The Voyage of the Space Beagle

by A. E. van Vogt

  His eyes were bright as he stared at the puzzled Grosvenor. “Don’t you see? The ability to read another’s mind would make you feel that you know about him. On that basis, a system of absolute certainties would develop. How could you doubt when you know? Such beings would flash through the early periods of their culture, and arrive at the fellah period in the swiftest possible time.”

  Alertly, while Grosvenor sat frowning, he described how various civilizations of Earth and galactic history had exhausted themselves, and then stagnated into fellahdom. Fellah people resented newness and change. They were not particularly cruel as a group, but because of their poverty they all too frequently develop an indifference toward the suffering of individuals.

  When Korita had finished, Grosvenor said, “Perhaps their resentment of change is responsible for the attack on the ship?” The archaeologist was cautious. “Perhaps.” There was silence. It seemed to Grosvenor that he had to act as if Korita’s total analysis was correct. He had no other hypothesis. With such a theory as a starting point, he could try to obtain verification from one of the images.

  A glance at the chronometer tensed him. He had less than seven hours to save the ship.

  Hastily, he focused a beam of light through the encephalo-adjuster. With quick movements, he set a screen in front of the light, so that a small area of glass was thrown into shadow except for the intermittent light that played on it from the adjuster.

  Instantly, an image appeared. It was one of the partially doubled ones, and because of the encephalo-adjuster, he was able to study it in safety. The first clear look astounded him. It was only vaguely humanoid. And yet it was understandable how his mind had leaped to the woman identification earlier. Its overlapping double face was crowned with a neat bun of golden feathers. But its head, though now unmistakably bird-like, did have a human appearance. There were no feathers on its face, which was covered with a lacework of what seemed to be veins. The human appearance resulted from the way those markings had formed into groups, to give the effect of cheeks and nose.

  The second pair of eyes and the second mouth were in each case nearly two inches above the first. They almost made a second head, which was literally growing out of the first. There was also a second pair of shoulders, with a doubled pair of short arms that ended in beautifully delicate, amazingly long hands and fingers — and the overall effect was still feminine. Grosvenor found himself thinking that the arms and fingers of the two bodies would be likely to separate first. The second body would then be able to help support its weight. Parthenogenesis, Grosvenor thought. Reproduction without sex. The growth of a bud from a parent body, and the final separation from the parent into a new individual.

  The image in the wall before him showed vestigial wings. Tufts of feathers were visible at the “wrists”. It wore a bright blue tunic over an astonishingly straight and superficially humanlike body. If there were other vestiges of a feathery past, they were hidden by the clothing. What was clear was that this bird didn’t, and couldn’t, fly under its own power.

  Korita spoke first, in a helpless tone. “How are you going to let it know you’re willing to be hypnotized in exchange for information?”

  Grosvenor did not answer in words. He stood up and tentatively drew a picture of the image and of himself on a blackboard. Forty-seven minutes and scores of drawings later the bird image suddenly faded from the wall, and a city scene appeared in its place.

  It was not a large community, and his first view of it was from a high vantage point. He had an impression of very tall, very narrow buildings, clustered so close together that all the lower reaches must be lost in gloom for most of each day. Grosvenor wondered, in passing, if that might possibly reflect nocturnal habits in some primeval past. His mind leaped on. He ignored individual buildings in his desire to obtain a whole picture. Above everything else, he wanted to find out the extent of their machine culture, how they communicated, and if this was the city from which the attack on the ship was being launched.

  He could see no machines, no aircraft, no cars. Nor was there anything corresponding to the interstellar-communication equipment used by human beings, which, on Earth, required stations spaced over many square miles of land. It seemed likely, therefore, that the origin of the attack was nothing like that.

  Even as he made his negative discovery, the view changed. He was no longer on a hill but in a building near the centre of the city. Whatever was taking that perfect colour picture moved forward, and he looked down over the edge. His primary concern was with the whole scene. Yet he found himself wondering how they were showing it to him. The transition from one scene to another had been accomplished in the twinkling of an eye. Less than a minute had passed since his blackboard illustration had finally made known his desire for information.

  That thought, like the others, was a flashing one. Even as he had it, he was gazing avidly down the side of the building. The space separating it from the near-by structures seemed no more than ten feet. But now he saw something that had not been visible from the hillside. The buildings were connected on every level by walks only inches wide. Along these moved the pedestrian traffic of the bird city.

  Directly below Grosvenor, two individuals strode towards each other along the same narrow walk. They seemed unconcerned by the fact that it was a hundred feet or more to the ground. They passed casually, easily. Each swung his outside leg, wide around the other, caught the walk, bent his inside leg wide out, and then they were by, without having broken pace. There were other people on other levels going through the same intricate manoeuvres in the same nonchalant manner. Watching them, Grosvenor guessed that their bones were thin and hollow, and that they were lightly built.

  The scene changed again, and then again. It moved from one section of the street to another. He saw, it seemed to him, every possible variation of the reproductive condition. Some were so far advanced that the legs and arms and most of the body was free. Others were as he had already seen them. In every instance, the parent seemed unaffected by the weight of the new body.

