by C. L. Moore
He found the door, pushed it open wide. On the threshold he said:
“You didn’t adopt me on a whim, Torren. Part of your mind knew exactly what it was doing. You brought me up the hard way. My life was spent in a symbolic Centrifuge, just like yours. I am you. I’m the half that doesn’t hate the Ganymedans at all. I’m the half that knows they’re your people, the children you might have had, walking a free world as yours would have walked if your experiment had come out right, like theirs. I’ll fight for them, Torren. In a respirator and mask, but I’ll fight. That’s why you’ll never kill me.”
Sighing, Torren tilted the pistol. His thick finger squeezed itself inside the guard, began slowly to tighten upon the trigger. Slowly.
“Sorry, son,” he said, “but I can’t let you get away with it.”
Fenton smiled. “I said you were crazy. You won’t kill me, Torren. There’s been a fight going on inside you ever since you left the Centrifuge—until now. Now it’s going on outside, in the open. That̻s a better place. As long as I’m alive, I’m your enemy and yourself. Keep it on the outside, Torren, or you will go mad. As long as I’m alive I’ll fight you. But as long as I’m alive, you’re not an island. It’s your battle I’m fighting. You’ll do your best to defeat me, Torren, but you won’t kill me. You won’t dare.”
He stepped back into the pillar, groping for the spring to close the door. His eyes met Torren’s confidently.
Torren’s teeth showed under grimacing lips.
“You know how I hate you, Ben,” he said in a thick, fierce voice. “You’ve always known!”
“I know,” Fenton said, and touched the spring. The door slid shut before him. He was gone.
Torren emptied the revolver with a sort of wild deliberation at the unmarred surface of the pillar, watching the bullets strike and richochet off it one by one until the hall was full of their whining and the loud explosions of the gun. The pillar stood blank and impervious where Fenton’s face had been.
When the last echo struck the ceiling Torren dropped the gun and fell back into his enormous tank, caught his breath and laughed, tentatively at first and then with increasing volume until great billows of sound rolled up the walls and poured between the pillars toward the stars. Enormous hands flailed the water, sending spray high. The vast bulk wallowed monstrously, convulsed and helpless with its laughter.
On the screen the roar of the coming planes grew until their noise swallowed up even Torren’s roaring mirth.
The Code
* * *
Through the parlor windows Dr. Bill Westerfield could see the village street, with laden branches hanging low above the blue-shadowed snow. The double tracks of tires diminished in the distance. Peter Morgan’s sleek sedan was parked by the curb, and Morgan himself sat opposite Bill, scowling into his coffee cup.
Bill Westerfield watched a few flakes of snow making erratic pseudo-Brownian movements in the winter twilight. He said under his breath, “Now is the winter of our discontent—”
Morgan moved his heavy shoulders impatiently and drew his heavy black brows closer together. “Yours?”
“His.” Both men looked up, as though their vision could pierce wood and plaster. But no sound came from upstairs, where old Rufus Westerfield lay in the big walnut bed carved with grapes and pineapples. He had slept and wakened in that same bed for seventy years, and he had expected to die in it. But it was not death that hovered above him now.
“I keep expecting Mephistopheles to pop up through a star trap and demand somebody’s soul,” Bill said. “His discontent … my discontent … I don’t know. It’s going too smoothly.”
“You’d feel better if there were a price tag hanging on the bedpost, would you? ‘One Soul, Prepaid.’ “
Bill laughed. “Logic implies somebody has to pay. Energy must be expended to do work. That’s the traditional price, isn’t it? Youth restored at the cost of Faustus’ soul.”
“So it’s really thaumaturgy after all?” Pete Morgan inquired, pulling down the corners of his heavy mouth until the lines standing deep made his face look a little Mephistophelian after all. “I’ve been thinking all along I was an endocrinologist.”
“O.K., O.K. Maybe that was how Mephisto did it too. Anyhow, it works.”
Upstairs the nurse’s heels sounded briefly on bare boards, and there was a murmur of voices, one light, one flat with age but echoing now with an undertone of depth and vibration that Bill Westerfield remembered only vaguely, from his boyhood.
