“I told you what it does—it makes the blue lens light up.”
“What good does that do?”
“Does me lots of good. Earns me a remission. I get out in four instead of fifteen to twenty.” Strumming an invisible guitar, Len sang a discordant line about his little gray cell in the west. Then he struggled to his feet and teetered slightly. “Great stuff that varnish of yours. The longer you hold it the stronger it works. Either I go now under my own steam or I stay another hour and you carry me home.”
The three stood up and Lagasta said, “Perhaps you’d like to take a bottle with you. After we’ve gone you can drink a toast to absent friends.”
Len clutched it gratefully. “Friends is right. You’ve made my life. Don’t know what I’d do without you. So far as I’m concerned you’re welcome to stick around for keeps.” Rather unsteadily he followed Kaznitz out, turned in the doorway and added, “Remember asking ’em, ‘Where am I if some outlandish bunch want to play rough with me?’ And they said, ’They won’t—because there’ll be no dividends in it.’” He put on the same smirk as before but it was more distorted by drink. “Real prophets, those guys. Hit the nail smack-bang on the head every time.” He went, nursing his bottle. Lagasta flopped into a chair and stared at the wall. So did Havarre. Neither stirred until Kaznitz came back.
Lagasta said viciously, “I’d lop off his fool head without the slightest compunction if it weren’t for that button business.”
“And that may be a lie,” offered Havarre.
“It isn’t,” Kaznitz contradicted. “He told the truth. I saw the button and the lens for myself. I also heard the faint whine of a power plant somewhere in the foundations.” He mused a moment, went on, “As for the lack of an antenna, all we know is that in similar circumstances we’d need one. But do they? We can’t assume that in all respects their science is identical with our own.”
“Logic’s the same everywhere, though,” Lagasta gave back. “So let’s try and look at this logically. It’s obvious that this Len character is no intellectual. I think it’s safe to accept that he is what he purports to be, namely, a criminal, an antisocial type of less than average intelligence. That raises three questions. Firstly, why have the Terrans put only one man on this planet instead of a proper garrison? Secondly, why did they choose a person of poor mentality? Thirdly, why did they select a criminal?”
“For the first, I have no idea,” responded Kaznitz. “But I can give a guess at the others.”
“Well?”
“They used someone none too bright because it is impossible to coax, drug, hypnotize, torture or otherwise extract valuable information from an empty head. The Terrans don’t know what we’ve got but one thing they do know: no power in creation can force out of a skull anything that isn’t in it in the first place.”
“I’ll give you that,” Lagasta conceded.
“As for picking on a criminal rather than any ordinary dope, seems to me that such a person could be given a very strong inducement to follow instructions to the letter. He’d be meticulous about pressing a button because he had everything to gain and nothing to lose.”
“All right,” said Lagasta, accepting this reasoning without argument. “Now let’s consider the button itself. One thing is certain: it wasn’t installed for nothing. Therefore it was fixed up for something. It has a purpose that makes sense even if it’s alien sense. The mere pressing of it would be meaningless unless it produced a result of some kind. What’s your guess on that?”
Havarre interjected, “The only possible conclusion is that it sounds an alarm somehow, somewhere.”
“That’s what I think,” Kaznitz supported.
“Me, too,” said Lagasta. “But it does more than just that. By sending the alarm it vouches for the fact that this watchman Len was still alive and in possession of his wits when we landed. And if we put him down a deep hole it will also vouch for the fact that he disappeared immediately after our arrival. Therefore it may provide proof of claim-jumping should such proof be necessary.” He breathed deeply and angrily, finished, “It’s highly likely that a fast Terran squadron is already bulleting this way. How soon it gets here depends upon how near its base happens to be.”
“Doesn’t matter if they catch us sitting on their world,” Kaznitz pointed out. “We’ve done nothing wrong. We’ve shown hospitality to their sentinel and we’ve made no claim to the planet.”
“I want to claim the planet,” shouted Lagasta. “How’m I going to do it now?”
“You can’t,” said Kaznitz. “It’s far too risky.”
“It’d be asking for trouble in very large lumps,” opined Havarre. “I know what I’d do if it were left to me.”
“You’d do what?”
“I’d beat it at top speed. With luck we might get to the next new world an hour ahead of the Terrans. If we do we’ll be more than glad that we didn’t waste that hour on this world.”
“I hate giving up a discovery,” Lagasta declared.
“I hate giving up two of them in rapid succession,” retorted Havarre with considerable point.
Lagasta growled, “You win. Order the crew to bring the scout boats aboard and prepare for take-off.” He watched Havarre hasten out, turned to Kaznitz and rasped, “Curse them!”
“Who? The crew?”
“No, the Terrans.” Then he stamped a couple of times around the cabin and added, “Snitgobbers!”
The vessel that swooped from the sky and made a descending curve toward the rock house was not a warship. It was pencil-thin, ultra-fast, had a small crew and was known as a courier boat. Landing lightly and easily, it put forth a gangway.
