Selected Stories

by Eddy C. Bertin

  NO, YOU CAN'T FEEL ANYTHING, THERE IS NOTHING TO BE FELT. YOU'RE JUST A BIG MACHINE, THAT'S ALL.

  I try to fight the realization that if I accept what they say, then I'll know that I'm completely mad, that I'm living in a hallucination from which there's no escape.

  THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE. I FEEL MY HANDS, MY FEET. I FEEL THEM!

  QUITE INTERESTING, AND LOGICAL. ALTHOUGH THEY HAVE BEEN AMPUTATED, YOUR BRAIN STILL KEEPS ON RECEIVING IMPULSES, WHICH IT INTERPRETS AS COMING FROM YOUR BODY. OTHER SIMILAR CASES ARE KNOWN WHERE PEOPLE LOST AN ARM OR A LEG IN AN ACCIDENT, AND WHEN WAKING UP IN THE MED CENTER, COMPLAINED OF PAIN IN THEIR HANDS OR FEET. YOU'LL LOSE THAT FEELING IN SOME TIME, WHEN YOU'LL HAVE LEARNED TO INTERPRET THE SENSATION AS WHAT IT REALLY IS. THE AUTOMATIC TURNING OF A LEVEL, THE CRAWLING OF THE HANDS OVER THE FACE OF A DIAL, THE PASSING OF AN ELECTRIC CURRENT THROUGH A CONTACT.

  BUT I'M NOT TRAINED FOR ANYTHING. YOU CAN'T JUST SEND ME INTO SPACE, YOU CAN'T...

  Is there someone laughing? The voice is neutral, yet it seems cynical. WE CAN'T? WE HAVE TOLD YOU: YOU'RE ON YOUR WAY! AT THE MOMENT YOUR SPEED IS ONE HUNDRED TWENTY KILOMETERS PER SECOND, AND IT IS INCREASING EVERY MILLISECOND. I DON'T BELIEVE IT. YOU DON'T HAVE TO NOW. YOU'LL ACCEPT IT SOON ENOUGH. Impossible. But they mustn't keep quiet, silence will end in madness, here where I can't move, can't see. I have to find out where I really am, what they have done to me. Maybe they really took out my brain, and are now all staring at it. So I speak again, I have to keep on talking, then I don't have to think. HOW LONG... WILL IT TAKE.?

  NO NEED FOR YOU TO OCCUPY YOURSELF WITH TIME. TIME HAS NO MEANING WHERE YOU ARE NOW. WE'LL TELL YOU WHEN THE JOURNEY'S FINISHED. THAT, TOO, WILL BE SOON ENOUGH.

  BUT... I CAN'T DO ANYTHING. HOW DO I STOP, ACCELERATE, TURN BACK, DO ANYTHING AT ALL?

  WE'LL DO ALL THAT FOR YOU.

  AND I CAN'T EVEN SEE.

  THAT CAN BE HELPED.

  Suddenly there is a glittering point in the shadow world of my mind, as a star forming in the dark. Then another, and another, they spring up out of nowhere, and suddenly TERROR, CHAOS, MY EYES, THEY BURN.

  My eyes, they burn with the light of a thousand stars, all around, above me, beside me, under me, I see them all at the same time, as a thousand burning eyes staring at me, a surrealistic nightly landscape of unmoving points, and in between the shadowslopes of unending nothingness and cosmic dustclouds.

  Dizziness, vertigo cramps my stomach, which they said doesn't exist, but I can't think. I am turning around and around, failing, falling into that nothingness, between those thousand points of light. They are changing now, their light dims, and they open and stare at me, from everywhere. Thousands of eyes, good eyes, eyes of old women, then they turn red, very slowly. They begin dripping strings of blood pearls between the clouds of darkness, shapes begin to form among them, fearful faces of old women, with scared smiles around their wrinkled mouths. So many pictures of fear, yes, and also of love, love, love; now the smiles are getting wider, the mouths split, toothless red mouths from ear to ear. A thousand electric knives in my thousand hands, and they cut and cut and I can't stop them. The mouths vomit blood, and spit it at me in slow-dripping clouds of red. The thousand knives are shaking uncontrollably between my wet fingers, while I hate and desire and love the old women. The rivers of blood stream between the stars; they're drowning them, suffocating them. Why doesn't the blood stop flowing? It approaches me with its sticky fingers, but no, they're my own hands, my own fingers, all red and dripping. There is no getting away from them; I drop the thousand knives. There's no escape from all the eyes, the staring dead eyes all around; they stare and drip scarlet into my naked brain, an enormous petrified landscape, they read my thoughts, they make them real. I must get away, must get away, their stares are burning, and I can't close my eyes on them, must get away. Must GET AWAY. MUST GET AWAY, AWAY, AWAY, AWAY, AWAY.

