Brain Wave

by Poul Anderson

  He drove back at a reckless speed. On the way, he noticed a machine out in a hayfield: a big enigmatic thing of flashing arms, doing the whole job with a single bored-looking man to guide it. They’d probably build a robot pilot as soon as they could get the materials. So what? He still had two hands.

  Further along, a patch of woods came down to the edge of the road. He thought he glimpsed something in there, a great gray shape which moved quietly back out of sight, but he couldn’t be sure.

  His calm temperament reasserted itself as he neared the estate, and he settled down to figuring. From the cows he could get milk and butter, maybe cheese. The few hens he had been able to recapture would furnish eggs. An occasional slaughtered sheer)—no, wait, why not hunt down some of those damned pigs instead?—would give him meat for quite a while; there was a smokehouse on the place. He could harvest enough hay, grain and corn—Tom and Jerry would just have to work!—to keep going through the winter; if he improvised a quern, he could grind a coarse flour and bake his own bread. There were plenty of clothes, shoes, tools. Salt was his major problem—but there ought to be a lick somewhere within a hundred miles or so, he could try to look up where and make a trip to it—and he’d have to save on gasoline and cut a lot of wood for winter, but he thought he could pull through. One way or another, he would.

  The magnitude of the task appalled him. One man! One pair of hands! But it had been done before, the whole human race had come up the hard way. If he took a cut in his standard of living and ate an unbalanced diet for a while, it wouldn’t kill him.

  And he had a brain which by pre-change measures was something extraordinary. Already, he had put that mind to work: first, devising a schedule of operations for the next year or so, and secondarily inventing gadgets to make survival easier. Sure—he could do it.

  He squared his shoulders and pushed down the accelerator, anxious to get home and begin.

  The noise as he entered the driveway was shattering. He heard the grunts and squeals and breaking of wood, and the truck lurched with his panicky jerk at the wheel. The pigs! he thought. The pigs had been watching and had seen him go—

  And he had forgotten his gun.

  He cursed and came roaring up the drive, past the house and into the farmyard. There was havoc. The pigs were like small black and white tanks, chuffing and grunting. The barn door was burst open and they were in the stored feed bags, ripping them open, wallowing in the floury stuff, some of them dragging whole sacks out into the woods. There was a bull too, he must have run wild, he snorted and bellowed as he saw the man, and the cows were bawling around, they had broken down their pasture fence and gone to him. Two dead sheep, trampled and ripped, lay in the yard, the rest must have fled in terror. And Joe—

  “Joe,” called Brock. “Where are yuh, boy?”

  It was raining a little, a fine misty downpour which blurred the woods and mingled with the blood on the earth. The old boar looked shiny as iron in the wetness. He lifted his head when the truck came and squealed.

  Brock drove straight for him. The truck was his only weapon now. The boar scampered aside and Brock pulled up in front of the barn. At once the pigs closed in, battering at the wheels and sides, grunting their hate of him. The bull lowered his head and pawed the ground.

  Joe barked wildly from the top of a brooder house. He was bleeding, it had been a cruel fight, but he had somehow managed to scramble up there and save himself.

  Brock backed the truck, swinging it around and driving into the flock. They scattered before him, he couldn’t get up enough speed in this narrow place to hit them and they weren’t yielding. The bull charged.

  There wasn’t time to be afraid, but Brock saw death. He swung the truck about, careening across the yard, and the bull met him head on. Brock felt a giant’s hand throw him against the windshield.

  Ragged darkness parted before his eyes. The bull was staggering, still on his feet, but the truck was dead. The pigs seemed to realize it and swarmed triumphantly to surround the man.

  He fumbled, crouched in the cab and lifting the seat. A long-handled wrench was there, comfortingly heavy. “All right,” he mumbled. “Come an’ get me.”

  Something loomed out of the woods and mist. It was gray, enormous, reaching for the sky. The bull lifted his dazed head and snorted. The pigs stopped their battering attack and for a moment there was silence.