Two technicians emerged and hurried to the house, intent on checking the atomic engine and the power circuits. The relief watchman appeared, scuffed grass with his feet, stared curiously around. He was built like a bear, had an underslung jaw, small, sunken eyes. His arms were thick, hairy and lavishly tattooed.
Moving fast, the crew manhandled crates and cartons out of the ship and into the house. The bulkiest item consisted of forty thousand cigarettes in air-tight cans. The beneficiary of this forethought, a thug able to spell simple words, was a heavy smoker.
Leonard Nash went on board the ship, gave his successor a sardonic smirk in passing. The crew finished their task. The technicians returned. Leaning from the air-lock door, an officer bawled final injunctions at the lone spectator.
“Remember, you must press until the blue lens lights up. Keep away from the local gin-traps and girlie shows—they’ll ruin your constitution. See you in four years.”
The metal disk clanged shut and screwed itself inward. With a boom the ship went up while the man with a world to himself became a midget, a dot, nothing.
Navigator Reece sat in the fore cabin gazing meditatively at the starfield when Copilot McKechnie arrived to keep him company. Dumping himself in a pneumatic chair, McKechnie stretched out long legs.
“Been gabbing with that bum we picked up. He’s not delirious with happiness. Got as much emotion as a lump of rock. And as many brains. It’s a safe bet his clean sheet means nothing whatever; he won’t be back a year before the cops are after him again.”
“Did he have any trouble on that last world?”
“None at all. Says a bunch of weirdies landed six or seven months ago. They pushed a hunk of brotherly love at him and then scooted. He says they seemed to be in a hurry.”
“Probably had a nice grab in prospect somewhere.”
“Or perhaps we’ve got them on the run. Maybe they’ve discovered at long last that we’re outgrabbing them in the ratio of seven to one. Those Antareans are still staking claims by the old method. Ship finds a planet, beams the news home, sits tight on the claim until a garrison arrives. That might take five, ten or twenty years, during which time the ship is out of commission. Meanwhile, a ship of ours discovers A, dumps one man, pushes on to B, dumps another man, and with any luck at all has nailed down C and D by the time we’ve transpor
ted a garrison to A. The time problem is a tough one and the only way to cope is to hustle.”
“Dead right,” agreed Reece. “It’s bound to dawn on them sooner or later. It’s a wonder they didn’t knock that fellow on the head.”
“They wouldn’t do that, seeing he’d pressed the button,” McKechnie observed. “Button? What button?”
“There’s a button in that house. Pressing it switches on a blue light.”
“Is that so?” said Reece. “And what else?”
“Nothing else. Just that. A blue light.”
Reece frowned heavily to himself while he thought it over. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do unwanted visitors. That’s why they scoot.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“See here, to get into space a species must have a high standard of intelligence. Agreed?”
“Yes.”
“Unlike lunatics, the intelligent are predictable in that they can be depended upon always to do the intelligent thing. They never, never, never do things that are pointless and mean nothing. Therefore a button and a blue light must have purpose, intelligent purpose.”
“You mean we’re kidding the Antareans with a phony setup, a rigmarole that is fundamentally stupid?”
“No, boy, not at all. We’re fooling them by exploiting a way of thinking that you are demonstrating right now.”
“Me?” Reece was indignant.
“Don’t get mad about it. The outlook is natural enough. You’re a spaceman in the space age. Therefore you have a great reverence for physics, astronautics and everything else that created the space age. You’re so full of respect for the cogent sciences that you’re apt to forget something.”
“Forget what?”
McKechnie said, “That psychology is also a science.”
Discontinuity
Raymond F. Jones
* * *
I
The middle-aged blond woman was like a sleek and expensive cat. Now, she was afraid. Her bruised face swathed in healing bandages, she sat in the big chair by the window of her husband’s office and watched his desk and the circle of his associates who were ringed about her.
She could feel hate like a hot radiance emitted by each of them. Their eyes stared as if she were some animal not of their species.
She spoke again. “I cannot give my permission. I would rather have David dead than—than like those others. Far rather!”
It was the third time she had said it and it only increased again the hate that surrounded her. Momentarily, she shrank in the chair. Then, as if she had retreated to a point beyond which she could not go, she sprang at them.
She stood erect in their midst, trembling with a fury that for once forced them back. “Stop staring at me that way! I’m his wife. Do you think I want him dead? You claim to be his friends, but if that were true would you offer him a return to life with an idiot’s mind?”
She turned to one end of the circle, paused, and turned again, glaring at each of them in the maddened, cavernous silence.
There were the young laboratory girls in white smocks. They were all in love with David, she thought. There were the earnest college boys working out research seminars at the Institute laboratories under David’s direction. They had come to plead for David’s life—as an idiot.
At last, from the rear of the circle, the moment of balanced hate was broken. A tall, gray-haired man stepped to her side and took her arm.
“Will the rest of you please leave?” he said. “I would like to speak with Mrs. Mantell alone for a few minutes.
They hesitated, then turned. Silently, she watched them go, but she wanted to cry out for them to remain. Her fear of any one of them alone was greater than that in the presence of all. It doubled as each of the two dozen filed through the doorway. The last one closed it behind him.
