by Anthology
Suddenly there was a shadow over him, and Geo saw Urson stride up to the end of the plank. His back to Geo, he crouched bear-like at the plank's head. "All right, now try someone a little bigger than you. Come on, kid, get off there. I want my turn." Urson's sword was drawn.
Snake turned, grabbed at something on Urson, but the big man knocked him away as he leapt diagonally onto the shore. Urson laughed over his shoulder. "You don't want the ones around my neck," he called back. "Here, keep these for me." He tossed the leather purse from his belt back to the shore. Snake landed just as Jordde flung the lash out again. Urson must have caught the line across his chest, because they saw his back suddenly stiffen. Then he leapt forward and came down with his sword so hard that had Jordde still been there, his leg would have come off. Jordde leapt back onto the edge of the ship, and the sword sliced three inches into the plank. As Urson tried to pull the blade out once more, Jordde sent his whip singing again. It wrapped Urson's mid-section like a black serpent, and it didn't come loose.
Urson howled. He flung his sword forward, which probably only by accident thwunked seventeen inches through Jordde's abdomen. He bent forward, grabbed the line with both hands, and tugged backwards, screaming.
Jordde took two steps onto the plank, his mouth open, his eyes closed, and fell over the side.
Urson heaved backwards, and toppled from the other side. For a moment they hung with the whip between them over the board. The ship heaved, rolled to. The plank swiveled, came loose; and with the board on top of them, they crashed into the water.
Geo and Snake were at the rocks' edge. Iimmi and Argo were coming up behind them.
Below them, limbs and board bobbed through the foam once. The line had somehow looped around Urson's neck, and the plank had turned up almost on end. Then they went under again.
With nothing between it and the rock wall of shore, the boat began to roll in. With each swell, it came in six feet, and then leaned out three. Then it came back another six. It took four swells, the time of four very deep breaths, until the side of the boat was grating up against the rocks. Geo could hear the plank splintering down in the water. But the sound of the water blanketed anything else that was breaking down there.
Geo took two steps backwards, clutched at his stubbed arm, and threw up.
Somebody, the captain, was calling, "Get her away from the rocks. Away from the rocks, before she goes to pieces!"
Iimmi took Geo's arm. "Come on, boy," he said, and managed to haul him onto the ship. Argo and Snake leapt on behind them, as the boat floundered away from the shore.
Geo leaned against the rail. Below him the water turned on itself in the rocks, thrashed along the river's side, and then, as he raised his eyes, stretched out along the bright blade of the beach. The long sand that rimmed the island dropped away from them, a stately and austere arc gathering in its curve all the sun's glare, and throwing it back on wave, and on wave. His back hurt, his stomach was shriveled and shaken like an old man's palsied fist, his arm was gone, and Urson….
And then Argo said, "Look at the beach!"
Geo flung his eyes up and tried in one moment to envelop whatever he saw, whatever it would be. Beneath the roar was a tide of quiet. The sand along the naked crescent was dull at depressions, mirror bright at rises. At the jungle's edge, leaves and fronds sped multi-textured rippling along the foliage. Each single fragment in that green carpet hung up in the sun was one leaf, he reflected, with two sides, and an entire system of skeleton and veins, as his hand and arm had been. And maybe one day would drop off, too. He looked from rock to rock now. Each was different, shaped and lined distinctly, but losing detail as the ship floated out, as the memory of his entire adventure was losing detail. That one there was like a bull's head half submerged; those two flat ones together on the sand looked like the stretched wings of eagles. The waves, measured and magnificent, followed one another onto the sand, like the varying, never duplicated rhythm of a good poem, peaceful, ordered, and calm. He tried to pour the chaos of Urson drowning from his mind onto the water. It flowed into each glass-green wave's trough in which it rode, suddenly quiet, up to the beach. He spread the pain in his own body over the web of foam and green shimmering, and was surprised because it fit easily, hung there well, quieted, very much quieted. Somewhere at the foot of his brain, an understanding was beginning to effloresce with the sea's water, under the sun.
Geo turned away from the rail, and with the wet deck slipping under his bare feet, he walked toward the forecastle. He released his broken limb, and his hand hung at his side.
When Snake came down that evening, Geo was lying on his back in the bunk, following the grain of the wood on the bottom of the bed above his. He had his good arm behind his neck now. Snake touched his shoulder.