  A shotgun blast ripped like thunder. The old boar was suddenly galloping in circles, wild with pain. Another explosion sent the bull crazy, turning on his heels and making for the woods.

  An elephant, gibbered Brock’s mind, an elephant come to help—

  The big gray shape moved slowly in on the pigs. They milled uneasily, their eyes full of hate and terror. The boar fell to the ground and lay gasping out his life. The elephant curled up its trunk and broke into an oddly graceful run. And the pigs fled.

  Brock was still for minutes, shaking too badly to move. When he finally climbed out, the wrench hanging loosely in one hand, the elephant had gone over to the haystack and was calmly stuffing its gullet. And two small hairy shapes squatted on the ground before the man.

  Joe barked feebly and limped over to his master. “Quiet, boy,” mumbled Brock. He stood on strengthless legs and looked into the wizened brown face of the chimpanzee who had the shotgun.

  “Okay,” he said at last. The fine cold rain was chilly on his sweating face. “Okay, you’re the boss just now. What do you want?”

  The chimpanzee regarded him for a long time. It was a male, he saw, the other was a female, and he remembered reading that the tropical apes couldn’t stand a northern climate very well. These must be from that circus which the man in the store had spoken of, he thought, they must have stolen the gun and taken—or made a bargain with?— the elephant. Now—

  The chimpanzee shuddered. Then, very slowly, always watching the human, he laid down the gun and went over and tugged at Brock’s jacket.

  “Do you understand me?” asked the man. He felt too tired to appreciate how fantastic a scene this was. “You know English?”

  There was no answer, except that the ape kept pulling at his clothes, not hard, but with a kind of insistence. After a while, one long-fingered hand pointed from the jacket to himself and his mate.

  “Well,” said Brock softly, “I think I get it. You’re afraid and you need human help, only you don’t want to go back to sitting in a cage. Is that it?”

  No answer. But something in the wild eyes pleaded with him.

  “Well,” said Brock, “you came along in time to do me a good turn, and you ain’t killing me now when you could just as easy do it.” He took a deep breath. “And God knows I could use some help on this place, you two and your elephant might make all the difference. And—and—okay. Sure.”

  He took off the jacket and gave it to the chimpanzee. The ape chattered softly and slipped it on. It didn’t fit very well, and Brock had to laugh.

  Then he straightened his bent shoulders. “All right. Fine. We’ll all be wild animals together. Okay? Come along into the house and get something to eat.”

  CHAPTER 9

  VLADIMIR IVANOVITCH PANYUSHKIN stood under the trees, letting the rain drip onto his helmet and run off the shoulders of his coat. It was a good coat, he had taken it off a colonel after the last battle, it shed water like a very duck. The fact that his feet squelched in worn-out boots did not matter.

  Vision swept down the hill, past the edge of forest and into the valley, and there the rain cut it off. Nothing stirred that he could see, nothing but the steady wash of rain, and he could hear nothing except its hollow sound. But the instrument said there was a Red Army unit in the neighborhood.

  He looked at the instrument where it lay cradled in the priest’s hands. Its needle was blurred with the rain that runneled across the glass dial, but he could see it dance. He did not understand the thing—the priest had made it, out of a captured radio—but it had given warning before.

  “I would say they a
re some ten kilometers off, Vladimir Ivanovitch.” The priest’s beard waggled when he spoke. It was matted with rain and hung stiffly across his coarse robe. “They are circling about, not approaching us. Perhaps God is misleading them.”

  Panyushkin shrugged. He was a materialist himself. But if the man of God was willing to help him against the Soviet government, he was glad to accept that help. “And perhaps they have other plans,” he answered. “I think we had best consult Fyodor Alexandrovitch.”

  “It is not good for him to be used so much, my son,” said the priest. “He is very tired.”

  “So are we all, my friend.” Panyushkin’s words were toneless. “But this is a key operation. If we can cut across to Kirovograd, we can isolate the Ukraine from the rest of the country. Then the Ukrainian nationalists can rise with hope of success.”

  He whistled softly, a few notes with a large meaning. Music could be made a language. The whole uprising, throughout the Soviet empire, depended in part on secret languages made up overnight.

