by Eando Binder
Contents
Copyright Information
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Copyright Information
Copyright © 1972 by Eando Binder.
All rights reserved.
Cover art © Vladislav Ociacia / Fotolia.
Dedication
To Clifford Kornoelje, my first fan.
Chapter 1
“Eureka!” yelled a voice from Lab 1, with all the excitement Archimedes may have displayed over 2000 years ago.
Going down the hall on his weekly rounds of Serendipity Labs, Dr. Amos Clyde looked surprised, then hurried his pace into the door of Lab No. 1. A youthful scientist turned, brushing back a crew cut.
“What is it, Barton?” said Dr. Clyde, director of this series of labs and the brain-boys who ran them. “Why that melodramatic expression? Terribly out of date, you know….”
Barton shook his head. “It wasn’t me, Doc. That creative cry came from Brains here.”
“The computer?” frowned Clyde, dubiously. Brains stood for Binary Rapid Analog and Integral Nth-Power System.
“Yes,” nodded Barton with a straight face. “As you remember, I was trying something new with it, opening all the circuits and programming it to invent anything it liked, just to see what would happen. Well, it came up with something startling…but let Brains tell you himself.”
The giant high-speed computer ensemble had long ago been equipped with voice as well as tape and typewriter read-out. Barton pressed the “report” button. With its flat mechanical tones, the computer boomed out: “Today I invented a man!”
Clyde looked stricken and opened his mouth, but Brains was pouring out more brassy words. “You take oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and various other elements and mix well in chemical combination until you get amino acids to form proteins and build up cells. Properly distributed, those cells make up an animate form with appendages and a head. Then add blood and a heart to pump it through the arteries, lungs to breathe in air, a sex organ, and a few more odds and ends, and you have a creature called man….”
Dr. Clyde heard the titter behind him. Crowding in the hallway beyond the door were most of the staff of Serendipity Labs with broad grins on their faces.
Clyde turned scarlet and turned accusingly on Barton. “You…you… It’s all a joke on me. Barton, I’ll…”
Again he was drowned out by Brains. “But this invention is to be rejected. The end product is utterly worthless.”
Clyde relaxed. He had a group of wild intellects under him whose humor was equally wild. “All right, Barton,” he said quietly, “you’ve had your fun.” But a firm note rose in his voice as he went on. “However, it’s hardly appropriate to use our busy computer for trivial pranks like that.”
Barton shrugged. “That only used one millionth of Brains’ capacity. All the other projects he’s working on…let’s see, thirty-four at present…are still clicking away smoothly.” He pointed to the flashing banks of coded lights and spinning tapes down the row of cabinets.
Barton changed his tone. “However, Brains did invent a man when given only the basic raw data. It was a dry run for my new project, which is to give him free rein and see if he does come up with something unique. Something our human brains never thought of.”
And that was the keynote of Serendipity Labs, Clyde reflected. To try any offbeat, unorthodox, harebrained experiments in all science fields and technologies. Serendipity—the unexpected, the random chance, the stroke of luck, the unplanned breakthrough.
Clyde winced a little, thinking of the name outside scientists often used scornfully for his pioneering group—the Blunder Boys, casting about in all directions and blundering into something new.
Yet it was paying off, he thought more pridefully as he made his way down the hall again. The appreciative group who had come to take in Barton’s little joke had dispersed to their own labs and brain-beating problems.
In Lab No. 2, a stout, muscled man with a black patch over one eye and a heavy-jowled face looked the picture of a pirate of old. But along with the lilting name of Dr. Alloway Argyle, he had a sensitive mind that probed into unexplored regions of the nuclear microcosmos.
Growling his usual gravel-voiced greeting, Dr. Argyle reported on his pet project. “I’ve got the magnetic spin for the quark now and have its theoretical properties fairly well tabulated…”
“The quark…the quark,” interposed Clyde a bit blankly.
“Oh, you know, the supposedly basic nuclear particle that makes up the electron, proton, neutron, hyperon, all the mesons, and the rest. But I’m on the track of something even more fundamental.” He paused, his eyes shining like a buccaneer sighting a Spanish galleon loaded with gold.
Dr. Clyde waited expectantly.
“The Ultimaton, I call it,” rasped Argyle’s voice. “It may well make up the quark itself.”
“Then it must be incredibly small,” said Clyde. “How tiny is it?”
“It has no size at all.”
Clyde stared. “What about weight?”
“No weight either.”
“Magnetic moment?” ventured Clyde. “Electric charge?”
“None.”
“No size, weight, magnetism, nor charge,” said Clyde, suspiciously. “Is this another joke, like Barton pulled…?”
Argyle looked indignant, fixing the director with his one good eye blazing. “The Ultimaton may have one property no other nuclear particle has, one that places it in a unique category—it may be alive.”
“Alive?” gasped Clyde.
“A living vibration,” amended Argyle obscurely. “It may account for why inorganic or ‘dead’ matter can form living plants and animals. It may actually be the root of….”
His voice trailed away and he stood blank-faced, his mind wandering off into remote regions. As if leaving a sleeping person, Clyde made no further comment and tiptoed out. Sometimes Argyle stood that way for half a day and not even an exploding bomb could bring him back from the unknown realm of thought through which he was wandering and seeking.
