“I cannot teach you that I do not know. I did not build this ship.”
There were surging waves of troubled thought that washed over his mind, but Jim Ward’s tenseness eased. The first fear of totally alien life drifted from his mind and he felt a strange affinity for the creature. It was injured and sick, he knew, but he could not believe that it did not know how the ship was built.
“Those who built this ship come often to trade upon my world,” said Quilcon. “But we have no such ships of our own. Most of us have no desire to see anything but the damp caves and sunny shores of our own world. But I longed to see the worlds from which these ships came.
“When this one landed near my cave I crept in and hid myself. The ship took off then and we traveled an endless time. Then an accident to the engine killed all three of those who manned the ship and I was left alone.
“I was injured, too, but I was not killed. Only the other of me died.”
Jim did not understand the queer phrase, but he did not break into Quilcon’s story.
“I was able to arrange means to control the flight of the ship, to prevent its destruction as it landed upon this planet, but I could not repair it because of the nature of my body.”
Jim saw then that the creature’s story must be true. It was obvious that the ship had been built to be manned by beings utterly unlike Quilcon.
“I investigated the city of yours near by and learned of your ways and customs. I needed the help of one of you to repair the ship. By force I could persuade one of you to do simple tasks, but none so complex as this requires.
“Then I discovered the peculiar customs of learning among you. I forced the man Herald to prepare the materials and send them to you. I received them before the person at the post office could see them. I got your name from the newspapers along with several others who were unsatisfactory.
“I had to teach you to understand the power co-ordinator because only by voluntary operation of your highest faculties will you be able to understand and repair the machine. I can assist but not force you to do that.”
The creature began pleading again. “And now will you repair the engine quickly. I am dying—but shall live longer than you—it is a long journey to my home planet, but I must get there and I need every instant of time that is left to me.”
* * *
Jim caught a glimpse of the dream vision that was the creature’s home world. It was a place of security and peace—in Quilcoa’s terms. But even its alienness did not block out the sense of quiet beauty that Quilcon’s mind transmitted to Jim’s. They were a species of high intelligence. Exceptionally developed in the laws of mathematics and theory of logic, they were handicapped in bodily development from inquiring into other fields of science whose existence was demonstrated by their logic and their mathematics. The more intellectual among them were frustrated creatures whose lives were made tolerable only by an infinite capacity for stoicism and adaptation.
But of them all, Quilcon was among the most restless and rebellious and ambitious. No one of them had ever dared such a journey as he had taken. A swelling pity and understanding came over Jim Ward.
“I’ll bargain with you,” he said desperately. “I’ll repair the engine if you’ll let me have its principles. If you don’t have them, you can get them to me with little trouble. My people must have such a ship as this.”
He tried to visualize what it would mean to Earth to have space flight a century or perhaps five centuries before the slow plodding of science and research might reveal it.
But the creature was silent.
“Quilcon—” Jim repeated. He hoped it hadn’t died.
“I’ll bargain with you,” said Quilcon at last. “Let me be the other of you, and I’ll give you what you want.”
“The other of me? What are you talking about?”
“It is hard for you to understand. It is union—such as we make upon our world. When two or more of us want to be together we go together in the same brain, the same body. I am alone now, and it is an unendurable existence because I have known what it is to have another of me.
“Let me come into your brain, into your mind and live there with you. We will teach your people and mine. We will take this ship to all the universes of which living creatures can dream. It is either this or we both die together, for too much time has gone for me to return. This body dies.”
Stunned by Quilcon’s ultimatum, Jim Ward stared at the ugly slug on the wall. Its brown body was heaving with violent pulsations of pain and a sense of delirium and terror came from it to Jim.
“Hurry! Let me come!” it pleaded.
He could feel sensations as if fingers were probing his cranium looking, pleading for entrance. It turned him cold.
He looked into the years and thought of an existence with this alien mind in his. Would they battle for eventual possession of his body and he perhaps be subjected to slavery in his own living corpse?
He tried to probe Quilcon’s thoughts, but he could find no sense or intent of conquest. There were almost human amenities intermingled with a world of new science and thought.
He knew Quilcon would keep his promise to give the secrets of the ship to the men of Earth. That alone would be worth the price of his sacrifice—if it should be sacrifice.
“Come!” he said quietly.
It was as if a torrent of liquid light were flowing into his brain. It was blinding and excruciating in its flaming intensity. He thought he sensed rather than saw the brown husk of Quilcon quiver in the hemisphere and shrivel like a brown nut.
But in his mind there was union and he paused and trembled with the sudden great reality of what he knew. He knew what Quilcon was and gladness flowed into him like light. A thought soared through his brain: Is sex only in the difference of bodily function and the texture of skin and the tone of voice?
He thought of another day when there was death in the sky and on the Earth below, and in a little field hospital. A figure on a white cot had murmured, “You’ll be all right, Jim. I’m going on, I guess, but you’ll be all right. I know it. Don’t miss me too much.”
