Startled, he broke again, glad that at least his prior experience had given him the strength to cut it off in mid-showing. Could it be adjusted to him, personally? A signal fifteen thousand years in the transition? The notion was ridiculous!
He reconnected — and the review was so swift as to be perfunctory. Then, as he reached the point at which he had cut it off the first time, it slowed, and a more sedate series resumed. This was, however, still faster than the version he had seen at the station.
Once more he broke, alarmed by the implication as much as by the deadly series. This was not, could not be a recording in any normal sense. It was more like a — a programmed text. A series of lessons embodying their own feedback so that the pupil could constantly check himself and rethink his errors. Inanimate, yet governed by the capability of the student. Such a text was the closest approach of the printed word to an animate teacher, just as a programmed machine-instructor approached sentience without consciousness. It was the student’s burgeoning comprehension of the material that animated the machine or text and gave the illusion of awareness.
Strange that this had not occurred to him before! Yet it was implicit in the groundwork for the program. One had to comprehend the distinction between—
What a mind-expanding thing this was! Already the concepts of the program were spilling over into his human framework. The concepts were real, they were relevant, to himself and to the universe. Philosophy, psychology — even astrology were assuming new significance for him, as he fitted their postulates into his increasing comprehension.
“Afra,” he said, closing his eyes to the fascinating sequence.
She was there. “Yes, Ivo.”
“Is it possible to — to say something in such a way that it — that all possible—”
“That it applies to many situations?” she suggested, trying to help him.
“No. To all situations. I mean, so it is true no matter how you use it. True for a person, true for a rock, true for a smell, true for an idea—”
“Figuratively, perhaps. ‘Good’ might apply to all of these, or ‘unusual.’ But those are subjective values—”
“Yes! Involving the student. But objective too, so that everyone agrees. Everyone who understands.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Ivo. It is impossible to have complete agreement while retaining individuality. The two are contradictory.”
“Not — personality. In learning framework. In comprehension. So anyone who understands — this — can understand anything. By applying the guidelines. A — a programmed mind, I think.”
“That almost sounds like the Unified Field Theory extended to cover psychology.”
“I don’t know. What does—”
“Albert Einstein’s lifework. He spent his last twenty-five years trying to reduce the physical laws of the universe to a unified formulation. In this way gravity, magnetism and atomic interactions could all be derived as special cases of the basic statement. The practical applications of such a system would be immense.”
“So that the theorems of one could be adapted to any other?”
“I believe so, if you thought of it that way.”
“Like adapting astronomy to human psychology? And to music and art and love?”
“I really don’t—” Once more the pause that portended trouble. “Are you taking up Harold’s line?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, the macroscope has it.”
“The Unified Field? Are you sure?”
“The whole thing. The set of concepts that apply to our entire experience, whoever or whatever we are.”
She pondered before answering. “That might be the key to the universe, Ivo.”
“No. It’s the mind-destroyer concept. I don’t quite follow it all yet, but a few more runthroughs—”
“Stop!” she cried. “Stay away from that!”
Was the anguish in her voice for him, or for the fate of the macroscope if he should fail? “I don’t mean that I’ll ride it to the… end. Just far enough to—”
“Just far enough to get hooked. Find some other way. Circle around it. Leapfrog it.”
“I can’t. I have to comprehend before I can go on. Otherwise I won’t be able to apply those advanced concepts.”
“Advanced con — Mindlessness!”
“I see it now. Things our species has never dreamed of. Concepts that supersede our realities. But I have to nullify this — this destructive aspect first, or I can never move on.”
“Ivo, you can’t control a fire by cooking yourself in it. You have to handle it remotely, never actually touching. The — the others tried to bathe in it—”
“I don’t think the information has to destroy. It’s many-faceted. If I can come at the right angle—”
“Ivo,” she said persuasively, and her voice gave him adolescent shivers. “Ivo, did you have to comprehend the mathematical theory of the sprouts game before you could win the tournament?”
“No. That’s — I just see the right course a step at a time, like a road through a forest, and I win. I don’t know anything about the math, really.”
“Then why do you feel you have to comprehend the destroyer? Isn’t it enough to know what to avoid and to pass it by, a step at a time? Think of it as a bad move, Ivo. A tantalizing but losing strategy. Skip it and go on to the next.”
He thought about it. “I suppose I could do that.”
“Just hold off the comprehension. Blind yourself to the fire. Shield your mind so that you can get beyond it.”
“Yes, I think I can. But everything I pick up on that basis — it will be like wiring a radio together from a diagram, without knowing anything about its principle of operation. Connect Lead A to Terminal B. It isn’t true knowledge.”
“Not many of us have true knowledge, Ivo. One of the things about civilization is that it is far too complex for every person to master every trade. We must skim the surface of things, we must turn dials, we must memorize procedures without thinking — we exist upon derivatives, yet it is enough. We have to accept the fact that none of us will ever or can ever grasp more than a tiny fraction of the knowledge and nature of our culture. It isn’t necessary to comprehend — just to accept.”