In Lab No. 3, Dr. Clyde absent-mindedly said “Good morning” to the nude female figure standing within. Then he caught himself and flushed, not from embarrassment but for not remembering.
“My androids look real, eh?” chortled Dr. Allen Chumley, waving at the other nude figures of both men and women. “All synthetic flesh out of vats.”
“You could at least clothe them,” muttered Clyde. “Any further results in giving them intelligence?”
Chumley’s fat body heaved out a mournful sigh. “No, not yet. But someday, somehow, I’ll energize the gray plastic matter within their plastic skulls.”
Leaving him sighing, Clyde went to Lab No. 4, to be greeted by a flood of profanity no truck driver could ever match. And yet the man within had an angelic face and poetic air.
“Don’t ask me,” snarled Dr. Ivan Yonah, standing beside a bulky electronic apparatus with a bubble-chamber, “if I’ve detected chronons yet, the units of time. They must be there in my bombardment of negative mesons but the cussword cussword cussword cussword….”
Clyde closed the door behind him with the string of imprecations rising to a grand crescendo of frustration. Clyde wished he
had some frustration pills that you could hand out like aspirin for headaches. His intellectual prima donnas suffered the tortures of the damned twice over when their pet projects turned out wrong.
In Lab No. 5, a short man, almost of dwarf size, turned his oriental face toward Clyde and spoke in a high-pitched tone. “Axes, clubs, blowtorches, rifle bullets—any weapon you can name—has no slightest effect on the stuff. But a laser beam”—he pointed sadly at a hole in a square plate of steel-like material—“will drill through it in an hour.”
“Too bad, Dr. Cheng,” said Clyde. “Are you going to abandon the project?”
“No,” snapped the scientist. “I can still try interlocking the atoms another way until I finally achieve my goal—indestructible matter.”
Down the hall, Clyde checked into other labs. One where a Kelvin thermometer registered below absolute zero, proving there was a negative range of coldness never before suspected. In another lab the experimenter was barking like a dog, with a real dog cocking his head and answering, one of various attempts to set up communications with animals.
Other labs featured experiments in growing one-celled amoebas as big as washtubs, making objects vanish into and return from the fourth to the twenty-eighth dimensions, manipulating subtle forces akin to black magic, making amorphous matter dribble out of tanks of pure energy trapped therein, and some experiments Clyde did not even understand.
The director shook his head in wonder, continuing down the hall. A couple dozen hand-picked brains were under his wing, each a genius or something beyond. The Floyd Foundation, which had subsidized and launched this untried venture, had already seen the first of the rewards that came out—three new technological triumphs, including the gravity intensifier, five bombshell theories in cosmology of which one featured invisible stars, two biological breakthroughs with one being a cancer inhibitor if not cure, and a dozen more miscellaneous science steps ahead, topped by the ESP gauge that could detect involuntary thought transmissions from the brain though not read the actual messages.
Clyde was thinking of its creator as he entered Lab No. 11. Thule W. Hillory—Psi Phenomena read the lettering on the door. The first thing that met the eye was a big chart on the wall. One part of it showed the electromagnetic spectrum of gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, the optical octave, infrared rays, microwaves, radar, and radio.
The other chart, obviously an analogy, listed “mental octaves”—telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition and retrocognition, psychogenesis, dreams, hypnosis, 6th sense hunches, and astral projection. Then, at the topmost end of the scale was a space with a question mark plus the words free mind.
Of all the Serendipity Labs roster of academic stars, Hillory was not a Ph.D. His formal education had been a ramble through several colleges and universities and a degree from none. But when interviewed and tested, he displayed an IQ that ran off the board. He was accepted by the Floyd Foundation screening board when he casually wrote down a formula that tied the alpha brain waves of human slumber into a waking state—the first known empirical link between the subconscious and conscious minds. Thereafter, in stature, he was, in their eyes, about three Ph.D.’s wrapped into one, with or without the scrap of paper conferring the title of “doctor” on him.
Yet Clyde could never get over the mild shock of seeing this amazing brain encased in a physical form that was hardly impressive.
Hillory was tall and thin, almost gaunt. His face was craggy and one shaggy eyebrow was permanently lifted above the other. He moved in jerks as if not fully in control of his body. His lips twitched constantly. His blond hair, cut short, stood out in bristles as if he were constantly charged with 50,000 volts. He walked in a slouch as if always passing under low doorways.
He was checking over notes with Merry Vedec, one of the many girl technicians hired by Serendipity Labs as aides to unburden the brain crew from routine tasks. Merry was no Miss America either, with irregular features and a somewhat slender, bosomless body. She looked the sexless female type—until you saw her enormous brown bedroom eyes, languid and heavy-lidded. Passion slumbered within her and subtly radiated its siren call to almost any man she looked at.
“How’s the mind-over-matter bit going?” queried Clyde.
Hillory jerked around in his ungainly fashion. He formed a crooked smile of greeting with his twitching lips. Then a frown of frustration filled his face.
