The Randall Garrett Megapack

by Randall Garrett

  “I know,” he said.

  “And Jim was always kidding. If they were girls, he said, we ought to call them Flora and Dora, or Annie and Fanny, or maybe Susie and Floozie. He was always kidding about it. You know?”

  “I know,” said the doctor.

  “And then…and then when they were identical boys, he was very sensible about it. He was always so sensible. ‘We’ll call them Martin and Bartholomew,’ he said. ‘Then if they want to call themselves Mart and Bart, they can, but they won’t be stuck with any rhyming names if they don’t want them.’ Jim was always very thoughtful that way, Doctor. Very thoughtful.”

  She seemed suddenly to realize that she was crying and took a handkerchief out of her sleeve to dab at her eyes and face.

  “I’ll have to quit crying,” she said, trying to sound very brave and very strong. “After all, it could have been worse, couldn’t it? I mean, the radiation could have killed my boy, too. Jim’s dead, yes, and I’ve got to get used to that. But I still have two boys to take care of, and they’ll need me.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Stanton, they will,” said the doctor. “They’ll both need you very much. And you’ll have to be very gentle and very careful with both of them.”

  “How…how do you mean that?” she asked.

  The doctor settled back in his chair and chose his words carefully. “Identical twins tend to identify with each other, Mrs. Stanton. There is a great deal of empathy between people who are not only of the same age, but genetically identical. If they were both completely healthy, there would normally be very little trouble in their education at home or in school. Any of the standard texts on psychodynamics in education will show you the pitfalls to avoid when dealing with identical siblings.

  “But your sons are no longer identical, Mrs. Stanton. One is normal, healthy, and lively. The other is…well, as you know, he is slow, sluggish, and badly co-ordinated. The condition may improve with time, but, until we know more about such damage than we do now, he will remain an invalid.”

  He had been watching her for further signs of emotional upset. But she seemed to be listening calmly enough. He went on.

  “That’s the trouble with radiation damage, Mrs. Stanton. Even when we can save the victim’s life, we cannot always save his health.

  “You can see, I think, what sort of psychic disturbances this might bring about in such a pair. The ill boy tends to identify with the well one, and, oddly enough, the reverse is also true. If they are not properly handled during their formative years, Mrs. Stanton, both can be badly damaged emotionally.”

  “I…I think I understand, Doctor,” the young woman said. “But what sort of thing should I look out for? What sort of things should I avoid?”

  “First off, I suggest you get a good man in psychic development,” the doctor said. “I, myself, would hesitate to prescribe. It’s out of my field. But I can say that, in general, most of your trouble will be caused by a tendency for the pair to swing into one of two extremes.

  “At one extreme, you will have mutual antagonism. This arises when the ill child becomes jealous of the other’s health, while, on the other hand, the healthy one becomes jealous of the extra consideration that is shown to his crippled brother.

  “At the other extreme, the healthy boy may identify so closely with his brother that he feels every slight or hurt, real or imagined, which the ill boy is subjected to. He becomes extremely over-solicitous, over-protective. At the same time, the invalid brother may come to depend completely on his healthy twin.

  “In both these situations there is a positive feedback that constantly worsens the condition. It requires a great deal of careful observation and careful application of the proper educational stimuli to keep the situation from developing toward either extreme. You’ll need expert help if you want both boys to display the full abilities of which they are potentially capable.”

  “I see,” the woman said. “Could you give me the name of a good man, Doctor?”

  The doctor nodded and picked up a book on his desk. “I’ll give you the names of several. You can pick the one you like best, the one with whom you seem to be most comfortable. Try several or all of them before you decide. They’re all good men. There are many good women in the field, too, but in this case I think a man would be best. Of course, if one of them thinks a woman is indicated, that’s up to him. As I said, that isn’t my field.”

  He opened the small book and riffled through it to find the names he wanted.