Again he marveled. Was this the sharp-tongued woman who had so recently bickered sarcastically with Groton? Which facet reflected the essence of her?
But all he said was: “Schön could comprehend.”
“You resent him, I know — just as I sometimes resented Brad. But such feelings are pointless. Each of us has to accept his place in the scheme of life, or the entire structure will collapse. Each of us has to be like Sandburg’s nail.”
“Whose nail?”
“The great nail that holds the skyscraper together. It seems a lowly task, but it is just as important as that of the pinnacle.”
“So I’m as important as Schön?”
“Of course, Ivo.”
“Even though Schön might bring Brad back, while I certainly can’t?”
There was no sound from her, and he was immediately sorry he had said it.
After what seemed like a very long time she spoke. “I’m sorry. I was mouthing platitudes. I’m not as objective as my preachments.”
He had liked the platitude better than the fact. “I’ll — I think I can get some of the information. Whatever it is. Without understanding it. I’ll try, anyway.”
“Thank you, Ivo.”
But she made him take a break then, while she saw about changing Brad’s soiled clothing again and feeding him: with a spoon, as with a baby. “I can do that,” Beatryx offered, but Afra would not give up the task.
Then the four of them ate: cold concentrates from the supplies. It was a somber occasion, since no one expected any real breakthrough via the macroscope and Brad’s presence morbidly illustrated the danger in trying. The flight from the torus had been a spectacular gesture, but unrealistic. How could they physically escape from physical pursuit, however much theory
they might attain? Their equipment could do it, but not their frail bodies.
Ivo, rested, took up the goggles and controls once more. He knew he had some exceedingly intricate maneuvering to do, because the mind-destroyer was a monstrous sun drawing him into its inferno. He had to approach it, and skirt it, and travel beyond — without getting burned.
In much the same fashion, the group of them had to approach and skirt the sun, on the way to Neptune, while avoiding the opposite menace of the UN pursuit. Another common denominator.
The symbolic patterns formed, leaping through the deadly sequence. Now if only he could follow their import without committing himself to the full denouement—
If he could only, somehow, find a way to survive a sustained ten gravities acceleration, so that they could outrun the robot—
To obtain the answer without absorbing the meaning. To use the voltage without being electrocuted. To remain selectively ignorant. To draw the honey without getting stung.
Again and again he broke the contact, feeling too great a comprehension. The progression was so logical! Every step widened his horizons, prepared him for the one ahead, and induced a savage taste for completion. It was a siren call, luring him in though he knew it was disaster… Yet he was gaining on it, developing, if not an immunity, a resistive callus in his brain. Each approach brought him farther without plumbing the uncontrolled depths. The trick was to keep control of his own reception, to keep it braked, not let the alien program take over entirely. He was becoming automatically blind to key portions, building a barrier—
And it had him. The immense gravity of that conceptual body caught him before he could break again and drew him into itself irresistibly. He knew too much! He had skirted too close, become too familiar, so that his slower intelligence had overcome the cognitive inhibition. He could not draw back from the pyre of that denouement.
Down, unable anymore to resist…
And the universe exploded.
That act of friendship had been enough: he survived, when he would have died. It was as though he had passed through purgatory and been exonerated after almost succumbing; his vision of Hell was behind him.
Though not at all well, he left the ship and set off for home on foot. It was a long walk from the Virginia coast to Macon, Georgia. He arrived March 15, 1865, to spend three months convalescing from St. Anthony’s. Fire.
And in that time of personal recovery from the physical misery of headaches, vomiting, chills and fever, his emotions suffered blows as well. Macon fell to the Union army under General Wilson on April 20, and too soon thereafter President Jefferson Davis himself was taken in the same vicinity. Hope dwindled and expired; the war was lost.
Gussie Lamar, the girl he loved, married a wealthy older man. True, Ginna Hankins remained, but somehow his passion for her had abated. The seemingly carefree days of youth were gone; the war had done for youth.
He wrote poetry through the pain in his joints, and knew even as he applied it tediously to paper that it was not good to express his distress in such fashion. Poetry, like music, reflected beauty, and with his hot reddened skin and swollen and blistered flesh he could feel little affinity for beauty. Unable to work constructively, he boarded for a time at Wesleyan College.
He recovered — but not completely. The consumption had taken hold upon his lung and ravaged it, never to let go entirely. It tightened its cruel grip when he attempted to tutor again, forcing him to give that up also, though he was desperately in need of the money. At last he joined his brother as bookkeeper at the Exchange Hotel, and gained a satisfactory if mundane livelihood.
Reconstruction was upon the land. Unjust laws and corrupt government fomented civic stagnation. Law had largely broken down. The phenomenal expectations of a nation had degenerated into apathy and despair.
Yet gradually his personal fortune improved. The New York literary weekly, Round Table, printed some of his poetry and encouraged him, giving him literary success of a sort. And in the spring of 1867 the Rev. R. J. Scott, editor of Scott’s Monthly, checked into the hotel. This was an opportunity not to be allowed to pass unchallenged.
Scott liked the manuscript.
