The World-Thinker and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  “Did he—did he—”

  “He started a landslide. We don’t have any more Clock.”

  Inspector Coble found no one to meet him at the Glory City space-port. He peered up and down the tarmac; he was alone. A scrap of paper blew across the far end of the field; nothing else moved.

  Odd, thought Inspector Coble. A committee had always been on hand to welcome him, with a program that was flattering but rather wearing. First to the Arch-Deacon’s bungalow for a banquet, cheerful speeches and progress reports, then services in the central chapel, and finally a punctilious escort to the foot of the Grand Montagne.

  Excellent people, by Inspector Coble’s lights, but too painfully honest and fanatical to be interesting.

  He left instructions with the two men who crewed the official ship, and set off on foot toward Glory City. Red Robundus was high, but sinking toward the east; he looked toward Salvation Bluff to check local time. A clump of smoky lace-veils blocked his view.

  Inspector Coble, striding briskly along the road, suddenly jerked to a halt. He raised his head as if testing the air, looked about him in a complete circle. He frowned, moved slowly on.

  The colonists had been making changes, he thought. Exactly what and how, he could not instantly determine: the fence there—a section had been torn out. Weeds were prospering in the ditch beside the road. Examining the ditch, he sensed movement in the harp-grass behind, the sound of young voices. Curiosity aroused, Coble jumped the ditch, parted the harp-grass.

  A boy and girl of sixteen or so were wading in a shallow pond; the girl held three limp water-flowers, the boy was kissing her. They turned up startled faces; Inspector Coble withdrew.

  Back on the road he looked up and down. Where in thunder was everybody? The fields—empty. Nobody working. Inspector Coble shrugged, continued.

  He passed the Rest Home, and looked at it curiously. It seemed considerably larger than he remembered it: a pair of wings, some temporary barracks had been added. He noticed that the gravel of the driveway was hardly as neat as it might be. The ambulance drawn up to the side was dusty. The place looked vaguely run down. The inspector for the second time stopped dead in his tracks. Music? From the Rest Home?

  He turned down the driveway, approached. The music grew louder. Inspector Coble slowly pushed through the front door. In the reception hall were eight or ten people—they wore bizarre costumes: feathers, fronds of dyed grass, fantastic necklaces of glass and metal. The music sounded loud from the auditorium, a kind of wild jig.

  “Inspector!” cried a pretty woman with fair hair. “Inspector Coble! You’ve arrived!”

  Inspector Coble peered into her face. She wore a kind of patchwork jacket sewn with small iron bells. “It’s—it’s Sister Mary Dunton, isn’t it?”

  “Of course! You’ve arrived at a wonderful time! We’re having a carnival ball—costumes and everything!”

  Brother Raymond clapped the inspector heartily on the back. “Glad to see you, old man! Have some cider—it’s the early press.”

  Inspector Coble backed away. “No, no thanks.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be off on my rounds…and perhaps drop in on you later.”

  Inspector Coble proceeded to the Grand Montagne. He noted that a number of the bungalows had been painted bright shades of green, blue, yellow; that fences in many cases had been pulled down, that gardens looked rather rank and wild.

  He climbed the road to Old Fleetville, where he interviewed the chief. The Flits apparently were not being exploited, suborned, cheated, sickened, enslaved, forcibly proselyted or systematically irritated. The chief seemed in a good humor.

  “I kill the Big Devil,” he told Inspector Coble. “Things go better now.”

  Inspector Coble planned to slip quietly to the space-port and depart, but Brother Raymond Dunton hailed him as he passed their bungalow.

  “Had your breakfast, Inspector?”

  “Dinner, darling!” came Sister Mary’s voice from within. “Urban just went down.”

  “But Maude just came up.”

  “Bacon and eggs anyway, Inspector!”

  The inspector was tired; he smelled hot coffee. “Thanks,” he said, “don’t mind if I do.”

  After the bacon and eggs, over the second cup of coffee, the inspector said cautiously, “You’re looking well, you two.”

  Sister Mary looked especially pretty with her fair hair loose.