  CHAPTER 7

  The image of the Nipe on the glowing screen was clear and finely detailed. It was, Stanton thought, as though one were looking through a window into the Nipe’s nest itself. Only the tremendous depth of focus of the lens that had caught the picture gave the illusion a feeling of unreality. Everything—background and foreground alike—was sharply in focus.

  Like some horrendous dream monster, the Nipe moved in slow motion, giving Stanton the eerie feeling that the alien was moving through a thicker, heavier medium than air, in a place where the gravity was much less than that of Earth. With ponderous deliberation, the fingers of one of his hands closed upon the handle of an oddly shaped tool and lifted it slowly from the surface upon which he worked.

  “That’s our best-placed camera,” said Colonel Mannheim, “but some of the others can always get details that this one doesn’t. The trouble is that we’ll never really have enough cameras in there—not unless we stud the walls, ceilings, and floors with them, and even then I’m not so sure we’d get everything. It isn’t the same as having a trained expert on camera who is trying to demonstrate what he’s doing. An expert plays to the camera and never obstructs any of his own movements. But the Nipe…” He left the sentence unfinished and shook his head sadly.

  Stanton narrowed his eyes at the image. To his own speeded-up perceptive processes, the motion seemed intolerably slow. “Would you mind speeding it up a little?” he asked the colonel. “I want to get an idea of the way he moves, and I can’t really get the feeling of it at this speed.”

  “Certainly.” The colonel turned to the technician at the controls. “Speed the tape up to normal. If there’s anything Mr. Stanton wants to look at more closely, we can run it through again.”

  As if in obedience to the colonel’s command, the Nipe seemed to shake himself a little and go about his business more briskly, and the air and gravity seemed to revert to those of Earth.

  “What’s he doing?” Stanton asked. The Nipe was performing some sort of operation on an odd-looking box that sat on the floor in front of him.

  The colonel pointed. “He’s got a screwdriver that he’s modified to give it a head with an L-shaped cross section, and he’s wiggling it around inside that hole in the box. But what he’s doing is a secret between God and the Nipe at this point,” Colonel Mannheim said glumly.

  Stanton glanced away from the screen for a moment to look at the other men who were there. Some of them were watching the screen, but most of them seemed to be watching Stanton, although they looked away as soon as they saw his eyes on them. All, that is, except Dr. George Yoritomo, who simply gave him a smile of confidence.

  Trying to see what kind of a bloke this touted superman is, Stanton thought. Well, I can’t say I blame ’em.

  He brought his attention back to the screen.

  So this was the Nipe’s hideaway. He wondered if it were furnished in the fashion that a Nipe’s living quarters would be furnished on whatever planet the multilegged horror had come from. Probably it had the same similarity as Robinson Crusoe’s island home had to a middle-class nineteenth-century English home.

  There was no furniture in it at all, as such. Low-slung as he was, the Nipe needed no tables or workbenches; all his work was spread out on the floor, with a neatness and tidiness that would have surprised many human technicians. For the same reason, he needed no chairs, and, since true sleep was a form of metabolic rest he evidently found unnecessary, he needed no bed. The closest thing he did that might be called s
leep was his habit of stopping whatever he was doing and remaining quiet for periods of time that ranged from a few minutes to a couple of hours. Sometimes his eyes remained opened during these periods, sometimes they were closed. It was difficult to tell whether he was sleeping or just thinking.

  “The difficulty was in getting cameras in there in the first place,” Colonel Mannheim was saying. “That’s why we missed so much of his early work. There! Look at that!” His finger jabbed at the image.

  “The attachment he’s making?”

  “That’s right. Now, it looks as though it’s a meter of some kind, but we don’t know whether it’s a test instrument or an integral and necessary part of the machine he’s making. The whole machine might even be only a test instrument for something else he’s building. Or perhaps a machine to make parts for some other machine. After all, he had to start out from the very beginning—making the tools to make the tools to make the tools, you know.”

  Dr. Yoritomo spoke for the first time. “It’s not quite as bad as all that, eh, Colonel? We must remember that he had our technology to draw upon. If he’d been wrecked on Earth two or three centuries ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do a thing.”