Yet it was his brother Clifford who actually succeeded as a novelist. The publisher that rejected his own novel brought out Clifford’s Thorn Fruit in 1867. That was a wonderful thing, and he was glad for his brother — but how he longed for some similar success!
He refused, as ever, to give up. Despite his health, he journeyed to New York, where a wealthy cousin provided help. He searched the city for a publisher.
His novel reflected his burning desire to say it all, to convey the whole of his mind and ideal to the reader. It was a kind of spiritual autobiography… and no one was interested.
Finally he subsidized its publication himself, though he could ill afford the expense. It was the only way.
He met another long-time friend, Mary Day, and that which had not bloomed before did so now.
On December 19, 1867, they were married.
CHAPTER 5
Gentle hands steadied his head and wiped his face with a wonderfully cool sponge. A woman’s touch, and it was good; he could imagine nothing so sure, so comforting.
For a moment he savored the attention, dreaming of recovery from devastation, of marriage. Then he opened his eyes.
It was Beatryx. “He’s awake,” she murmured.
The others seemed to materialize as she spoke. He saw Harold Groton’s anxious, homely face, and Afra’s careful glance of assessment.
“No, I’m not brain-burned,” he said.
“Thank God!” Afra said.
“What happened?” Groton asked at the same time.
“Now don’t go jumping on him like that,” Beatryx chided them. “He needs a chance to rest. His forehead is hot.” And she brushed his face expertly with the sponge again.
Her analysis might be simplistic, he thought, but his forehead was hot, and he was tired with a fatigue that extended deep into the psyche. Gratefully, he fell asleep.
Hours later he was ready to talk to them. “How close is the UN ship?”
“The optic spots the manned one about a day behind us,” Groton said. “We don’t have more than twenty-five hours before it comes within effective laser range.”
Ivo remembered. The laser itself could reach them anywhere in near-space, but could not be properly aimed unless coordinated by an instrument as precise as the macroscope. So it became essentially a short-range weapon, against a maneuvering target, good only for a few thousand miles. “Good. I mean, I think that gives us enough time.”
“You — you have the solution?” The dawning of hope on Afra’s face was a blessed thing to watch.
“Solution?” he repeated, finding it unreasonably funny. “Yes. Something very like it. But first I’ll have to explain what happened.”
“Ivo, I don’t want to rush you,” Groton said, “but if we don’t get away from that UN ship soon—”
“I’m sorry, but I do have to explain first. There is some danger, and if I — well, one of you would have to take over the scope.”
“Suddenly I get your message,” Groton said. “What did happen? Afra came screaming to us about the mind-destroyer, and we were afraid — anyway, I’m certainly glad it wasn’t so. But you certainly were out of it for a while.”
“No — I was in it. I was fighting to protect myself against the destroyer by — well, no need to go into that just now. I almost had it, but I — slipped, mentally, and got drawn in too close. I thought that was the end, and I couldn’t even resist, but I was lucky. I still had orbital velocity, and it spun me through the corona and out the other side.”
“I don’t see—”
“I do, Harold,” Afra said. “Think of it as an analogy. A planetoid plunging into the sun. The important thing is that he skirted the destroyer and only got stunned for a while.”
“Yes, physically. Not mentally, if that makes sense. And beyond it — I guess you’d call
it the galactic society.”
“You saw who sent the killer signal?” Groton.
“No. That’s a separate channel, if that’s the word. It’s all done in concept, but one is superimposed upon another, and you have to learn to separate them. Once you isolate the destroyer, the rest is all there for the taking.”
“Other concepts?” Afra.
“Other programs. They’re like radio stations, only all on the same band, and all using similar symbolic languages. You have to fasten on a particular trademark, otherwise only the strongest comes through, and that’s the destroyer.”
“I follow.” Groton. “It’s like five people all talking at once, and it’s all a jumble except for the loudest voice, unless you pay attention to just one. Then the others seem to tune out, though you can still hear them.”
“That’s it. Only there are more than five, and you really have to concentrate. But you can pick up any one you want, once you get the feel for it.”
“How many are there?” Afra.
“I don’t know. I think it’s several thousand. It’s hard to judge.”
They looked at him.
“One for each civilized species, you see.”
“Several thousand stations?” Afra, still hardly crediting it. “Whatever do they broadcast?”
“Information. Science, philosophy, economics, art — anything they can put into the universal symbology. Everything anybody knows — it’s all there for the taking. An educational library.”
“But why?” Afra. “What do they get out of it, when nobody can pick it up?”
“I’m not clear yet on the dating system, but my impression is that most of these predate the destroyer. At least, they don’t mention it, and they’re from very far away. The other side of the galaxy. So if it took fifteen thousand years for the destroyer to reach us, these others are taking twenty thousand, or fifty thousand. Maybe the local ones shut down when the destroyer started up, but we won’t know for thousands of years.”
“That bothers me too.” Afra. “Thousands of years before any other species receives their broadcasts, even if the destroyer is not considered. Far too long for any meaningful exchange between cultures.”
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