by Isaac Asimov
“Forget Anvhar!” Ihjel cut him off with a chop of his hand. “This world will roll on quite successfully whether you are here or not. You must forget it, think of its relative unimportance on a galactic scale, and consider instead the existing, suffering, hordes of mankind. You must think what you can do to help them.”
“But what can I do—as an individual? The day is long past when a single man, like Caesar or Alexander, could bring about world-shaking changes.”
“True—but not true,” Ihjel said. “There are key men in every conflict of forces, men who act like catalysts applied at the right instant to start a chemical reaction. You might be one of those men, but I must be honest and say that I can’t prove it yet. So in order to save time and endless discussion, I think I will have to spark your personal sense of obligation.”
“Obligation to whom?”
“To mankind of course, to the countless billions of dead who kept the whole machine rolling along that allows you the full, long and happy life you enjoy today. What they gave to you, you must pass on to others. This is the keystone of humanistic morals.”
“Agreed. And a very good argument in the long run. But not one that is going to tempt me out of this bed within the next three hours.”
* * * *
“A point of success,” Ihjel said. “You agree with the general argument. Now I apply it specifically to you. Here is the statement I intend to prove. There exists a planet with a population of seven million people. Unless I can prevent it, this planet will be completely destroyed. It is my job to stop that destruction, so that is where I am going now. I won’t be able to do the job alone. In addition to others I need you. Not anyone like you—but you and you alone.”
“You have precious little time left to convince me of all that,” Brion told him, “so let me make the job easier for you. The work you do, this planet, the imminent danger of the people there—these are all facts that you can undoubtedly supply. I’ll take a chance that this whole thing is not a colossal bluff and admit that given time, you could verify them all. This brings the argument back to me again. How can you possibly prove that I am the only person in the galaxy who can help you?”
“I can prove it by your singular ability, the thing I came here to find.”
“What ability? I am different in no way from the other men on my planet.”
“You’re wrong,” Ihjel said. “You are the embodied proof of evolution. Rare individuals with specific talents occur constantly in any species, man included. It has been two generations since an empathetic was last born on Anvhar and I have been watching carefully most of that time.”
“What in blazes is an empathetic—and how do you recognize it when you have found it?” Brion chuckled, this talk was getting preposterous.
“I can recognize one because I’m one myself—there is no other way. As to how projective empathy works, you had a demonstration of that a little earlier, when you felt those strange thoughts about Anvhar. It will be a long time before you can master that, but receptive empathy is your natural trait. This is mentally entering into the feeling, or what could be called the spirit of another person. Empathy is not thought perception, it might better be described as the sensing of someone else’s emotional makeup, feelings and attitudes. You can’t lie to a trained empathetic because he can sense the real attitude behind the verbal lies. Even your undeveloped talent has proved immensely useful in the Twenties. You can outguess your opponent because you know his movements even as his body tenses to make them. You accept this without ever questioning it.”
“How do you know—?” This was Brion’s understood, but never voiced secret.
Ihjel smiled. “Just guessing. But I won the Twenties too, remember, also without knowing a thing about empathy at the time. On top of our normal training, it’s a wonderful trait to have. Which brings me to the proof we mentioned a minute ago. When you said you would be convinced if I could prove you were the only person who could help me. I believe you are—and that is one thing I cannot lie about. It’s possible to lie about a belief verbally, to have a falsely based belief, or to change a belief. But you can’t lie about it to yourself.”
“Equally important—you can’t lie about a belief to an empathetic. Would you like to see how I feel about this? ‘See’ is a bad word—there is no vocabulary for this kind of thing yet. Better, would you join me in my feelings? Sense my attitudes, memories and emotions just as I do?”
Brion tried to protest, but he was too late. The doors of his senses were pushed wide and he was overwhelmed.
“Dis…” Ihjel said aloud. “Seven million people…hydrogen bombs…Brion Brandd.” These were just key words, land marks of association. With each one Brion felt the rushing wave of the other man’s emotions.
There could be no lies here, Ihjel was right in that. This was the raw stuff that feelings are made of, the basic reactions to the things and symbols of memory.
DIS…DIS…DIS…it was a word it was a planet and the word thundered like a drum a drum the sound of its thunder surrounded and was
a wasteland a planet
of death a planet where
living was dying and
dying was very
better than
living
crude barbaric
backward miserable
dirty beneath
consideration
planet
DIS
hot burning scorching
wasteland of sands
and sands and sands and
sands that burned had burned
will burn forever
the people of this planet so
crude dirty miserable barbaric
subhuman in-human less-than-human
but
they
were
going
to
be
DEAD
and DEAD they would be seven million
blackened corpses that
would blacken your dreams
all dreams dreams
forever because those
H Y D R O G E N B O M B S
were waiting
to kill
them unless…unless…unless…
you Ihjel stopped it you Ihjel
(DEATH)…you (DEATH)…
you (DEATH) alone couldn’t do
it you (DEATH)
must have
BRION BRANDD wet-behind-the-ears raw untrained-Brion Brand to help you he was the only one in the galaxy who could finish the job.…
* * * *
As the flow of sensation died away, Brion realized he was sprawled back weakly on his pillows, soaked with sweat, washed with the memory of the raw emotion. Across from him Ihjel sat with his face bowed into his hands. When he lifted his head Brion saw within his eyes a shadow of the blackness he had just experienced.