  Colonel Mannheim smiled at the tall, lean man. “Granted,” he said agreeably, “but it’s quite obvious that there are parts of our technology that are just as alien to him as parts of his are to us. Remember how he went to all the trouble of building a pentode vacuum tube for a job that could have been done by transistors he already had had a chance to get and didn’t. His knowledge of solid-state physics seems to be about a century and a half behind ours.”

  Stanton listened. Dr. Yoritomo was, in effect, one of his training instructors. Advanced Alien Psychology, Stanton thought; Seminar Course. The Mental Whys & Wherefores of the Nipe, or How to Outthink the Enemy in Twelve Dozen Easy Lessons. Instructor: Dr. George Yoritomo.

  The smile on Yoritomo’s face was beatific, but he held up a warning finger. “Ah, ah, Colonel! We mustn’t fall into a trap like that so easily. Remember that gimmick he built last year? The one that blinded those people in Baghdad? It had five perfect emeralds in it, connected in series with silver wire. Eh?”

  “That’s true,” the colonel admitted. “But they weren’t used the way we’d use semiconducting materials.”

  “Indeed not. But the thing worked, didn’t it? He has a knowledge of solid-state physics that we don’t have, and vice versa.”

  “Which one would you say was ahead of the other?” Stanton asked. “I don’t mean just in solid-state physics, but in science as a whole.”

  “That’s a difficult question to answer,” Dr. Yoritomo said thoughtfully. “Frankly, I’d put my money on his technology as encompassing more than ours—at least, insofar as the physical sciences are concerned.”

  “I agree,” said Colonel Mannheim. “He’s got things in that little nest of his that—” He stopped and shook his head slowly, as though he couldn’t find words.

  “I will say this,” Yoritomo continued. “Whatever his great technological abilities, our friend the Nipe has plenty of good, solid guts. And patience.” He smiled a little, and then amended his statement. “From our own point of view.”

  Stanton looked at him quizzically. “How do you mean? I was just about to agree with you until you tacked that last phrase on. What does point of view have to do with it?”

  “Everything, I should say,” said Yoritomo. “It all depends on the equipment an individual has. A man, for instance, who rushes into a building to save a life, wearing nothing but street clothes, has courage. A man who does the same thing when he’s wearing a nullotherm suit is an unknown quantity. There is no way of knowing, from that action alone, whether he has courage or not.”

  Stanton thought he saw what the scientist was driving at. “But you’re not talking about technological equipment now,” he said.

  “Not at all. I’m talking about personal equipment.” He turned his head slightly to look at the colonel. “Colonel Mannheim, do you think it would require any personal courage on Mr. Stanton’s part to stand up against you in a face-to-face gunfight?”

  The colonel grinned tightly. “I see what you mean.”

  Stanton grinned back rather wryly. “So do I. No, it wouldn’t.”

  “On the other hand,” Yoritomo continued, “if you were to challenge Mr. Stanton, would that show courage on your part, Colonel?”

  “Not really. Foolhardiness, stupidity or insanity—but not courage.”

  “Ah, then,” said Yoritomo with a beaming smile, “neither of you can prove you have guts enough to fight the other. Can you?”

  Mannheim smiled grimly and said nothing. But Stanton was thinking the whole thing out very carefully. “Just a second,” he said. “That depends on the circumstances. If Colonel Mannheim, say, knew that forcing me to shoot him would save the life of someone more important than himself—or, perhaps, the lives of a great many people—what then?”

  Yoritomo bowed his head in a quick nod. “Exactly. That is what I meant by viewpoint. Whether the Nipe has courage or patience or any other human feeling depends on two things: his own abilities and exactly how much information he has. A man can perform any action without fear if he knows that it will not hurt him—or if he does not know that it will.”

  Stanton thought that over in silence.

  The image of the Nipe was no longer moving. He had settled down into his “sleeping position”—unmoving, although the baleful violet eyes were still open. “Cut that off,” Colonel Mannheim said to the operator. “There’s not much to learn from the rest of that tape.”