  The Sensitive came out of the dripping brush which concealed Panyushkin’s troops. He was small for his fourteen years, and there was a blankness behind his eyes. The priest noted the hectic flush in his cheeks and crossed himself, murmuring a prayer for the boy. It was saddening to use him so hard. But if the godless men were to be overthrown at all, it would have to be soon, and the Sensitives were necessary. They were the untappable, unjammable, undetectable link which tied together angry men from Riga to Vladivostok; the best of them were spies such as no army had ever owned before. But there were still many who stood by the masters, for reasons of loyalty or fear or self-interest, and they had most of the weapons. Therefore a whole new concept of war had to be invented by the rebels.

  A people may loathe their government, but endure it because they know those who protest will die. But if all the people can be joined together, to act at once—or, most of them, simply to disobey with a deadly kind of peaceful-ness—the government can only shoot a few. Cut off from its own strong roots, the land and the folk, a government is vulnerable and less than a million armed men may be sufficient to destroy it.

  “There is a Red Star,” said Panyushkin, pointing out into the rain. “Can you tell what they plan, Fyodor Alexandrovitch?”

  The boy sat down on the running, sopping hillside and closed his eyes. Panyushkin watched him somberly. It was hard enough being a link with ten thousand other Sensitives across half a continent. Reaching for unlike minds would strain him close to the limit. But it had to be done.

  “There is—they know us.” The boy’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “They—have—instruments. Their metal smells us. They—no, it is death! They send death!” He opened his eyes, sucked in a sharp gasp, and fainted. The priest knelt to take him up and cast Panyushkin a reproachful look.

  “Guided missiles!” The leader whirled on his heel. “So they do have detectors like ours now. Good thing we checked, eh, priest? Now let us get away from here before the rockets come!”

  He left, enough metallic stuff behind to fool the instruments, and led his men along the ridge of hills. While the army was busy firing rockets on his camp, he would be readying an attack on their rear.

  With or without the help of the priest’s incomprehensible God, he felt quite sure that the attack would succeed.

  Felix Mandelbaum had hardly settled into his chair when the annunciator spoke. “Gantry.” The secretary’s tone of voice said that it was important.

  Gantry—he didn’t know anybody of that name. He sighed and looked out the windows. Morning shadow still lay cool across the streets, but it was going to be a hot day.

  There was a tank squatting on its treads down there, guns out to guard City Hall. The worst of the violence seemed to have passed: the Third Ba’al cult was falling apart rapidly after the prophet’s ignominious capture last week, the criminal gangs were being dealt with as the militia grew in size and experience, a measure of calm was returning to the city. But there was no telling what still prowled the outer districts, and there were surely going to be other storms before everything was finally under control.

  Mandelbaum sat back in his chair, forcing tensed muscles to relax. He always felt tired these days, under the thin hard-held surface of energy. Too much to do, too little time for sleep. He pushed the buzzer which signalled: Let him in.

  Gantry was a tall rawboned man whose good clothes did not quite fit him. There was an upstate twang in the ill-tempered voice: “They tell me you’re the dictator of the city now.”

  “Not exactly,” said Mandelbaum, smiling. “I’m just a sort of general trouble shooter for the mayor and the council.”

  “Yeah. But when there’s nothing but trouble, the trouble shooter gets to be boss.” There was a truculence in the swift reply. Mandelbaum didn’t try to deny the charge, it was true enough. The mayor had all he could do handling ordinary administrative. machinery; Mandelbaum was the flexible man, the co-ordinator of a thousand quarreling elements, the maker of basic policy, and the newly created city council rarely failed to vote as he suggested.

  “Sit down,” he invited. “What’s your trouble?” His racing mind already knew the answer, but he gained time by making the other spell it out for him.

  “I represent the truck farmers of eight counties. I was sent here to ask what your people mean by robbing us.”

  “Robbing?” asked Mandelbaum innocently.

  “You know as well as I do. When we wouldn’t take dollars for our stuff they tried to give us city scrip. And when we wouldn’t take that, they said they’d seize our crops.”