“Death,” Brion said. “That terrible feeling of death. It wasn’t just the people of Dis who would die. It was something more personal.”
“Myself,” Ihjel said, and behind this simple word were the repeated echoes of night that Brion had been made aware of with his newly recognized ability. “My own death, not too far away. This is the wonderfully terrible price you must pay for your talent. Angst is an inescapable part of empathy. It is a part of the whole unknown field of psi phenomena that seems to be independent of time. Death is so traumatic and final that it reverberates back along the time line. The closer I get, the more aware of it I am. There is no exact feeling of date, just a rough location in time. That is the horror of it. I know I will die soon after I get to Dis—and long before the work there is finished. I know the job to be done there, and I know the men who have already failed at it. I also know you are the only person who can possibly complete the work I have started. Do you agree now? Will you come with me?”
“Yes, of course,” Brion said. “I’ll go with you.”
CHAPTER IV
“I’ve never seen anyone quite as angry as that doctor,” Brion said.
“Can’t blame him,” Ihjel shifted his immense weight and grunted from the console, where he was having a coded conversation with the ship’s brain. He hit the keys quickly, and read the answer from the screen. “You took away his medical moment of glory. How many times in his life will he have a chance to nurse back to rugged smiling health the triumphantly exhausted Winner of the Twenties?”
“Not many, I imagine. The wonder of it is how you managed to convince him that you and the ship here could take care of me as well as his hospital.”
“I could never convince him of that,” Ihjel said. “But I and the Cultural Relationships Foundation have some powerful friends on Anvhar. I’m forced to admit I brought a little pressure to bear.” He leaned back and read the course tape as it streamed out of the printer. “We have a little time to spare, but I would rather spend it waiting at the other end. We’ll blast as soon as I have you tied down in a stasis field.”
The completeness of the stasis field leaves no impression on the body or mind. In it there is no weight, no pressure, no pain—no sensation of any kind. Except for a stasis of very long duration, there is no sensation of time. To Brion’s consciousness, Ihjel flipped the switch off with a continuation of the same motion that had turned it on. The ship was unchanged, only outside of the port was the red-shot blankness of jump space.
“How do you feel?” Ihjel asked.
Apparently the ship was wondering the same thing. Its detector unit, hovering impatiently just outside of Brion’s stasis field, darted down and settled on his forearm. The doctor back on Anvhar had given the medical section of the ship’s brain a complete briefing. A quick check of a dozen factors of Brion’s metabolism was compared to the expected norm. Apparently everything was going well, because the only reaction was the expected injection of vitamins and glucose.
“Can’t say I’m feeling wonderful yet,” Brion answered, levering himself higher on the pillows. “But every day it’s a bit better, steady progress.”
“I hope so, because we have about two weeks before we get to Dis. Think you’ll be back in shape by that time?”
“No promises,” Brion said, giving a tentative squeeze to one bicep. “It should be enough time, though. Tomorrow I start mild exercise and that will tighten me up again. Now—tell me more about Dis and what you have to do there.”
“I’m not going to do it twice, so just save your curiosity a while. We’re heading for a rendezvous-point now to pick up another operator. This is going to be a three-man team, you, me and an exobiologist. As soon as he is aboard I’ll do a complete briefing for you both at the same time. What you can do now is get your head into the language box and start working on your Disan. You’ll want to speak it perfectly by the time we touch down.”
* * * *
With an autohypno for complete recall, Brion had no difficulty in mastering the grammar and vocabulary of Disan. Pronunciation was a different matter altogether. Almost all the word endings were swallowed, muffled or gargled. The language was rich in glottal stops, clicks and guttural strangling sounds. Ihjel stayed in a different part of the ship, when Brion used the voice mirror and analysis scope, claiming that the awful noises interfered with his digestion.
Their ship angled through jump-space along its calculated course. It kept its fragile human cargo warm, fed them and supplied breathable air. It had orders to worry about Brion’s health, so it did, checking constantly against its recorded instructions and noting his steady progress. Another part of the ship’s brain counted microseconds with moronic fixation, finally closing a relay when a predetermined number had expired in its heart. A light flashed and a buzzer hummed gently but insistently.
Ihjel yawned, put away the report he had been reading, and started for the control room. He shuddered when he passed the room where Brion was listening to a playback of his Disan efforts.
“Turn off that dying brontosaurus and get strapped in,” he called through the thin door. “We’re coming to the point of optimum possibility and we’ll be dropping back into normal space soon.”
The human mind can ponder the incredible distances between the stars, but cannot possibly contain within itself a real understanding of them. Marked out on a man’s hand an inch is a large unit of measure. In interstellar space a cubical area with sides a hundred-thousand miles long is a microscopically fine division. Light crosses this distance in a fraction of a second. To a ship moving with a relative speed far greater than that of light, this measuring unit is even smaller. Theoretically it appears impossible to find a particular area of this size. Technologically it was a repeatable miracle that occurred too often to even be interesting.