  Grosvenor was trying to get a glimpse inside one of the dim interiors of a building when the picture began to fade from the wall. In a moment, the city had disappeared completely. In its place grew the double image. The image fingers pointed at the encephalo-adjuster. Its motion was unmistakable. It had fulfilled its part of the bargain. It was time for him to fulfill his.

  It was naive of it to expect that he would do so. The trouble was, he had to. He had no alternative but to carry out his obligation.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I am calm and relaxed,” said Grosvenor’s recorded voice. “My thoughts are clear. What I see is not necessarily related to what I am looking at. What I hear may be meaningless to the interpretive centres of my brain. But I have seen their city as they think it. Whether what I actually see and hear makes sense or nonsense, I remain calm, relaxed, and at ease….”

  Grosvenor listened carefully to the words, and then turned to Korita. “That’s it,” he said simply.

  The time might come, of course, when he would not consciously hear the message. But it would be there. Its patterns would impress ever more firmly on his mind. Still listening, he examined the adjuster for the last time. It was all as he wanted it.

  To Korita, he explained, “I’m setting the automatic cutoff for five hours. If you pull this switch” — he indicated a red lever — “you can break me free before then. But only do so in an emergency.”

  “How do you define emergency?”

  “If we’re attacked here.” Grosvenor hesitated. He would have liked a series of breaks. But what he was about to do was not merely a scientific experiment. It was a life-and-death gamble. Ready for action, he put his hand on the control dial. And there he paused.

  For this was the moment. Within a few seconds, the group mind of countless individual bird folk would be in possession of parts of his nervous system. They would undoubtedly try to control him as they were controlling the other men o
n the ship.

  He was fairly positive that he would be up against a group of minds working together. He had seen no machines, not even a wheeled vehicle, that most primitive of mechanical devices. For a short time, he had taken it for granted that they were using television-type cameras. Now he guessed that he had seen the city through the eyes of individuals. With these things, telepathy was a sensory process as sharp as vision itself. The en-massed mind power of millions of bird people could hurdle light-years of distance. They didn’t need machines.

  He couldn’t hope to foresee the result of his attempt to become a part of their collective mind.

  Still listening to the recorder, Grosvenor manipulated the dial of the encephalo-adjuster and slightly modified the rhythm of his own thoughts. It had to be slight. Even if he had wanted to, he could not offer the aliens complete attunement. In those rhythmic pulsations lay every variation of sanity, unsanity, and insanity. He had to restrict his reception to waves that would register “sane” on a psychologist’s graph.

  The adjuster superimposed them on a beam of light which in turn shone directly on the image. If the individual behind the image was affected by the pattern in the light, it hadn’t shown it yet. Grosvenor did not expect overt evidence, and so he was not disappointed. He was convinced that the result would become apparent only in the changes that occurred in the patterns they were directing at him. And that, he was sure, he would have to experience with his own nervous system.

  It was hard for him to concentrate on the image, but he persisted. The encephalo-adjuster began to interfere markedly with his vision. And still he stared steadily at the image.

  “I am calm and relaxed. My thoughts are clear….”

  One instant the words were loud in his ears. The next, they were gone. And in their stead was a roaring sound as of distant thunder.

  The noise faded slowly. It became a steady throbbing like the murmur in a large sea shell. Grosvenor was aware of a faint light. It was far away and had the hazy dimness of a lamp seen through thick fog.

  “I’m still in control,” he assured himself. “I’m getting sense impressions through its nervous system. It’s getting impressions through mine.”

  He could wait. He could sit here and wait until the darkness cleared, until his brain started to make some kind of interpretation of the sense phenomena that were being telegraphed from that other nervous system. He could sit here and—

  He stopped. Sit! he thought. Was that what it was doing? He poised intent and alert. He heard a distant voice say, “Whether what I actually see and hear makes sense or nonsense, I remain calm….”

  His nose began to itch. He thought. They don’t have noses; at least I didn’t see any. Therefore, it’s either my own nose, or a random speculation. He started to reach up to scratch it, and felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He would have doubled up with the hurt of it if he had been able. He couldn’t. He couldn’t scratch his nose. He couldn’t put his hands on his abdomen.

  He realized then that the itch and the pain stimuli did not derive from his own body. Nor did they necessarily have any corresponding meaning in the other’s nervous system. Two highly developed life forms were sending signals to each other — he hoped that he was sending signals to it also — which neither could interpret. His advantage was that he had expected it. The alien, if it was fellah, and if Korita’s theory was valid, hadn’t and couldn’t. Understanding that, he could hope for adjustment. It could only become more confused.

  The itch went away. The pain in his stomach became a feeling of satiation, as if he had eaten too much. A hot needle stabbed at his spine, digging at each vertebra. Half-way down, the needle turned to ice, and the ice melted and ran in a freezing stream down his back. Something — a hand? a piece of metal? a pair of tongs? — snatched at a bundle of muscles in his arm, and almost tore them out by the roots. His mind shrieked with pain messages. He almost lost consciousness.