  “I know,” said Mandelbaum. “Some of the boys are pretty tactless. I’m sorry.”

  Gantry’s eyes narrowed. “Are you ready to say they won’t pull guns on us? I hope so, because we got guns of our own.”

  “Have you got tanks and planes too?” asked Mandelbaum. He waited an instant for the meaning to sink in, then went on swiftly: “Look, Mr. Gantry, there are six or seven million people left in this city. If we can’t assure them a regular food supply, they’ll starve. Can your association stand by and let seven million innocent men, women, and children die of hunger while you sit on more food than you can eat? No. You’re decent human beings. You couldn’t.”

  “I don’t know,” said Gantry grimly. “After what that mob did when it came stampeding out of the city last month—”

  “Believe me, the city government did everything it could to stop them. We failed in part, the panic was too big, but we did keep the whole city from moving out on you.” Mandelbaum made a bridge of his fingers and said judicially: “Now if you really were monsters you’d let the rest of them stay here to die. Only they wouldn’t Sooner or later, they’d all swarm out on you, and then everything would go under.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Gantry twisted his large red hands together. Somehow, he found himself on the defensive. “It ain’t that we want to make trouble, out in the country. It’s just—well, we raise food for you, but you ain’t paying us. You’re just taking it. Your scrip don’t mean a thing. What can we buy with it?”

  “Nothing, now,” said Mandelbaum candidly. “But believe me, it’s not our fault. The people here want to work. We just haven’t got things organized enough yet. Once we do, our scrip will mean things like clothes and machinery for you. If you let us starve, though—where’s your market then?”

  “All that was said at the association meeting,” replied Gantry. “The thing is, what guarantee have we got that you’ll keep your end of the bargain?”

  “Look, Mr. Gantry, we do want to co-operate. We want it so much that we’re prepared to offer a representative of your people a seat on the city council. Then how can we double-cross you?”

  “Hmmm—” Gantry’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “How many members on the council all told?”

  They bargained for a while, and Gantry left with a city offer of four seats which would hold special veto powers on certain matters concerning rural policy. Mandelb
aum was sure the farmers would accept it: it looked like a distinct victory for their side.

  He grinned to himself. How do you define victory? The veto power wouldn’t mean a thing, because rural policy was perfectly straightforward anyway. The city, the whole state and nation, would gain by the reunification of so large an area. Perhaps the piled-up debt to the farmers would never be paid—society was changing so rapidly that there might be no more cities in a few years—but that, however lamentable, was a small matter. What counted now was survival.

  “North and Morgan,” said the annunciator.

  Mandelbaum braced himself. This was going to be tougher. The waterfront boss and the crazy political theorist had their own ambitions, and considerable followings —too large to be put down by force. He stood up politely to greet them.

  North was a burly man, his face hard under it layers of fat; Morgan was slighter physically, but his eyes smoldered under the high bald forehead. They glared at each other as they came in, and looked accusingly at Mandelbaum. North growled their mutual question: “What’s the idea bringing us in at the same time? I wanted to see you in private.”

  “Sorry,” said Mandelbaum insincerely. “There must have been a mix-up. Would you mind both just sitting down for a few minutes, though? Maybe we can work it out together somehow.”

  “There is no ‘somehow’ about it,” snapped Morgan. “I and my followers are getting sick of seeing the obvious principles of Dynapsychism ignored in this government. I warn you, unless you reorganize soon along sensible lines—”

  North brushed him aside and turned to Mandelbaum. “Look here, there’re close to a hundred ships layin’ idle in the port of New York while th’ East Coast and Europe’re yellin’ for trade. My boys’re gettin’ fed up with havin’ their voice go unheard.”

  “We haven’t had much word from Europe lately,” said Mandelbaum in apologetic tone. “And things are too mixed up yet for us even to try coastwise trading. What’d we trade with? Where’d we find fuel for those ships? I’m sorry, but—” His mind went on: The real trouble is, your racket hasn’t got any waterfront to live off now.