegetation, even as little as evidenced by that single strip down there, there must be some kind of animal life.”
Tark ruffled his wings in a shrug. “I doubt it. The plants would get all the carbon dioxide they needed from volcanoes—animal life wouldn’t have to exist. Still, let’s take a look. Don’t worry, I’m hoping there’s intelligent life, too. If there is, it will doubtless need some help if it is to survive. Which ties in with our aims, for that is our principal purpose on this expedition—to discover intelligent life, and, wherever possible, to give it what help we can, if it needs help.”
Vascar’s vestigial hands worked the controls, and the ship dropped leisurely downward toward the green strip.
* * *
A rabbit darted out of the underbrush—Tommy leaped at it with the speed and dexterity of a thoroughly wild animal. His powerful hands wrapped around the creature—its struggles ceased as its vertebra was snapped. Tommy squatted, tore the skin off the creature, and proceeded to eat great mouthfuls of the still warm flesh.
Blacky cawed harshly, squawked, and his untidy form came flashing down through the air to land precariously on Tommy’s shoulder. Tommy went on eating, while the crow fluttered its wings, smoothed them out, and settled down to a restless somnolence. The quiet of the scrub forest, save for the cries and sounds of movement of birds and small animals moving through the forest, settled down about Tommy as he ate. “Tommy” was what he called himself. A long time ago, he remembered, there used to be a great many people in the world—perhaps a hundred—many of whom, and particularly two people whom he had called Mom and Pop, had called him by that name. They were gone now, and the others with them. Exactly where they went, Tommy did not know. But the world had rocked one night—it was the night Tommy ran away from home, with Blacky riding on his shoulder—and when Tommy came out of the cave where he had been sleeping, all was in flames, and the city on the horizon had fallen so that it was nothing but a huge pile of dust—but in the end it had not mattered to Tommy. Of course, he was lonesome, terrified, at first, but he got over that. He continued to live, eating, drinking, sleeping, walking endlessly; and Blacky, his talking crow, was good company. Blacky was smart. He could speak every word that Tommy knew, and a good many others that he didn’t. Tommy was not Blacky’s first owner.
But though he had been happy, the last year had brought the recurrence of a strange feeling that had plagued him off and on, but never so strongly as now. A strange, terrible hunger was settling on him. Hunger? He knew this sensation. He had forthwith slain a wild dog, and eaten of the meat. He saw then that it was not a hunger of the belly. It was a hunger of the mind, and it was all the worse because he could not know what it was. He had come to his feet, restless, looking into the tangled depths of the second growth forest.
“Hungry,” he had said, and his shoulders shook and tears coursed out of his eyes, and he sat down on the ground and sobbed without trying to stop himself, for he had never been told that to weep was unmanly. What was it he wanted?
He had everything there was all to himself. Southward in winter, northward in summer, eating of berries and small animals as he went, and Blacky to talk to and Blacky to talk the same words back at him. This was the natural life—he had lived it ever since the world went bang. But still he cried, and felt a panic growing in his stomach, and he didn’t know what it was he was afraid of, or longed for, whichever it was. He was twenty-one years old. Tears were natural to him, to be indulged in whenever he felt like it. Before the world went bang—there were some things he remembered—the creature whom he called Mom generally put her arms around him and merely said, “It’s all right, Tommy, it’s all right.”
So on that occasion, he arose from the ground and sai
d, “It’s all right, Tommy, it’s all right.”
Blacky, he with the split tongue, said harshly, as was his wont, “It’s all right, Tommy, it’s all right! I tell you, the price of wheat is going down!”
Blacky, the smartest crow anybody had—why did he say that? There wasn’t anybody else, and there weren’t any more crows—helped a lot. He not only knew all the words and sentences that Tommy knew, but he knew others that Tommy could never understand because he didn’t know where they came from, or what they referred to. And in addition to all that, Blacky had the ability to anticipate what Tommy said, and frequently took whole words and sentences right out of Tommy’s mouth.
* * *
Tommy finished eating the rabbit, and threw the skin aside, and sat quite still, a peculiarly blank look in his eyes. The strange hunger was on him again. He looked off across the lush plain of grasses that stretched away, searching into the distance, toward where the Sun was setting. He looked to left and right. He drew himself softly to his feet, and peered into the shadows of the forest behind him. His heavily bearded lips began to tremble, and the tears started from his eyes again. He turned and stumbled from the forest, blinded.
Blacky clutched at Tommy’s broad shoulder, and rode him, and a split second before Tommy said, “It’s all right, Tommy, it’s all right.”
Tommy said the words angrily to himself, and blinked the tears away.
He was a little bit tired. The Sun was setting, and night would soon come. But it wasn’t that that made him tired. It was a weariness of the mind, a feeling of futility, for, whatever it was he wanted, he could never, never find it, because he would not know where he should look for it.
His bare foot trampled on something wet—he stopped and looked at the ground. He stooped and picked up the skin of a recently killed rabbit. He turned it over and over in his hands, frowning. This was not an animal he had killed, certainly—the skin had been taken off in a different way. Someone else—no! But his shoulders began to shake with a wild excitement. Someone else? No, it couldn’t be! There was no one—there could be no one—could there? The skin dropped from his nerveless fingers as he saw a single footprint not far ahead of him. He stooped over it, examining, and knew again that he had not done this, either. And certainly it could be no other animal than a man!
Adventures in Time and Space Page 83