Dr. Vixen, who remained, was her husband’s first assistant and co-developer of the Mantell Synthesis. Older than David, he had the serene and confident bearing of a man who is aware that most of his life is behind him, and that he has spent it exactly as he would have wished.
He leaned back against the desk and placed his hands upon it. Alice Mantell slumped back into the chair as if he had forced her down.
“Now, I will answer the question you asked, Alice. Yes—I do think you want David dead. Regardless of the condition of his mind or his body you want him out of your life.”
“I’ll not listen—”
“Sit down and shut up, please. There are great peculiarities in the accident in which you and David were involved. Not the least of these is your own miraculous escape in comparison with his great brain injury. A suggestion to the police concerning this, along with a report of your own infidelities towards David would certainly result in a lengthy investigation, to say the least.
“This is how they might reconstruct it: Your friend, Jerrold Exter, was hiding in the darkness of the back seat of the car when you and David got in. There was no occasion for David to glance back at him, almost invisible in the darkness.
“It was some sort of compressed air mallet that Jerrold used to crush David’s skull. Then you got out and let the car plunge through the retaining wall at the end of Mayview Drive. You managed to beat yourself up a little so it wouldn’t be too suspicious looking. And if the wreckage hadn’t been spotted within a few minutes you might have succeeded in your plan.”
The thing that she had feared was here, and with its coming the fear dwindled. Her heavy breathing slowed, and her face recovered from its whiteness.
“You mean this for blackmail?” she asked.
For a moment she believed that Dr. Vixen was going to hurl himself upon her, and the rage she incited within him was curiously pleasant to her.
“I want David,” he said evenly, at last. “I want him alive and well. In return, David will certainly be willing to be relieved of your presence for the rest of his life.”
“So he has lied to all of you about me!”
“We’ll let that go,” said Dr. Vixen. “You agree?”
She nodded quickly, again like a cat, striking for what seemed a precious offer of freedom from punishment, and security from the thing that she had loathed. She was going to be free at last of the incredible, alien world in which David Mantell lived, to which she had been bound by fifteen long years of marriage to him. For a time he had dragged her along like a small child at a fair that displayed things beyond her comprehension, and then he had abandoned her because she had failed to understand.
She relaxed in spite of Dr. Vixen’s awareness of her evil, partly, even, because of it. “Do you think I’m bad?” she said suddenly.
He shook his head. “There are no bad people. Only sick ones, stupid ones, ignorant ones. David would have told you that. He would have let you go long before now if he had been sure that you wanted to.”
“But I did want to! Surely he has told you that if he has told you anything.”
“He always seemed to think there was a chance. You see, he loved you.”
He was sorry when he had said it, for in the presence of this woman it was as if he had exposed his friend’s nakedness to an obscene gaze.
But Alice Mantell startled him. Her eyes softened and the catlike tension of her body relaxed for just an instant. “I loved him, too,” she said, “once—”
“Perhaps you can remember that, then, in giving the assistance that we need.”
“You have my permission to perform the Synthesis! What more do I have to pay for freedom?”
“You have misunderstood because neither you nor they”—he nodded towards the closed door—“are aware of all the facts. Your permission to perform the Synthesis on your husband is relatively unimportant. Lack of it would be just one more illegality that would not have stood in our way.
“More important, Dr. Dodge, the Institute president, notified David only this morning that the Synthesis was banned, and the operation is now illegal with or without your permission.
“What are you talking about? Why is the Synthesis forbidden?”
“The others—the first hundred Synthesis patients you mentioned a moment ago. The group who have made the Mantell Synthesis a one hundred percent failure so far. The public and the politicians have decided there are to be no more like them, regardless of possible benefits.”
“Will David’s be a failure, too?”
“We have no reason to believe otherwise.”
“You’re insane!” She rose and backed away as if in sudden fear of his madness. “Why will you persist in a deliberate failure that will turn him into an idiot?”
“Because—he is wholly lost to us otherwise. This way, he will at least be alive. As long as he is alive there is hope. And, finally, because he would have wanted it this way.”
“You’re devils of the same litter.”
He took her from the office into the Synthesis laboratory. There, her fear returned. She had been afraid all her married life of the world in which David walked. He could tear apart the brain of a man, cell by cell, and reconstruct it in the image of a living human being.
But she never had believed it could be anything but dead. David had penetrated to the very core of life—and had found nothing there that she could embrace. Sometimes—long ago—he had tried to tell her of the vast and intricate molecules that were the essence of a man. He told her the long and incomprehensible names of those protein structures that held the memory and intelligence of man. He could show her, he said, the exact cluster of molecules that held his love for her—and that, she thought, was the moment in which she stopped loving him.
The room was full of compact masses of equipment and long panels that ranged the entire length of the laboratory. Overhead, great cables and high-frequency pipes wove in intricate streams to knit the masses together. Like the interior of a great, expanded skull, this would be the kind of creation that David would build, she thought bitterly.
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