“It works,” agreed Pete Morgan, and rattled the coffee cup in its saucer. “You don’t sound too happy. Why?”
Bill got up and walked down the room without answering. At the far end he hesitated, then swung around and came back with a scowl on his thin face to match Morgan’s black-browed saturninity.
“There’s nothing wrong about reversing the biological time-flow—if you can,” he declared. “Father hasn’t got his eye on a Marguerite somewhere. He isn’t doing it for selfish reasons. We aren’t tampering with the Fountain of Youth because we want glory out of it, are we?”
Morgan looked at him under a thicket of black brows. “Rufus is a guinea pig,” he said. “Guinea pigs are notoriously selfless. We’re working for posterity ourselves, and a halo after we’re dead. Is that what you want me to say? Is there something the matter with you, Bill? You’ve never been squeamish before.”
Bill went down the room again, walking quickly as if he wanted to get to the far end before his mind changed. When he came back he was holding a framed photograph.
“All right, look here.” He thrust it out roughly. Morgan put down his cup and held the frame up to the light, squinting at the pictured face. “That was Father ten years ago,” Bill said. “When he was sixty.”
In silence Morgan looked long and steadily at the photograph. Upstairs they could hear faintly in the stillness how the carved bed creaked as Rufus Westerfield moved upon it. He moved more easily now than he had done a month ago, in the depth of his seventy years. Time was flowing backward for old Rufus. He was nearing sixty again.
Morgan lowered the photograph and looked up at Bill.
“I see what you mean,” he said deliberately. “It isn’t the same man.”
Biological time is a curious, delusive thing. It is no quirk of imagination that makes a year seem endless to the child and brief to the grandfather. To a child of five a year is long, a fifth of his whole life. To a man of fifty, it represents only a fiftieth. And the thing is not wholly a matter of the imagination. It links inescapably into the physical make-up of a man, in a sort of reverse ratio. In youth the bodily processes are demonstrably as much faster as the time-sense is slower. The fetus, during gestation, races through a million years of evolution; the adolescent in ten years’ time covers an aging process that will take him another fifty years of slowing change to equal. The young heal rapidly; the old sometimes never heal. Dr. du Nouy in his Biological Time plunges even deeper than this into the mysteries of youth and age, speculating on the private time universe in which each of us lives alone.
Rufus Westerfield was groping his way slowly backward through his.
Another experimenter, a Dr. Francois this time, had given the clue which he was following, as Theseus followed another sort of clue through the labyrinthine ways where the Minotaur lurked in hiding. Dr. Francois trained subjects to tap a telegraph key three hundred times a minute in their normal state. Then he applied heat and cold, gently, not to distract his subjects. And heat shortened their appreciation of time. The key tapped faster. Academically speaking they were older when warmth surrounded them. In the cold, time ran slower, like the long days of youth.
It had not, of course, been as simple as all that. The cardiac and vascular systems of the human machine needed powerful stimulus; the liver had almost ceased to build red cells. For these time could not turn backward without help. And there had been hypnosis, too. Seventy years of habit-patterns took a lot of erasing, and more esoteric matters than these
had to be dealt with. The awareness of time itself, flowing soundlessly past in a stream that moved faster and faster as it neared the brink.
“It isn’t the same man,” Morgan repeated without emotion, his eyes on Bill’s face. Bill jerked his shoulders irritably.
“Of course it’s the same man. It’s Father at sixty, isn’t it? Who else could it be?”
“Then why did you show it to me?”
Silence.
“The eyes,” Bill said carefully after awhile. “They’re … a little different. And the slope of the forehead. And the angle of the cheek isn’t … well, not quite the same. But you can’t say it isn’t Rufus Westerfield.”
“I’d like to compare them,” Morgan said practically. “Shall we go up?”
The nurse was closing the bedroom door behind her as they reached the stair head.
“He’s asleep,” she mouthed silently, her glasses glittering at them. Bill nodded, stepping past her to push the door soundlessly open.