  As the image blanked out, Stanton said, “Have you actually managed to build any of the devices he’s constructed, Colonel?”

  “Some,” said Colonel Mannheim. “We have specialists all over the world studying those tapes. We have the advantage of being able to watch every step the Nipe makes, and we know the materials he’s been using to work with. But, even so, the scientists are baffled by many of them. Can you imagine the time James Clerk Maxwell would have had trying to build a modern television set from tapes like this?”

  “I can imagine,” Stanton said.

  “You can see, then, why we’re depending on you,” Mannheim said.

  Stanton merely nodded. The knowledge that he was actually a focal point in human history, that the whole future of the human race depended to a tremendous extent on him, was a realization that weighed heavily and, at the same time, was immensely bracing.

  “And now,” the colonel said, “I’ll turn you over to Dr. Yoritomo. He’ll be able to give you a great deal more information than I can.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The girl moved with the peculiar gliding walk so characteristic of a person walking under low-gravity conditions, and the ease and grace with which she did it showed that she was no stranger to low-gee. To the three men from Earth who followed her a few paces behind, the gee-pull seemed so low as to be almost nonexistent, although it was actually a shade over one quarter of that of Earth, the highest gravitational pull of any planetoid in the Belt. Their faint feeling of nausea was due simply to their lack of experience with really low gravity—the largest planetoid in the Belt had a surface gravity that was only one eighth of the pull they were now experiencing, and only one thirty-second of the Earth gravity they were used to.

  The planetoid they were on—or rather, in—was known throughout the Belt simply as Threadneedle Street, and was nowhere near as large as Ceres. What accounted for the relatively high gravity pull of this tiny body was its spin. Moving in its orbit, out beyond the orbit of Mars, it turned fairly rapidly on its axis—rapidly enough to overcome the feeble gravitational field of its mass. It was a solid, roughly spherical mass of nickel-iron, nearly two thirds of a mile in diameter and, like the other inhabited planetoids of the Belt, honeycombed with corridors and rooms cut out of the living metal itself. But the corridors and rooms were oriented differently from those of the other planetoids; Threadneedle
Street made one complete rotation about its axis in something less than a minute and a half, and the resulting centrifugal force reversed the normal “up” and “down”, so that the center of the planetoid was overhead to anyone walking inside it. It was that fact which added to the queasiness of the three men from Earth who were following the girl down the corridor. They knew that only a few floors beneath them yawned the mighty nothingness of infinite space.

  The girl, totally unconcerned with thoughts of that vast emptiness, stopped before a door that led off the corridor and opened it. “Mr. Martin,” she said, “these are the gentlemen who have an appointment with you. Mr. Gerrol. Mr. Vandenbosch. Mr. Nguma.” She called off each name as the man bearing it walked awkwardly through the door. “Gentlemen,” she finished, “this is Mr. Stanley Martin.” Then she left, discreetly closing the door.

  The young man behind the desk in the metal-walled office stood up smiling as the three men entered, offered his hand to each, and shook hands warmly. “Sit down, gentlemen,” he said, gesturing toward three solidly built chairs that had been anchored magnetically to the nickel-iron floor of the room.

  “Well,” he said genially when the three had seated themselves, “how was the trip out?”

  He watched them closely, without appearing to do so, as they made their polite responses to his question. He was acquainted with them only through correspondence; now was his first chance to evaluate them in person.

  Barnabas Nguma, a very tall man whose dark brown skin and eyes made a sharp contrast with the white of the mass of tiny, crisp curls on his head, smiled when he spoke, but there were lines of worry etched around his eyes. “Pleasant enough, Mr. Martin. I’m afraid that steady one-gee acceleration has left me unprepared for this low gravity.”

  “Well,” said Stefan Vandenbosch, “it really isn’t so bad, once you get used to it. As long as it’s steady, I don’t mind it.” He was a rather chubby man of average height, with blond hair that was beginning to gray at the temples and pale blue eyes that gave his face an expression of almost childlike innocence.