He had known there would be no peace for him ever, but now there was peace and the voice of Quilcon was like that voice from long ago, for as the creature probed into his thoughts its inherent adaptability matched its feelings and thought to his and said, “Everything is all right, isn’t it, Jim Ward?”
“Yes … yes it is.” The intensity of his feelings almost blinded him. “And I want to call you Ruth, after another Ruth—”
“I like that name.” There was shyness and appreciation in the tones, and it was not strange to Jim that he could not see the speaker, for there was a vision in his mind far lovelier than any Earthly vision could have been.
“We’ll have everything,” he said, “Everything that your world and mine can offer. We’ll see them all.”
But like the other Ruth who had been so practical, this one was, too. “First we have to repair the engine. Shall we do it, now?”
The solitary figure of Jim Ward moved toward the ramp and disappeared into the depths of the ship.
BRAIN
S. Fowler Wright
Some there are who believe that the cold reason of science is everything; without even comprehending that the scientist is also a man, with a man’s strength and weakness, they demand that the world be run by a formula. With devastating irony, Mr. Fowler Wright pictures a state governed by just such a rigid, scientifically correct formula. But man, even scientific man, is more than a provable theorem; knowledge is not always perfect power, as witness the case of the pig who helped upset the rule of the wise men.
* * *
I
PROFESSOR BRISKET, President of the first Scientist government, sat in his new Studio of Contemplation, one morning in the early spring of 1990, considering the possibilities of the unprecedented power which the advance of knowledge, and the events of the last year, had placed in his some
what bony hands.
It was six months since the suppression of the rebellion of 1989, in which the last traditions of barbarism had gone down, drowned in the blood of millions.
It was a crisis which had been inevitable for fifty years, though there were few that had foreseen, even a year ago, how near it was, and how decisive it must be.
A year ago, in spite of the changes and developments of half a century, the grotesque custom had persisted which decided the government of the country by the equal votes of its adult inhabitants, there being no distinction between youth and age, between folly and wisdom, between knowledge and ignorance—not even the simplest distinction between the cranial capacities of the voters, no disability being recognized except that of certified lunacy, or definite conviction of criminality. It was scarcely more than fifty years since there had been the grotesque spectacle of an eminent scientist being summoned before a magistrate, with no University qualifications whatever, to account for the possession of a stolen dog, and for the uses to which he had put it.
Since then, scientific knowledge had been powerful enough to influence successive governments, in spite of the comic method of their appointment, in ways which had brought incalculable benefits to mankind.
And then (as the obstinate mule had died just as it had been successfully reduced to the daily diet of a single straw), from one absurd triviality, the whole country had leapt into a sudden flame of war, with all its horrors.
It was a woman, as usual, who was the first cause of the crisis. A woman who had been fond of turnips. A woman with an infatuated husband, who had actually grown them for her, on a strip of hidden land behind his dwelling, in excess of the regulated dietary, and in contempt of the balance of vitamins on which their health, if not their lives, depended.
Worse than that, after the crime had been detected and punished, mildly enough, by the painless amputation of his left ear, he had contumaciously repeated the offence, attempting to grow the forbidden vegetable in an unoccupied cellar.
Being again detected, and knowing that he could hope for no further mercy, he had resisted arrest with such violence that his captors had brought him to the dock with broken heads, and one of them having a damaged mouth, and a denture smashed beyond remedy.
There had been no demonstration at the trial, of which there had been no public report (which was prohibited for certain of the grosser forms of obscenity), and there had been no sign of previous agitation to forecast the riot which had demolished the vehicle intended to convey him to the port of banishment, and rescued him from it.
A week later, the city of Nottingham, in which the incident had occurred, was in a state of open rebellion, refusing to surrender the culprit, and demanding repeal of the legislation which had occasioned the trouble.
And then, while the government hesitated and temporized, using such intermittent severities as exasperated without suppressing a revolt which threatened to spread from the midland to the northern counties, Professor Brisket, until then only known as holding the chair of Homology at the London University, had called a conference of twenty of the leading scientists, and, three days later, it was announced to an astounded world that the Government had resigned, and that the Council of Twenty-One had assumed responsibility for the control of the country.
Open war followed. War that was fierce, and short, and sanguinary. The usurpation was resisted by nine-tenths of the population, including almost the whole of its (comparatively) illiterate, its political, its religious, and the majority of its literary and journalistic elements. But the scientists and their followers, banding in instant opposition to the forces of prejudice and reaction, opposed a hundred devices, secret, subtle, and deadly, to the crude violence of high-explosive, and the vain defenses of trench and steel.
The proletariat fought with the obsolete weapons with which they had been furnished by the subservient scientists of an earlier century: the scientists retaliated with a variety of deaths, insanities and diseases, of which the origin was often indiscoverable, and from which there was no defense, nor any road of escape which could be found by those upon whom they fell.