  “Never felt better,” said Brother Raymond. “It’s a matter of rhythm, Inspector.”

  The inspector blinked. “Rhythm, eh?”

  “More precisely,” said Sister Mary, “a lack of rhythm.”

  “It all started,” said Brother Raymond, “when we lost our Clock.”

  Inspector Coble gradually pieced out the story. Three weeks later, back at Surge City he put it in his own words to Inspector Keefer.

  “They’d been wasting half their energies holding onto—well, call it a false reality. They were all afraid of the new planet. They pretended it was Earth—tried to whip it, beat it, and just plain hypnotize it into being Earth. Naturally they were licked before they started. Glory is about as completely random a world as you could find. The poor devils were trying to impose Earth rhythm and Earth routine upon this magnificent disorder; this monumental chaos!”

  “No wonder they all went nuts.”

  Inspector Coble nodded. “At first, after the Clock went out, they thought they were goners. Committed their souls to God and just about gave up. A couple of days passed, I guess—and to their surprise they found they were still alive. In fact, even enjoying life. Sleeping when it got dark, working when the sun shone.”

  “Sounds like a good place to retire,” said Inspector Keefer. “How’s the fishing out there on Glory?”

  “Not so good. But the goat-herding is great!”

  Where Hesperus Falls

  My servants will not allow me to kill myself. I have sought self-extinction by every method, from throat-cutting to the intricate routines of Yoga, but so far they have thwarted my most ingenious efforts.

  I grow ever more annoyed. What is more personal, more truly one’s own, than a man’s own life? It is his basic possession, to retain or relinquish as he sees fit. If they continue to frustrate me, someone other than myself will suffer. I guarantee this.

  My name is Henry Revere. My appearance is not remarkable, my intelligence is hardly noteworthy, and my emotions run evenly. I live in a house of synthetic shell, decorated with wood and jade, and surrounded by a pleasant garden. The view to one side is the ocean, the other, a valley sprinkled with houses similar to my own. I am by no means a prisoner, although my servants supervise me with the most minute care. Their first concern is to prevent my suicide, just as mine is to achieve it.

  It is a game in which they have all the advantages—a detailed knowledge of my psychology, corridors behind the walls from which they can observe me, and a host of technical devices. They are men of my own race, in fact my own blood. But they are immeasurably more subtle than I.

  My latest attempt was clever enough—although I had tried it before without success. I bit deeply into my tongue and thought to infect the cut with a pinch of garden loam. The servants either noticed me placing the soil in my mouth or observed the tension of my jaw.

  They acted without warning. I stood on the terrace, hoping the soreness in my mouth might go undetected. Then, without conscious hiatus, I found myself reclining on a pallet, the dirt removed, the wound healed. They had used a thought-damping ray to anaesthetize me, and their sure medical techniques, aided by my almost invulnerable constitution, defeated the scheme.

  As usual, I concealed my annoyance and went to my study. This is a room I have designed to my own taste, as far as possible from the complex curvilinear style which expresses the spirit of the age.

  Almost immediately the person in charge of the household entered the room. I call him Dr. Jones because I cannot pronounce his name. He is taller than I, slender and fine-boned. His features ar
e small, beautifully shaped, except for his chin which to my mind is too sharp and long, although I understand that such a chin is a contemporary criterion of beauty. His eyes are very large, slightly protuberant; his skin is clean of hair, by reason both of the racial tendency toward hairlessness, and the depilation which every baby undergoes upon birth.

  Dr. Jones’ clothes are vastly fanciful. He wears a body mantle of green film and a dozen varicolored disks which spin slowly around his body like an axis. The symbolism of these disks, with their various colors, patterns, and directions of spin, are discussed in a chapter of my History of Man—so I will not be discursive here. The disks serve also as gravity deflectors, and are used commonly in personal flight.

  Dr. Jones made me a polite salute, and seated himself upon an invisible cushion of anti-gravity. He spoke in the contemporary speech, which I could understand well enough, but whose nasal trills, gutturals, sibilants and indescribable fricatives, I could never articulate.

