Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  No one ever took Dad up on it—at least, no one who survived to collect. And so it looked like it was up to me to settle the score for a shattered era and a planetful of corpses. The speed was taking hold now; I felt an exalted sense of destiny, and a fever to be about it. I was the duly chosen instrument for mankind’s revenge, and that reckoning was long overdue.

  I unclipped one of the remaining incendiary grenades from my belt—it comforted me to hold that much raw power in my hand—and kept on walking uptown, feeling infinitely more than twenty years old. And as I stalked my prey through concrete canyons and brownstone foothills, I found myself thinking of his crime, of the twisted motives that had produced this barren jungle and countless hundreds like it. I remembered my father’s eyewitness account of Carlson’s actions, repeated so many times during my youth that I could almost recite it verbatim, heard again the Genesis of the world I knew from its first historian—my father, Jacob Stone. Yes, that Stone, the one man Carlson never expected to survive, to shout across a smashed planet the name of its unknown assassin. Jacob Stone, who first cried the name that became a curse, a blasphemy and a scream of rage in the throats of all humankind. Jacob Stone, who named our betrayer: Wendell Morgan Carlson!

  And as I reviewed that grim story, I kept my hand near the rifle with which I hoped to write its happy ending…

  Chapter Two

  Excerpts from I Worked with Carlson, by Jacob Stone, Ph.D., authorized version: Fresh Start Press 1986 (mimeo)

  …The sense of smell is a curious phenomenon, oddly resistant to measurement or rigorous analysis. Each life form on Earth appears to have as much of it as they need to survive, plus a little. The natural human sense of smell, for instance, was always more efficient than most people realized, so much so that in the 1880s the delightfully eccentric Sir Francis Galton had actually succeeded, by associating numbers with certain scents, in training himself to add and subtract by smell, apparently just for the intellectual exercise.

  But through a sort of neurological suppressor circuit of which next to nothing is known, most people contrived to ignore all but the most pleasing or disturbing of the messages their noses brought them, perhaps by way of reaction to a changing world in which a finely tuned olfactory apparatus became a nuisance rather than a survival aid. The level of sensitivity which a wolf requires to find food would be a hindrance to a civilized human packed into a city of his fellows.

  By 1982, Professor Wendell Carlson had raised olfactometry to the level of a precise science. In the course of testing the theories of Beck and Miles, Carlson almost absentmindedly perfected the classic “blast-injection” technique of measuring differential sensitivity in olfaction, without regard for the subjective impressions of the test subject. This not only refined his data, but also enabled him to work with life forms other than human, a singular advantage when one considers how much of the human brain is terra incognita.

  His first subsequent experiments indicated that the average wolf utilized his sense of smell on the order of a thousand times more efficiently than a human. Carlson perceived that wolves lived in a world of scents, as rich and intricate as our human worlds of sight and word. To his surprise, however, he discovered that the potential sensitivity of the human olfactory apparatus far outstripped that of any known species.

  This intrigued him…

  …Wendell Morgan Carlson, the greatest biochemist Columbia—and perhaps the world—had ever seen, was living proof of the truism that a genius can be a damned fool outside his own specialty.

  Genius he unquestionably was; it was not serendipity that brought him the Nobel Prize for isolating a cure for the entire spectrum of virus infections called “the common cold.” Rather it was the sort of inspired accident that comes only to those brilliant enough to perceive it, fanatic seekers like Pasteur.

  But Pasteur was a boor and a braggart who frittered away valuable time in childish feuds with men unfit to wash out his test tubes. Genius is seldom a good character reference.

  Carlson was a left-wing radical.

  Worse, he was the type of radical who dreams of romantic exploits in a celluloid underground: grim-eyed rebels planting homemade bombs, assassinating the bloated oppressors in their very strongholds and (although he certainly knew what hydrogen sulfide was) escaping through the city sewers.