  Grosvenor was a badly shaken man when that sensation faded into nothingness. These were all illusions. No such things were happening anywhere, not in his body, not in that of the bird being. His brain was receiving a pattern of impulses through his eyes, and was misinterpreting them. In such a relationship, pleasure could become a pain, any stimulus could produce any feeling. He hadn’t counted on the misinterpretations being so violent.

  He forgot that as his lips were caressed by something soft and squishy. A voice said, “I am loved—” Grosvenor rejected the meaning. No, not “loved.” It was, he believed, his own brain again trying to interpret sense phenomena from a nervous system that was experiencing a reaction different from any comparable human emotion. Consciously, he substituted the words. “I am stimulated by—” and then let the feeling run its course. In the end, he still didn’t know what it was that he had felt. The stimulation was not unpleasant. His taste buds were titillated by a sense of sweetness. A picture of a flower came into his mind. It was a lovely, red, Earth carnation and thus could have no connection with the flora of the Riim world.

  Riim! he thought. His mind poised in tense fascination. Had that come to him across the gulf of space? In some irrational way, the name seemed to fit. Yet no matter what came through, a doubt would remain in his mind. He could not be sure.

  The final series of sensations had all been pleasant. Nevertheless, he waited anxiously for the next manifestation. The light remained dim and hazy. Then once more his eyes seemed to water. His feet suddenly itched intensely. The sensation passed, leaving him unaccountably hot and weighed by a suffocating lack of air.

  “False!” he told himself. “Nothing like this is happening.”

  The stimulations ceased. Again there was only the steady throbbing sound, and the all-pervasive blur of light. It began to worry him. It was possible that his method was right and that, given time, he would eventually be able to exercise some control over a member, or a group of members, of the enemy. But time was what he could not spare. Every passing second brought him a colossal distance nearer personal destruction. Out there — here (for an instant he was confused) — in space, one of the biggest and costliest ships ever built by men was devouring the miles at a velocity that had almost no meaning.

  He knew which parts of his brain were being stimulated. He could hear a noise only when sensitive areas at the side of the cortex received sensations. The brain surface above the ear, when titillated, produced dreams and old memories. In the same way, every part of the human brain had long ago been mapped. The exact location of stimulation areas differed slightly for each individual, but the general structure, among humans, was always the same.

  The normal human eye was a fairly objective mechanism. The lens focused a real image on the retina. To judge by the pictures of their city, as transmitted by the Riim folk, they, also, possessed objectively accurate eyes. If he could coordinate his visual centres with their eyes, he would receive dependable pictures.

  More minutes went by. He thought, in sudden despair, is it possible that I’m going to sit here the full five hours without ever making a useful contact? For the first time, he questioned his good sense in committing himself so completely to this situation. When he tried to move his hand over the control lever of the encephalo-adjuster, nothing seemed to happen. A number of vagrant sensations came, among them the unmistakable odour of burning rubber.

  For the third time, his eyes watered. And then, sharp and clear, a picture came. It flashed off as swiftly as it had flashed on. But to Grosvenor, who had been trained by advanced tachistoscopic techniques, the after-image remained as vivid in his mind as if he had had a leisurely look.

  It seemed as if he were in one of the tall, narrow buildings. The interior was dimly lighted by the reflections from the sunlight that came through the open doors. There were no windows. Instead of floors, the residence was fitted with catwalks. A few bird people were sitting on these walks. The walls were lined with doors, indicating the existence of cabinets and storage areas.

  The visualization both excited an
d disturbed him. Suppose he did establish a relationship with this creature whereby he was affected by its nervous system, and it by his. Suppose he reached the point where he could hear with its ears, see with its eyes, and feel to some degree what it felt. These were sensory impressions only.

  Could he hope to bridge the gap and induce motor responses in the creature’s muscles? Would he be able to force it to walk, turn its head, move its arms, and generally, make it act as his body? The attack on the ship was being made by a group working together, thinking together, feeling together. By gaining control of one member of such a group, could he exercise some control over all?

  His momentary vision must have come through the eyes of one individual. What he had experienced so far did not suggest any kind of group contact. He was like a man imprisoned in a dark room, with a hole in the wall in front of him covered with layers of translucent material. Through this filtered a vague light. Occasionally, images penetrated the blur, and he had glimpses of the outside world. He could be fairly certain that the pictures were accurate. But that did not apply to the sounds that came through another hole on a side wall, or the sensations that came to him through still other holes in the ceiling and floor.

  Human beings could hear frequencies up to twenty thousand vibrations a second. That was where some races started to hear. Under hypnosis, men could be conditioned to laugh uproariously when they were being tortured, and shriek with pain when tickled. Stimulation that meant pain to one life form could mean nothing at all to another.

  Mentally, Grosvenor let the tensions seep out of him. There was nothing for him to do but relax and wait.

  He waited.

  It occurred to him presently that there might be a connection between his own thoughts and the sensations he received. That picture of the inside of the building — what had he thought just before it came? Principally, he recalled, he had visualized the structure of the eye.