  Far away, below in the underground control rooms, alarm lights were flickering up all over the instrument panels, and hands began running across dials as drunk insects.

  "The dials have gone mad! Damn, what's happening? S-76, what have you done to cause this?"

  "How should I know what happened? He said he couldn't see, so I opened the lenses outside on the Needle. But he reacts as a lunatic."

  "The strain has been too much in too short a time. Shock reaction, back to the moment of his crime. We must get him away from that point, it's too dangerous."

  "The only trigger I can imagine is the sight of the stars. After all, we did expect a mild reaction, but certainly not this."

  "Close the lenses. All of them."

  "But then we can't--"

  "SHUT THE LENSES, ALL OF THEM!"

  Darkness comes, but the blood stays. Slowly it crawls through the veins, nursing my brain with synthetic fluids; it seeps into the cells of my existence, poisons them, easily, slowly, deliberately. I can't see, I don't want to see. Outside, there is the sound of a million indifferent stars; softly they cry for me. They whisper to me, as mother, dear mother, my dear mother, who never existed.

  "But I don't see how only the sight of the stars could trigger a reaction like this."

  "Remember that from the earth only about five thousand stars at most are visible with the naked eye, the atmosphere closes off all the rest. Beyond the atmosphere, that number is quite higher, but that's beside the real point. Which is that he doesn't see with two eyes as a normal human being. He sees with sixteen lenses, clustered all around the body of the Needle, around his body, as stiples on a spider's back. HE SEES IN ALL DIRECTIONS AT THE SAME TIME. Try to imagine a man imprisoned in a closed bowl which is completely covered with mirrors inside, giving light, so that he is able to see inside, everything in all directions. This is more or less the effect open space has on him, a complete and utterly terrifying alienation."

  "Then he must be able to conquer that alienation. Our astronauts have learned to accept this with their sixteen telescreens."

  "But can't you see that it isn't the same? Those astronauts could choose to watch whatever they wanted on whatever screen they preferred. He hasn't a choice, the lenses are his eyes!"

  "Then he'll have to learn to use them. Open the lenses, slowly this time, one after another, lens after lens, so that he has to accept them one by one."

  "He won't. His brain won't accept them, I tell you, it isn't able to take that much information at the same time."

  "Then whatever goes wrong or went wrong is your fault, S-76. You should have foreseen this, you should never have opened all the lenses. I'll have to mention it on your next report."

  The bespectacled man in white turned to his machines. His outstretched fingers playfully touched them, softly, caressing them as a lover's hand. The red light mirrored crimson in his spectacles; he seemed an extention of the machines. "Damn that time-lag between our conversation," he murmured, "heaven knows what is going on outside there, what has happened, before we learn of it here."

  The voice out of space was silent now, but the instruments in the Needle loyally continued transmitting their observations. Clinking, rattling, everything taken straight out of the brain of the semihuman being which once had been given the name Charles Harkson-8. The silent facts told the men in white more than did the voice itself.

  I am walking on an enormous chess field, a battlefield. The players wear skeleton faces, and they rise out of rivers of blood flowing between the squares. There is no escaping the blood. As a continuously growing amoeba it drifts silently between the stars, dripping its poisonous feelers over my eyes, through my eyes into my naked helpless brain, and I can't close my eyes, can't shut off my brain to it. A player appears, a white phantom figure, two dimensional: a reflection of my opponent? He has no depth, no real menace; I discard him and he changes into a mass of blood which flows down onto the field, and disappears. Another appears. He is dressed in silk, unreal, approaching me as a moth drawn by light. He is a moving, pulpillating amoeba of dark light; I burn his wings and he changes into an
eye, staring at me accusingly, then he becomes darker and darker, and is gone. Strings of pearls rise from the field, very white, very innocent, but rust-colored blood crawls over them as a hideous caterpillar. I fear the blood, it disgusts me, and it is everywhere.

  She rises among the thousands of star-eyes, two red suns flare in her white-haired skull, burning, burning so bright, so dreadful. Her arm moves, and it is a part of the galaxy which is displaced by the movement, carelessly thrown beside. You're just nothing, she whispers, but it is the voice of a million radio-waves from a million dying stars which thunders in my ears. Why do you come to me, when the only thing you can do is sit there, panting, looking up at me as a dog? You aren't a man. You aren't real. You're nothing. Why can't you do SOMETHING?