  It never occurred to him that it takes a very special kind of man to be a guerilla. He was convinced that the moral indignation he had acquired at Washington in ’71 (during his undergraduate days) would see him through hardship and privation, and he would have been horrified if someone had pointed out to him that Che Guevara seldom had access to toilet paper. Never having experienced hunger, he thought it a glamorous state. He lived a compartmentalized life, and his wild talent for biochemistry had the thickest walls: only within them was he capable of logic or true intuition. He had spent a disastrous adolescent year in a seminary, enlisted as a “storm trooper of Mary,” and had come out of it apostate but still saddled with a relentless need to Serve A Cause—and it chanced that the cry in 1982 was, once again, “Revolution Now!”

  He left the cloistered halls of Columbia in July of that year, and applied to the smaller branch—the so-called “Action-Faction”—of the New Weathermen for a position as assassin. Fortunately he was taken for crazy and thrown out. The African Liberation Front was somewhat less discerning—they broke his leg in three places. In the Emergency Room of Jacobi Hospital, Carlson came to the conclusion that the trouble with Serving A Cause was that it involved associating with unperceptive and dangerously unpredictable people. What he needed was a One-Man Cause.

  And then, at the age of thirty-two, his emotions noticed his intellect for the first time.

  When the two parts of him came together, they achieved critical mass—and that was a sad day for the world. I myself bear part of the blame for that coming together—unwittingly I provided one of the final sparks, put forward the idea which sent Carlson on the most dangerous intuitive leap of his life. My own feelings of guilt for this will plague me to my dying day—and yet it might have been anyone. Or no one.

  Fresh from a three-year stint doing biowar research for the Defense Department, I was a very minor colleague of Carlson’s, but quickly found myself becoming a close friend. Frankly I was flattered that a man of his stature would speak to me, and I suspect Carlson was overjoyed to find a black man who would treat him as an equal.

  But for reasons which are very difficult to explain to anyone who did not live through that period—and which need no explanation for those who did—I was reluctant to discuss the A.L.F. with a honky, however “enlightened.” And so when I went to visit Carlson in Jacobi Hospital and the conversation turned to the self-defeating nature of uncontrollable rage, I attempted to distract the patient with a hasty change of subject.

  “The Movement’s turning rancid, Jake,” Carlson had just muttered, and an excellent digression occurred to me.

  “Wendell,” I said heedlessly, “do you realize that you personally are in a position to make this a better world?”

  His eyes lit up. “How’s that?”

  “You are probably the world’s greatest authority on olfactometry and the human olfactory apparatus—among other things—right?”

  “As far as there is one, I suppose so. What of it?” He shifted uneasily within his traction-gear: wearing his radical persona, he was made uncomfortable by reference to his scientist mode. He felt it had little to do with the Realities of Life—like nightsticks and grand juries.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” I persisted to my everlasting regret, “that nearly all the undesirable by-products of twentieth-century living—Technological Man’s most unlovable aspects—quite literally stink? The whole world’s going rancid, Wendell, not just the Movement: automobiles, factory pollution, crowded cities—Wendell, why couldn’t you develop a selective suppressant for the sense of smell—controlled anosmia? Oh, I know a snort of formaldehyde will do the trick, and having your adeno
ids removed sometimes works. But a man oughtn’t to have to give up the smell of frying bacon just to survive in New York. And you know we’re reaching that pass—in the past few years it hasn’t been necessary to leave the city and then return to be aware of how evil it smells. The natural suppressor-mechanism in the brain—whatever it is—has gone about as far as it can go. Why don’t you devise a small-spectrum filter to aid it? It would be welcomed by sanitation workers, engineers—why, it would be a godsend to the man on the street!”

  Carlson was mildly interested. Such an anosmic filter would be both a mordant political statement and a genuine boon to mankind. He had been vaguely pleased by the success of his cold cure, and I believe he sincerely wished to make the world a happier place—however perverted his methods tended to be. We discussed the idea at some length, and I left.