Yet so bitter was the enmity which had leapt to light from the tiny spark which had kindled it, so hopeless did the rebels feel that their fate would be, should they resign themselves to submission; so sure, on the other hand, were the ranks of the scientists that they fought for all the possibilities of the mind of man, and that failure would frustrate all their work, and lead the world backward, even to the monkey-twilight of their aboriginal ancestors, that it seemed for a time that extermination only would be sufficient to decide its issue.
The rebels had been encouraged, almost at the first, by the defection of one of the leading scientists of the day, Dr. Shercliff Binyon, whose teaching had always been of a heretical kind, as he had held that while the pursuit of knowledge is among the noblest occupations of the human mind, the idea that the created can be equal, by the application of such knowledge, to take the part of the Creator, was a presumptuous folly which could only end in such disaster as would revert the world to an elementary barbarism. He had even suggested that this result, and the recurrence of such results, might be the Divine method by which the earth was continually refitted for its purpose as a training ground for the spirit of man.
But his support, however morally important, had had little practical result beyond the momentary heartening of the rebels, for his learning was not of a kind which could be used for the discomfiture of their enemies; and the scientists, infuriated by the unexpected stubbornness of the resistance which they encountered, and by the desertion of one of their own body, decided to strike with a severity which would end the conflict.
When Professor Brisket had given the members of the previous government an ultimatum of two hours to resign their offices, it had been with a warning that, should they refuse or hesitate, they would be smitten by a disease which would render them pestilent beyond endurance of any human associates.
Now he had warned the champions of ignorance and reaction that, unless there should be surrender, absolute and abject, within twelve hours, they would learn, in the desolation of a city, the irresistible powers which they had defied so vainly.
The rebels had replied by marshalling a cloud of fighting planes, which held the air from Southampton to Lowestoft in one unbroken line of heroic purpose, and by the upthrown mouth of ten thousand antiaircraft guns. But the planes had held their line unchallenged, and the guns had remained silent. Only, when the next morning came, Bristol had ceased to be. It had dissolved into air or ground before a chemical agent so powerful, so silent, and so swift, that no sound disturbed the serenity of the surrounding country, no light of ruin flickered over the Channel waters. Simply, the city lights went out. Simply, the ground where once the city stood showed bare and burnt, and of a somewhat crocus aspect, purple and yellow-streaked, when the dawn found it. But of the city that had been, of life or building or garden, even of Clifton bridge, there was no trace at all.
After that, there had been no more trouble.
Professor—now President—Brisket smiled silently, recalling the coincidence that Dr. Binyon had happened to be in the city which had been selected for the required example. His hesitations had ceased from troubling.
Power had come to the President, as it may never have come to any earlier potentate in the history of the world. There was only the Council of the Twenty-One, and to each of these he had allotted their appropriate occupations. Seventeen of them would continue the conquest of knowledge, by the power of which the world lay at their feet already; and the whole Universe was yielding, one by one, its cryptic secrets to their insatiate importunities. Of the other three, two were occupied in executive work as his enthusiastic subordinates. There was no danger from them. Professor Borthin? Well, he was not immortal. There might be a vacancy on the Council of Twenty-One. It might be very soon.
II
The President sat in his star-domed Studio of
Contemplation, over the aromatic darkness of which its vault of stars gave the impression of the depths of space, without the risk of rain or cold or tempest, so that he might think without any triviality of distraction, and with the vast realm always before him,—the realm of blind, unchanging law which lay, in its vast unconsciousness, awaiting the control of the advancing minds of men.
The hours passed, and he did not move. He was facing the most momentous decision of his life. More gigantic in possibilities, more fatal should his judgment err, than had been that which had established him as the head of the first purely scientific government that the earth had known.
It was three years ago that he had casually discovered, when his investigations were directed to quite other ends, the substance which stimulates the cerebral processes, and controls the functioning of the brain. He had been cautious in its application, because the occasion of his discovery had suggested that its use might not be without danger to a mammalian subject, and an injection into a young dog had produced a condition of such uncontrollable ferocity as to be indistinguishable from actual madness.
A viper, receiving a small, and then a larger injection, had shown no sign of any effect whatever. On receiving a third, it had died within a few hours.
The first real success had been with a minnow, one of five in a glass tank, to which he had given an infinitesimal injection. Two days afterwards, when he went to scatter their food on the water in the usual corner, he found that it was surrounded by a barrier of the floating weed which the tank contained, through which there was only one passage left, and that somewhat tortuous.
Through this passage the inoculated minnow darted swiftly, reaching the food sufficiently before its baffled companions to get the largest share of the meal.
He had disturbed the weed, and had found it rearranged on the next morning.
Disturbing it again, he had watched, and seen the fish actually tugging the floating weed to the required position.
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