"What is it?" Geo asked, turning on his side and sitting out from under the bunk.
Snake held out the leather purse to Geo.
"Huh?" Geo asked. "Didn't you give them to Argo yet?"
Snake nodded.
"Well, why didn't she take them. Look, I don't want to see them again."
Snake pushed the purse toward him again, and added, Look …
Geo took the purse, opened the draw string, and turned the contents out in his hand: there were three chains, on each of which was a gold coin fastened by a hole near the edge. Geo frowned. "How come these are in here?" he asked. "I thought—where are the jewels?"
In … ocean, Snake said. Urson … switched … them.
"What are you talking about?" demanded Geo. "What is it?"
Don't … want … tell … you …
"I don't care what you want, you little thief." Geo grabbed him by the shoulder. "Tell me!"
Know … from … back … with … blind … priestesses, Snake explained rapidly. He … ask … me … how … to … use … jewels.. when … you … and … Iimmi … exploring … and … after … that … no … listen … to … thoughts … bad … thoughts … bad …
"But he—" Geo started. "He saved your life!"
But … what … is … reason, Snake said. At … end …
"You saw his thoughts at the end?" asked Geo. "What did he think?"
You … sleep … please, Snake said. Lot … of … hate … lot … of … bad … hate … There was a pause in the voice in his head … and … love …
Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his teeth, the tiredness, the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and the change which hurt. His whole body ached, his back hurt in two sharp lines, and he couldn't stop crying.
Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened.
Geo laughed. "I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us so dangerous."
"How?" asked Iimmi. "When? What was it?"
"Same time you did," Geo said. "I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later."
"When?" Iimmi repeated.
"I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me."
"Then what was it you saw, we saw?"
"Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?"
"Didn't Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean."
"Right," said Geo. "Now, do you remember what my theory was about what we saw?"
"Did you have a theory?" Iimmi asked.
"About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was."
"Oh, that," Iimmi said. "I remember. Yes."
"I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama's lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn't a thing we saw, it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn't have to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. In fact, you can say that an action is a reconciliation of the duality of
his motivation. Now, take all that we've been through, the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more."
"All right," said Iimmi.
"And that's what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos."
"All right again," Iimmi said. "And I'll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were one—something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and two—something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?"
"You picked just the right word," Geo smiled. "Now, Jordde was a novice in the not too liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it, experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?"
"I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing," Iimmi said. "It would for me."
"It did," said Geo. "Jordde wasn't what you'd call stable before that. If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson. It's apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch. That's why he stopped reading Urson's thoughts. The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson's balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we didn't get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And Hama was something to hold onto for the boy."
"Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?"
"Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does. The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the revelation of a concrete God. Now, he knew that Snake had contacted something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he religiously tried to 'convert' Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury, he cut the boy's tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire which the blind priestesses had given him before he left. Why did he want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a sacred place to him by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn't want anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of The Goddess also."
"In other words," summarized Iimmi, "he thought what happened to him and Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach itself, and didn't want it to happen to anybody else."
"That's right," said Geo, lying back in his bunk. "Which is sort of understandable. They didn't come in contact with any of the technology of Aptor, and so it might well have seemed that way."
Iimmi leaned back also. "Yeah," he said. "I can see how the same thing almost—almost might have happened to me. If everything had been the same."
Geo closed his eyes. Snake came down and took the top bunk; and when he slept, Snake told him of Urson, of his last thoughts, and surprisingly, things he mostly knew.
Emerging from the forecastle the next morning, he felt bright sunlight slice across his face. He had to squint, and when he did so, he saw her sitting cross-legged on the stretched canvas topping of a suspended lifeboat.
"Hi, up there," he called.
"Hello," she called down. "How are you feeling?"
Geo shrugged.
Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and with paper bag in hand, dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and said, "Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something."
"Sure." He followed her.
Suddenly she looked serious. "Your arm is worrying you. Why?"
Geo shrugged. "You don't feel like a whole person. I guess you're not really a whole person."
"Don't be silly," said Argo. "Besides, maybe Snake will let you have one of his. How are the medical facilities in Leptar?"
"I don't think they're up to anything like that."
"We did grafting of limbs back in Aptor," Argo said. "A most interesting way we got around the antibody problem, too. You see—"
"But that was back in Aptor," Geo said. "This is the real world we're going into now."