  Had Carlson not been bored silly in the hospital, he would never have rented a television set. It was extremely unfortunate that the “Late Show” (ed. note: a television show of the period) that evening featured the film version of Alistair MacLean’s The Satan Bug. Watching this absurd production, Carlson was intellectually repelled by the notion that a virus could be isolated so hellishly virulent that “a teaspoon of it would sweep the earth of life in a few days.”

  But it gave him a wild idea—a fancy, a fantasy, and a tasty one.

  He checked with me by phone the next day, very casually, and I assured him from my experiences with advances in virus-vectoring that MacLean had not been whistling in the dark. In fact, I told him, modern so-called “bacterial warfare” made the Satan Bug look like child’s play. Carlson thanked me and changed the subject.

  On his release from the hospital, he came to my office and asked me to work with him for a full year, to the exclusion of all else, on a project whose nature he was reluctant to discuss. “Why do you need me?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Because,” he finally told me, “you know how to make a Satan Bug. I intend to make a God Bug. And you could help me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Listen, Jake,” he said with that delightful informality of his. “I’ve licked the common cold—and there are still herds of people with the sniffles. All I could think of to do with the cure was to turn it over to the pharmaceuticals people, and I did all I could to make sure they didn’t milk it, but there are still suffering folks who can’t afford the damned stuff. Well, there’s no need for that. Jake, a cold will kill someone sufficiently weakened by hunger—I can’t help the hunger, but I could eliminate colds from the planet in forty-eight hours…with your help.”

  “A benevolent virus-vector…” I was flabbergasted, as much by the notion of decommercializing medicine as by the specific nostrum involved.

  “It’d be a lot of work,” Carlson went on. “In its present form my stuff isn’t compatible with such a delivery system—I simply wasn’t thinking along those lines. But I’ll bet it could be made so, with your help. Those pharmaceuticals goniffs have made me rich enough to pay you twice what Columbia does, and we’re both due for sabbatical anyway. What do you say?”

  I thought it over, but not enough. The notion of collaborating with a Nobel Prize winner was simply too tempting. “All right, Wendell.”

  …We set up operations in Carlson’s laboratory-home on Long Island, he in the basement and myself on the main floor. There we worked like men possessed for the better part of a year, cherishing private dreams and slaughtering guinea pigs by the tens of thousands. Carlson was a stern if somewhat slapdash taskmaster, and as our work progressed he began looking over my shoulder, learning my field while discouraging inquiries about his own progress. I assumed that he simply knew his field too well to converse intelligently about it with anyone but himself. And yet he absorbed all my own expertise with fluid rapidity, until eventually it seemed that he knew as much about virology as I did myself. One day he disappeared with no explanation, and returned a week or two later with what seemed to me a more nasal voice.

  And near the end of the year there came a day when he called me on the telephone. I was spending the weekend, as always, with my wife and two sons in Harlem. Christmas was approaching, and Barbara and I were discussing the relative merits of plastic and natural trees when the phone rang. I was not at all surprised to hear Carlson’s reedy voice, so reminiscent of an oboe lately—the only wonder was that he had called during conventional waking hours.

  “Jake,” he began without preamble, “I haven’t the time or inclination to argue, so shut up and listen, right? Right. I advise and strongly urge you to take your family and leave New York at once—steal a car if you have to, or hijack a Greyhound (ed. note: a public transportation conveyance) for all of me, but be at least twenty miles away by midnight.”

  “But—”

  “…head north if you want my advice, and for God’s sake stay away from all cities, towns, and people in any number. If you possibly can, get upwind of all nearby industry, and bring along all the formaldehyde you can—a gun too, if you own one. Good-bye, my friend, and remember I do this for the greater good of mankind. I don’t know if you’ll understand that, but I hope so.”

  “Wendell, what in the name of God are you—?” I was talking to a dead phone.

  Barbara was beside me, a worried look on her face, my son Isham in her arms. “What is it, Jacob?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said unsteadily, “but I think Wendell has come unhinged. I must go to him. Stay with the children; I’ll be back as quickly as I can. And Barbara…”

  “Yes?”