“It’s more like matter-over-mind,” said Hillory, his voice surprisingly melodious like an opera singer. “My brain matter is too dense to figure out where the mind lurks within my skull, or anybody else’s.”
Hillory picked up an odd-looking wire-mesh helmet and placed it on his head at a ludicrous angle. “This gizmo was supposed to separate my brain from my psyche. Free my pure mind.” He grinned wryly. “All it did was give me a horrible headache never before matched on God’s green earth. Super headaches now available! Straight from Serendipity Labs. Pah! The most useless invention in the world.”
He tossed the helmet aside.
“Come on,” Hillory added suddenly, grabbing the girl’s hand. “I’ll give you a motorcycle ride. Good way to clear the sticky cobwebs out of my head.”
Merry nodded and went out with him. Dr. Clyde made no protest. His brainy brood had complete freedom of action with no restrictions. If they wanted to loaf or take a day off, it was their sole choice. And the girl technician might be needed to take notes if inspiration abruptly struck him.
Chapter 2
The motorcycle with its two riders sped out of the parking lot and took the winding road up the hill. Looking back, one could see the sprawling low building that housed Serendipity Labs and its mental giants. Purely functional, it was a misshapen box set down among rolling hills at the western edge of New Jersey, looking out upon the majestic Delaware Water Gap over in Pennsylvania—a quiet setting with the main highway fourteen miles away and the nearest small township hidden behind the hills.
Merry hung onto Hillory’s middle as he jerked the motorcycle around bends, just as he jerked his body around on foot. The cycle’s muffled roar echoed at times from cliffsides as he headed toward a wilder section of the countryside that was sparsely populated.
“Too many bumps?” yelled Hillory as the pavement petered out and they jounced along a rough dirt road.
“No, go faster,” sang out Merry gleefully. “I was a tomboy when I was a little girl and I’ve never gotten over it. This is cool, man.”
Hillory gunned the motor until the motorcycle was more in the air than on the ground. They came down each time after a bump with jarring impact. Hillory glanced back admiringly at the girl’s excited face, enjoying the physical punishment and its spice of danger. For now they rode alongside a steep ravine where disaster awaited if they ever careened into it.
Hillory snapped “hullo” and suddenly put on the brakes, so violently that the skid almost threw Merry off.
“Try again if you want to blow a tire,” she said in ruffled good humor.
“I wasn’t playing rough rider,” said Hillory, pointing down into the ravine. “What’s that?”
The girl peered down where his finger pointed. Through the shrubs and gnarled slope-clinging trees she caught a glint of something metallic.
Hillory was already scrambling down the slope and the girl followed gamely. “Might be a wrecked car,” she said.
“No,” barked Hillory, with an odd note of tenseness in his voice. “It’s round and flat and silvery. And bigger. It’s something else…something odd…”
Then, stopping on a rock overhang that gave a more unobstructed look below, they saw it clearly.
Merry gasped. “Why, it—it looks just like one of those flying saucers people keep reporting.”
Hillory grunted and started downward again. They were scratched by brambles and panting from exertion by the time they reached the bottom of the ravine where the strange machine lay. It had obviously crashed here, for the lower part of the disc-shaped vehicle was c
rushed, and it lay at a slant on one edge.
“It still shines brightly,” breathed Merry. “Must have crashed recently.”
“No,” denied Hillory, glancing around keenly. “The metal seems rustless, but notice the edges coated with moss and lichens, and how weeds have grown up into the smashed bottom openings. It’s been here years, maybe centuries, who knows?”
Merry’s eyes were round. She spoke with a gulp. “Do you suppose there’s…someone in it? His body or his skeleton? Someone from….”
She made a sweeping eloquent wave, in awe, at the sky.
“From outer space, what else?” said Hillory matter-of-factly. “Let’s go see.”
Hillory stooped and crawled under the jagged broken edges of the saucer’s bottomside. He straightened up and found himself in what had been the interior cabin, outfitted with various wall-panel gauges, dials, and indicators.
In the gloom, with sunlight cut off, he swept his eyes around and then started. Huddled in a corner against the wall was a skeleton. No, not exactly a skeleton of inner bones upon which flesh had been hung. It was an outer skeleton, like the chitinous armor of insects, inside of which the flesh had once existed but was now no more than a few dried shreds. The external skeleton was shaped more or less in manlike form, including the selfsame kind of skull humans had.
From what unthinkably remote star had he come? What bizarre kind of civilization existed there? And what had been his mission here on earth? Hillory shook his head at these unanswerable questions.
He peered closer, then, at the skeleton’s bony hand, which clutched what seemed to be a scroll. Hillory was able to climb up on the undamaged flooring of the vehicle and crawl on hands and knees close to the dead alien’s remains. A lingering stench of decay and rot almost made him retch. But he forced his stomach to quiet down and then carefully pulled the scroll out of the bony hand.
As he crawled back, Hillory could feel with surprise that it was not a scroll of paper he held. It was a thin metallic sheet rolled up. When he brought it out into the sunlight, he saw its bright silvery gleam. But it was heavy, too heavy to be aluminum or even tin foil. Must be iridium, platinum, osmium, something like that. Long-lasting, corrosion-resisting metals.