"Maybe I can get a doctor from the temple to come over," she shrugged. "And then, maybe I won't be able to."
"It's a pleasant thought," Geo said.
When they reached the back of the ship, Argo took out a contraption from the paper bag. "I salvaged this in my tunic. Hope I dried it off well enough last night."
"It's your motor," Geo said.
"Um-hm," said Argo. She put it on a low set of lockers by the cabin's back wall.
"How are you going to work it?" he asked. "It's got to have that stuff, electricity."
"There is more than one way to shoe a centipede," Argo assured him. She reached behind the locker and pulled up a strange gizmo of glass and wire. "I got the lens from Sis," she explained. "She's awfully nice, really. She says I can have my own laboratory all to myself. And I said she could have all the politics, which I think was wise of me, considering. Don't you?" She bent over the contraption. "Now, this lens here focuses the sunlight—isn't it a beautiful day—on these thermocouples. I got the extra metal from the ship's smith. He's sweet. Hey, we're going to have to compare poems from now on. I mean I'm sure you're going to write a whole handful about all of this. I certainly am. Anyway, you connect it up here."
She fastened two wires to two other wires, adjusted the lens, and the tips of the thermocouple glowed red. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Geo glanced up and saw Snake and Iimmi standing above them, looking over the rail on the cabin's roof. They grinned at each other, and then Geo looked back at the motor. It whipped around steadily, gaining speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze. "Look at that thing go," breathed Argo. "Will you just look at that thing go!"
* * *
Contents
THE VARIABLE MAN
By Philip K. Dick
I
He fixed things—clocks, refrigerators, vidsenders and destinies. But he had no business in the future, where the calculators could not handle him. He was Earth's only hope—and its sure failure!
Security Commissioner Reinhart rapidly climbed the front steps and entered the Council building. Council guards stepped quickly aside and he entered the familiar place of great whirring machines. His thin face rapt, eyes alight with emotion, Reinhart gazed intently up at the central SRB computer, studying its reading.
"Straight gain for the last quarter," observed Kaplan, the lab organizer. He grinned proudly, as if personally responsible. "Not bad, Commissioner."
; "We're catching up to them," Reinhart retorted. "But too damn slowly. We must finally go over—and soon."
Kaplan was in a talkative mood. "We design new offensive weapons, they counter with improved defenses. And nothing is actually made! Continual improvement, but neither we nor Centaurus can stop designing long enough to stabilize for production."
"It will end," Reinhart stated coldly, "as soon as Terra turns out a weapon for which Centaurus can build no defense."
"Every weapon has a defense. Design and discord. Immediate obsolescence. Nothing lasts long enough to—"
"What we count on is the lag," Reinhart broke in, annoyed. His hard gray eyes bored into the lab organizer and Kaplan slunk back. "The time lag between our offensive design and their counter development. The lag varies." He waved impatiently toward the massed banks of SRB machines. "As you well know."
At this moment, 9:30 AM, May 7, 2136, the statistical ratio on the SRB machines stood at 21-17 on the Centauran side of the ledger. All facts considered, the odds favored a successful repulsion by Proxima Centaurus of a Terran military attack. The ratio was based on the total information known to the SRB machines, on a gestalt of the vast flow of data that poured in endlessly from all sectors of the Sol and Centaurus systems.
21-17 on the Centauran side. But a month ago it had been 24-18 in the enemy's favor. Things were improving, slowly but steadily. Centaurus, older and less virile than Terra, was unable to match Terra's rate of technocratic advance. Terra was pulling ahead.
"If we went to war now," Reinhart said thoughtfully, "we would lose. We're not far enough along to risk an overt attack." A harsh, ruthless glow twisted across his handsome features, distorting them into a stern mask. "But the odds are moving in our favor. Our offensive designs are gradually gaining on their defenses."
"Let's hope the war comes soon," Kaplan agreed. "We're all on edge. This damn waiting…."
The war would come soon. Reinhart knew it intuitively. The air was full of tension, the elan. He left the SRB rooms and hurried down the corridor to his own elaborately guarded office in the Security wing. It wouldn't be long. He could practically feel the hot breath of destiny on his neck—for him a pleasant feeling. His thin lips set in a humorless smile, showing an even line of white teeth against his tanned skin. It made him feel good, all right. He'd been working at it a long time.