  “I know this sounds insane, but pack a bag and be ready to leave town at once if I call and tell you to.”

  “Leave town? Without you?”

  “Yes, just that. Leave New York and never return. I’m virtually certain you won’t have to, but it’s just possible that Wendell knows what he’s talking about. If he does, I’ll meet you at the cabin by the lake, as soon as I can.” I put off her questions then and left, heading for Long Island.

  When I reached Carlson’s home in Old Westbury I let myself in with my key and made my way toward his laboratory. But I found him upstairs in mine, perched on a stool, gazing intently at a flask in his right hand. Its interior swirled, changing color as I watched.

  Carlson looked up. “You’re a damned fool, Jake,” he said quietly before I could speak. “I gave you a chance.”

  “Wendell, what on earth is this all about? My wife is scared half to…”

  “Remember that controlled-anosmia you told me about when I was in the hospital?” he went on conversationally. “You said the trouble with the world is that it stinks, right?”

  I stared at him, vaguely recalling my words.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a solution.”

  And Carlson told me what he held in his hand. A single word.

  I snapped, just completely snapped. I charged him, clawing wildly for his throat, and he struck me with his left hand, his faceted ring giving me the scar I bear to this day, knocking me unconscious. When I came to my senses I was alone, alone with a helpless guilt that careened yammering through the halls of my reason and a terror that clutched at my bowels. A note lay on the floor beside me, in Wendell’s sprawling hand, telling me that I had—by my watch—another hour’s grace. At once I ran to the phone and wasted ten minutes trying to call Barbara. I could not get through—trunk failure, the operator said. Gibbering, I took all the formaldehyde I could find in both labs and a self-contained breathing rig from Carlson’s, stepped out into the streetlit night and set about stealing a car.

  It took me twenty minutes—not bad for a first attempt but still cutting it fine. I barely made it to Manhattan, with superb traffic conditions to help me, before the highway became a butcher shop.

  At precisely nine o’clock, Wendell Morgan Carlson stood on the roof of Columbia’s enormous Butler Library, held high in the air by fake Greek columns and centuries of human thought, gazing north across a quadrangle within which grass and trees had nearly given up trying to
grow, toward the vast domed Lowe Library and beyond toward the ghetto in which my wife and children were waiting, oblivious. In his hands he held the flask I had failed to wrest from him, and within it were approximately two teaspoons of an infinitely refined and concentrated virus culture. It was the end result of our year’s work, and it duplicated what the military had spent years and billions to obtain: a strain of virus that could blanket the globe in about forty-eight hours. There was no antidote for it, no vaccine, no defense of any kind for virtually all of humanity. It was diabolical, immoral and quite efficient. On the other hand, it was not lethal.

  Not, that is, in and of itself. But Carlson had concluded, like so many before him, that a few million lives was an acceptable price for saving the world, and so at 9:00 P.M. on December 17, 1984, he leaned over the parapet of Butler Hall and dropped his flask six long stories to the concrete below. It shattered on impact and sprayed its contents into what dismal breeze still blew through the campus.

  Carlson had said one word to me that afternoon, and the word was “Hyperosmia.”

  Within forty-eight hours every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.

  During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet’s population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.

  The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days. In the last hours, those pitiably few city-dwellers on the far side of the globe who were rigorous enough of thought to heed and believe the brief bewildered death-cries of the great mass media strove valiantly—and hopelessly—to effect emergency measures. The wiser attempted, as I had, to deaden their senses of smell with things like formaldehyde, but there is a limit to the amount of formaldehyde that even desperate men can lay hands on in a day or less, and its effects are generally temporary. Others with less vision opted for airtight environments if they could get them, and there they soon died, either by asphyxiation when their air supply ran out, or by suicide when, fervently hoping they had outlived the virus, they cracked their airlocks at last. It was discovered that human technology had produced no commonly available nose-plug worth a damn, nor any air-purification system capable of filtering out Carlson’s virus. Mankind failed utterly to check the effects of the ghastly Hyperosmic Plague, and the Exodus began…