  “Well, Henry Revere, how goes it?” he asked.

  In my pidgin-speech I made a non-committal reply.

  “I understand,” said Dr. Jones, “that once again you undertook to deprive us of your company.”

  I nodded. “As usual I failed,” I said.

  Dr. Jones smiled slightly. The race had evolved away from laughter, which, as I understand, originated in the cave-man’s bellow of relief at the successful clubbing of an adversary.

  “You are self-centered,” Dr. Jones told me. “You consider only your own pleasure.”

  “My life is my own. If I want to end it, you do great wrong in stopping me.”

  Dr. Jones shook his head. “But you are not your own property. You are the ward of the race. How much better if you accepted this fact!”

  “I can’t agree,” I told him.

  “It is necessary that you so adjust yourself.” He studied me ruminatively. “You are something over ninety-six thousand years old. In my tenure at this house you have attempted suicide no less than a hundred times. No method has been either too crude or too painstaking.”

  He paused to watch me but I said nothing. He spoke no more than the truth, and for this reason I was allowed no object sharp enough to cut, long enough to strangle, noxious enough to poison, heavy enough to crush—even if I could have escaped surveillance long enough to use any deadly weapon.

  I was ninety-six thousand, two hundred and thirty-two years old, and life long ago had lost that freshness and anticipation which makes it enjoyable. I found existence not so much unpleasant, as a bore. Events repeated themselves with a deadening familiarity. It was like watching a rather dull drama for the thousandth time: the boredom becomes almost tangible and nothing seems more desirable than oblivion.

  Ninety-six thousand, two hundred and two years ago, as a student of bio-chemistry, I had offered myself as a guinea pig for certain tests involving glands and connective tissue. An incalculable error had distorted the experiment, with my immortality as the perverse result. To this day I appear not an hour older than my age at the time of the experiment, when I was so terribly young.

  Needless to say, I suffered tragedy as my parents, my friends, my wife, and finally my children grew old and died, while I remained a young man. So it has been. I have seen untold generations come and go; faces flit before me like snowflakes as I sit here. Nations have risen and fallen, empires extended, collapsed, forgotten. Heroes have lived and died; seas drained, deserts irrigated, glaciers melted, mountains levelled. Almost a hundred thousand years I have persisted, for the most part effacing myself, studying humanity. My great work has been the History of Man.

  Although I have lived unchanging, across the years the race evolved. Men and women grew taller, and more slender. Every century saw features more refined, brains larger, more flexible. As a result, I, Henry Revere, homo sapiens of the twentieth century, today am a freakish survival, somewhat more advanced than the Neanderthal, but essentially a precursor to the true Man of today.

  I am a living fossil, a curio among curios, a public ward, a creature denied the option of life or death. This was what Dr. Jones had come to explain to me, as if I were a retarded child. He was as kindly as he knows how, but unusually emphatic. Presently he departed and I was left to myself, in whatever privacy the scrutiny of a half a dozen pairs of eyes allows.

  It is harder to kill one’s self than one might imagine. I have considered the matter carefully, examining every object within my control for lethal potentialities. But my servants are preternaturally careful. Nothing in this house could so much as bruise me. And when I leave the house, as I am privileged to do, gravity deflectors allow me no profit from high places, and in this exquisitely organized civilization there are no dangerous vehicles or heavy machinery in which I could mangle myself.

  In the final analysis I am flung upon my own resources. I have an idea. Tonight I shall take a firm grasp on my head and try to break my neck…

  Dr. Jones came as always, and inspected me with his usual reproach. “Henry Revere, you trouble us all with your discontent. Why can’t you reconcile yourself to life as you have always known it?”

  “Because I am bored! I have experienced everything. There is no more possibility of novelty or surprise! I feel so sure of events that I could predict the future!”

  He was rather more serious than usual. “You are our guest. You must realize that our only concern is to ensure your safety.”

  “But I don’t want safety! Quite the reverse!”