Brion and Ihjel were strapped in when the jump-drive cut off abruptly, lurching them back into normal space and time. They didn’t unstrap, just sat and looked at the dimly distant pattern of stars. A single sun, of apparent fifth magnitude was their only neighbor in this lost corner of the universe. They waited while the computer took enough star sights to triangulate a position in three dimensions, muttering to itself electronically while it did the countless calculations to find their position. A warning bell chimed and the drive cut on and off so quickly the two acts seemed simultaneous. This happened again, twice, before the brain was satisfied it had made as good a fix as possible and flashed a NAVIGATION POWER OFF light. Ihjel unstrapped, stretched and made them a meal.
Ihjel had computed their passage time with criminally precise allowances. Less than ten hours after they arrived a powerful signal blasted into their waiting receiver. They strapped in again as the NAVIGATION POWER ON signal blinked insistently.
A ship had paused in flight somewhere relatively near in the vast volume of space. It had entered normal space just long enough to emit a signal of radio query on an assigned wave length. Ihjel’s ship had detected this and instantly responded with a verifying signal. The passenger spacer had accepted this assurance and gracefully laid a ten-foot metal egg in space. As soon as this had cleared its jump field the parent ship vanished towards its destination, light-years away.
Ihjel’s ship climbed up the signal it had received. This signal had been recorded and examined minutely. Angle, strength and Doppler movement were computed to find course and distance. A few minutes of flight were enough to get within range of the far weaker transmitter in the dropcapsule. Homing on this signal was so simple, a human pilot could have done it himself. The shining sphere loomed up, then vanished out of sight of the viewports as the ship rotated to bring the space lock into line. Magnetic clamps cut in when they made contact.
“Go down and let the bug-doctor in,” Ihjel said. “I’ll stay and monitor the board in case of trouble.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Get into a suit and open the outer lock. Most of the drop sphere is made of inflatable metallic foil so don’t bother to look for the entrance. Just cut a hole in it with the oversize can opener you’ll find in the tool box. After Dr. Morees gets aboard jettison the thing. Only get the radio and locator unit out first—it gets used again.”
The tool did look like a giant opener. Brion carefully felt the resilient metal skin that covered the lock entrance, until he was sure there was nothing on the other side. Then he jabbed the point through and cut a ragged hole in the thin foil. Dr. Morees boiled out of the sphere, knocking Brion aside.
“What’s the matter?” Brion asked.
There was no radio on the other’s suit, he couldn’t answer. But he did shake his fist angrily. The helmet ports were opaqued so there was no way to tell what expression went with the gesture. Brion shrugged and turned back to salvaging the equipment pack, pushing the punctured balloon free and sealing the lock. When pressure was pumped back to ship-normal he cracked his helmet and motioned the other to do the same.
“You’re a pack of dirty lying dogs!” Dr. Morees said when the helmet came off. Brion was completely baffled. Dr. Lea Morees had long dark hair, large eyes and a delicately shaped mouth now taut with anger. Dr. Morees was a
woman.
“Are you the filthy swine responsible for this atrocity?” Lea asked menacingly.
“In the control room,” Brion said quickly, knowing when cowardice was much preferable to valor. “A man named Ihjel. There’s a lot of him to hate, you can have a good time doing it. I just joined up myself—” He was talking to her back as she stormed from the room. Brion hurried after her, not wanting to miss the first human spark of interest in the trip to date.
“Kidnaped! Lied to and forced against my will! There is no court in the galaxy that won’t give you the maximum sentence and I’ll scream with pleasure as they roll your fat body into solitary—”
“They shouldn’t have sent a woman,” Ihjel said, completely ignoring her words. “I asked for a highly-qualified exobiologist for a difficult assignment. Someone young and tough enough to do field work under severe conditions. So the recruiting office sends me the smallest female they can find, one who’ll melt in the first rain.”
“I will not!” Lea shouted. “Female resiliency is a well known fact and I’m in far better condition than the average woman. Which has nothing to do with what I’m telling you. I was hired for a job in the university on Moller’s World and signed a contract to that effect. Then this bully of an agent tells me the contract has been changed, read sub paragraph 189-C or some such nonsense, and I’ll be transshipping. He stuffed me into that suffocation basketball without a by-your-leave and they threw me overboard. If that is not a violation of personal privacy—”
“Cut a new course, Brion,” Ihjel broke in. “Find the nearest settled planet and head us there. We have to drop this woman and find a man for this job. We are going to what is undoubtedly the most interesting planet an exobiologist ever conceived of, but we need a man who can take orders and not faint when it gets too hot.”
Brion was lost. Ihjel had done all the navigating and Brion had no idea how to begin a search like this.
“Oh no you don’t,” Lea said. “You don’t get rid of me that easily. I placed first in my class and most of the five-hundred other students were male. This is only a man’s universe because the men say so. What is the name of this garden planet where we are going?”