The room inside was big and bare with an almost monastic simplicity that made the ornately carved bed incongruous. A night light glowing on a table near the door cast long humped shadows upward on walls and ceilings, like shadows cast by a fire that has burned low. The man in the bed lay quiet, his eyes closed, his thin, lined face and thin nose austere in the dimness.
They crossed the floor silently and stood looking down. Shadows softened the face upon the pillow, giving it an illusion of the youth to come. Morgan held the photograph up to catch what light there was, his lips pursed under the black mustache as he studied it. This was, of course, the same man. There could be no possibility of error. And superficially the two faces were identical. But basically—
Morgan bent his knees a little and stooped to catch the angle of forehead and cheek as the photograph showed it. He stood stooping for a full minute, looking from face to photograph. Bill watched anxiously.
Then Morgan straightened, and as he rose the old man’s eyelids rose too. Rufus Westerfield lay there looking up at them without moving. The night light caught in his eyes, making them very black and very bright. They looked sardonic, all that was alive in the weary face, but young and wise and amused.
For a moment no one spoke; then the eyes crinkled in slanting enjoyment, and Rufus laughed, a thin, high laugh that was older than his years. Senility sounded in the laugh, and a man of sixty should not be senile. But after the first cracked cackle the sound deepened slightly and was no longer old. His voice was liable, at this stage, to break into senility as an adolescent’s breaks into maturity. The adolescent break is normal, and perhaps Rufus’ break was normal too, in a process that created its own norm because it was as yet unique in human history.
“You boys want something?” inquired Rufus.
“Feel all right?” Morgan asked.
“I feel ten years younger,” Rufus grinned. “Anything wrong, son? You look—”
“No, not a thing.” Bill smoothed the frown off his face. “Almost forgot your shots. Pete and I were talking—”
‘Well, hurry up. I’m sleepy. I’m growing fast, you know. Need sleep.” And he laughed again, no cackle in the sound this time.
Bill went out hastily. Morgan said, “You’re growing, all right. And it does take energy. Have a good day?”
“Fine. You going to unlearn me any this evening?”
Morgan grinned. “Not exactly. I want you to” do a little … thinking … though. After Bill’s finished.”
Rufus nodded. “What’s that under your arm? The frame looks familiar. Anyone I know?”
Morgan glanced down automatically at the photograph he was holding, the face hidden. Bill, coming in at that moment with the nurse behind him, saw the old man’s brilliant, quizzical stare, and Morgan’s eyes shift away from it.
“No,” said Morgan. “Nobody you’d know.”
Bill’s hand shook a little. The hypodermic he was carrying, point up, trembled so that the drop upon its needle spilled over and ran down the side.
“Steady,” Rufus said. “You nervous about something, son?”
Carefully Bill did not meet Morgan’s gaze. “Not a thing. Let’s have your arm, Father.”
After the nurse had gone Morgan pulled a stump of candle from his pocket and set it upon Rufus’ bedside table. “Put out the night light, will you?” he said to Bill as he held a match to the wick. Yellow flame bloomed slowly in the dimness.
“Hypnosis,” Rufus said, squinting at the flicker.
“Not yet, no. I’m going to talk. Look at the flame, that’s all.”
“That’s hypnosis,” Rufus insisted in an argumentative voice.
“It makes you more receptive to suggestion. Your mind has to be liberated enough so you can … see … time.”
“Mm-m.”
“All right—not see it, then. Sense it, feel it. Realize it as a tangible thing.”
“Which it isn’t,” Rufus said.
“The Mad Hatter managed.”
“Sure. And look what happened to him.”
Morgan chuckled. “I remember. It was always teatime. You don’t need to worry about that. We’ve done this before, you know.”
“I know you say we have. I’m not supposed to remember.” Rufus’ voice imperceptibly had begun to soften. His gaze was on the flame, and its reflection wavered in miniature in his eyes.
“No. You never remember. You’ll forget all about this, too. I’m talking to a level of your mind that lies beneath the surface. The work goes on down there, in the quiet, just as the shots you’re getting work in secret inside your body. You’re listening, Rufus?”