  Dr. Jones ignored me. “You must make up your mind to cooperate. Otherwise—” he paused significantly “—we will be forced into a course of action that will detract from the dignity of us all.”

  “Nothing could detract any further from my dignity,” I replied bitterly. “I am hardly better than an animal in a zoo.”

  “That is neither your fault nor ours. We all must fulfill our existences to the optimum. Today your function is to serve as vinculum with the past.”

  He departed. I was left to my thoughts. The threats had been veiled but were all too clear. I was to desist from further attempts upon my life or suffer additional restraint.

  I went out on the terrace, and stood looking across the ocean, where the sun was setting into a bed of golden clouds. I was beset by a dejection so vast that I felt stifled. Completely weary of a world to which I had become alien, I was yet denied freedom to take my leave. Everywhere I looked were avenues to death: the deep ocean, the heights of the palisade, the glitter of energy in the city. Death was a privilege, a bounty, a prize, and it was denied to me.

  I returned to my study and leafed through some old maps. The house was silent—as if I were alone. I knew differently. Silent feet moved behind the walls, which were transparent to the eyes above these feet, but opaque to mine. Gauzy webs of artificial nerve tissue watched me from various parts of the room. I had only to make a sudden gesture to bring an anaesthetic beam snapping at me.

  I sighed, slumped into my chair. I saw with the utmost clarity that never could I kill myself by my own instrumentality. Must I then submit to an intolerable existence? I sat looking bleakly at the nacreous wall behind which eyes noted my every act.

  No, I would never submit. I must seek some means outside myself, a force of destruction to strike without warning: a lightning bolt, an avalanche, an earthquake.

  Such natural cataclysms, however, were completely beyond my power to ordain or even predict.

  I considered radioactivity. If by some pretext I could expose myself to a sufficient number of roentgens…

  I sat back in my chair, suddenly excited. In the early days atomic wastes were sometimes buried, sometimes blended with concrete and dropped into the ocean. If only I were able to—but no. Dr. Jones would hardly allow me to dig in the desert or dive in the ocean, even if the radioactivity were not yet vitiated.

  Some other disaster must be found in which I could serve the role of a casualty. If, for instance, I had foreknowledge of some great meteor, and where it would st
rike…

  The idea awoke an almost forgotten association. I sat up in my chair. Then, conscious that knowledgeable minds speculated upon my every expression, I once again slumped forlornly.

  Behind the passive mask of my face, my mind was racing, recalling ancient events. The time was too far past, the circumstances obscured. But details could be found in my great History of Man.

  I must by all means avoid suspicion. I yawned, feigned acute ennui. Then with an air of surly petulance, I secured the box of numbered rods which was my index. I dropped one of them into the viewer, focused on the molecule-wide items of information.

  Someone might be observing me. I rambled here and there, consulting articles and essays totally unrelated to my idea: The Origin and Greatest Development of the Dithyramb; The Kalmuk Tyrants; New Camelot, 18119 A.D.; Oestheotics; The Caves of Phrygia; The Exploration of Mars; The Launching of the Satellites. I undertook no more than a glance at this last; it would not be wise to show any more than a flicker of interest. But what I read corroborated the inkling which had tickled the back of my mind.

  The date was during the twentieth century, during what would have been my normal lifetime.

  The article read in part:

  Today HESPERUS, last of the unmanned satellites, was launched into orbit around Earth. This great machine will swing above the equator at a height of a thousand miles, where atmospheric resistance is so scant as to be negligible. Not quite negligible, of course; it is estimated that in something less than a hundred thousand years HESPERUS will lose enough momentum to return to Earth.

  Let us hope that no citizen of that future age suffers injury when HESPERUS falls.

  I grunted and muttered. A fatuous sentiment! Let us hope that one person, at the very least, suffers injury. Injury enough to erase him from life!

  I continued to glance through the monumental work which had occupied so much of my time. I listened to aquaclave music from the old Poly-Pacific Empire; read a few pages from The Revolt of the Manitobans. Then, yawning and simulating hunger, I called for my evening meal.