“Go ahead,” Rufus said drowsily.
“We must shatter the temporal idols in your mind that stand between you and youth. Mental energy is powerful. The whole fabric of the universe is energy. You’ve been conditioned to think you grow old because of time, and this is a false philosophy. You must learn to discount it. Your belief acts upon your body, as the adrenals react to fear or anger. It’s possible to set up a conditioned reflex so that the adrenals will respond under a different stimulus. And you must be conditioned to reverse time. The body and the mind react inseparably, one upon the other. Metabolism controls the mind, and the mind governs the metabolism. These are the two faces of a single coin.”
Morgan’s voice slowed. He was watching the flicker of the reflected light shining beneath the old man’s lids. The lids were heavy.
“A single coin—” echoed Rufus’ voice, very low.
“The life processes of the body,” said Morgan in a monotone, “are like a river that flows very swiftly at its source. But it slows. It runs slower and slower into age. There’s another river, though, the awareness of time, and that stream runs with an opposite tempo. In youth it’s so slow you don’t even guess it’s moving. In age, it’s a Niagara. That is the stream, Rufus, that’s going to carry you back. It’s rushing by you now, deep and swift. But you’ve got to be aware of it, Rufus. Once you recognize it, nothing can stop you. You must learn to know time.”
The monotone droned on.
Fifteen minutes later, downstairs, Morgan set the photograph of Rufus at sixty upon the mantelpiece and regarded it with a heavy scowl.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s have it.”
Bill fidgeted. “What is there to say? We’re doing something so new we have no precedent. Father’s changing, Pete—he’s changing in ways we didn’t expect. It worries me. I wish we hadn’t had to use him for a guinea pig.”
“There was no choice, and you know it. If we’d used up ten years of testing and experiment—”
“I know. He couldn’t have lasted six months when we started. He knew it was risky. He was willing to chance it. I know all that. But I wish—”
“Now be reasonable, Bill. How the devil could we experiment except on a human subject, and a man with a high I.Q. at that? You know I tried it with chimps. But we’d have had to evolve them into humans first. After all, in the last analysis it’s the intelligenc
e factor that makes the trick possible. It’s lucky your father’s breakdown was purely physical.” He paused, looking again at the photograph. “About this, though—”
Bill spread his hands with a distracted motion. “I’d thought of every possible chance of error—except this one.” He laughed wryly. “It’s crazy. It isn’t happening.”
“The whole thing’s crazy as a bedbug. I still don’t believe it’s working. If Rufus is really back to sixty already, then anything can happen. It wouldn’t surprise me if the sun came up from California tomorrow.” Morgan fished in his pocket and brought out a cigarette. “All right, then,” he said, fumbling for a match, “so he doesn’t look exactly as he did ten years ago. Does he act the way he did then?”
Bill shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t taking notes in those days. How was I to guess what you and I’d be up to now?” He paused. “No, I think he doesn’t,” he said.
Morgan squinted at him through smoke. “What’s wrong?”
“Little things. That look in his eyes when he woke awhile ago, for instance. Did you notice? A sort of sardonic brightness. He takes things less seriously. He … just doesn’t match his face any more. That austere look … it used to suit him. Now when he wakes suddenly and looks at you, he’s … well, looking out of a mask. The mask’s changing … some. I know it’s changing. The photograph proves that. But it isn’t changing as fast as his mind.”
Deliberately Morgan blew smoke out in a long, swirling plume. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said soothingly. “He’ll never be the same man he was ten years ago, you know. We aren’t erasing his memory. Maybe he mellowed more than you realize in the decade he’s just retracted. At forty, at thirty, he’ll still be a man who’s lived seventy-odd years. It won’t be the same mind or the same man that existed in the Eighties. You’re just getting a case of the jitters, my boy.”
“I’m not. His face has changed! His forehead angle’s different!’ His nose is beginning to arch up a little. His cheekbones are higher than they ever were in his life. I’m not imagining that, am I?”