  Mars is a red rubine in her toothless mouth, and a few stardrops glide along her long legs as she moves against the background of eternal darkness, as a fading projection. I want to hold her, I need her. I need her.

  "Damn, damn, damn! What is happening with that... thing? It acts as if it had received a strong dose of psychedelics. The initial shock reaction should be gone by now. He should have full control of his brain-centers by now, but he just isn't reacting normally to ANYTHING.

  "That moment of shock must have triggered something which has been building up for many years, a chained beast in the dark caves of his mind. It's almost incredible that the psychmeds haven't discovered it; must have been hidden in the deepest centers of the unconsciousness. Anyway, it isn't fading away as we hoped, and we're stuck with it, like it or not."

  "Then I suggest an artificial psychoshock to restore him to normality."

  "To normality? H-35, the time of primitive shock therapy is long past, if you will please remember this. We have placed it him in a situation no human being has ever been before. We can't foretell the effects of a second shock."

  "But that brain is MAX! We can't trust anything it transmits to us; all that information and we can't do ANYTHING with it!"

  "Of course not, we're receiving hallucinations, not objective truths, not even his real subjective reactions to what he sees. What we get are images out of his own mind, superimposing upon his reactions to outer space; changed in shape and meaning. He is distorting reality, changing it and adapting it to his own needs. The brain is at war with itself, and to save itself, the submerged has taken over: we see space all that information and we can't do ANYTHING with it!"

  "But we can't do anything with that! We need information about space out there, we have to know how a normal brain reacts to the conditions we've imposed on it. Not the ravings of a psychotic?'

  "And we're obtaining information, F-54. They are distorted, as if the lenses were looking inward as well as outward. Outer space and the space inside his brain have come together."

  "Yes, but how long will it take to sort out what is important to us, the ssentials we need?"

  "How should I know? The only thing for us to do is try shaping it into something that makes sense. Some kind, any kind, of sense! But it hardly matters, does it? If we make the Needle turn back now, we're losing everything. If we let it continue, there's still a chance that the brain will restore itself to sanity." "All right then. Let the Needle continue."

  Outward, I am speeding. It is as if I can sense the movement, the steady acceleration. I can see it, and then again I can't. It's strange, confusing. It's as if I'm looking through a murky glass into a dark room, and in THAT dark room... so on. I can see all the dark rooms and shrouded glasses, endlessly going on, and I, I am falling into them, shards of glass keep on splintering on all sides, as I crash through glass upon glass upon glass outward, inward? How can I know? I am Charles Harkson-8, and I am dead. They say I'm a convicted and executed paranoid murderer; but then again I can't be Harkson-8, because I am the thing they call the Needle, I am a part of the instrument panel and its metal hide. My nerve endings are electric cells and circuits. My feet are photon streams, and I am pushing myself forward, swimming, diving into the darkness of all the rooms, which are getting smaller all the time. Fighting the current, with microscoping strokes, against the tides of the space-dust sea, against waves of burning light and clouds of impenetrable black. I am a rubber heart, pumping synthetic blood and feeding fluids through my plastic veins. I am Man, or let's say PART of man, going out to meet space, to greet darkness. Why do they insist that I'm Harkson-8? I am afraid of him, afraid of what he's done, afraid of what he might do. He's looking at me, from the heart of my body, and his eyes are very clouded and stating. I cannot be Harkson-8; he remembers, he remembers too much, and I do not want to remember. I do not want to remember.

  The park is a green sea of synthetically grown grass, with white islands on it, drifting away on timewinds for the years they have left. They are all there, the Old People, sitting and resting; they keep on living with plastic lungs and transplant hearts, some even with teleeyes when their own have worn out. They live through youth, returning all the time through eternity. Mummies with crawling insect hands and blind eyes. My father, you never knew what grew out of your seed. My mother, you never saw the child you gave to the world. Uncaring for each other, and each uncared for, there they sit, the dummy people, as curiosa in a public museum. They sit, they stand, sometimes they talk, a few hushed words, without feeling, without meaning except to themselves. Only the Watchers care for them, and they're paid heavy wages for it, because it means real work. I am walking through their endless rows, looking up and down on them as on cold lifeless statues. My hands are still shaking, after my last fight with Marge. I have left her without another word, but her insane accusations and her naked contempt still hover above me as a cloak. The old woman is only sitting there, her hands fluttering.

  PLEASE CLOSE YOUR MOUTHS, I CAN'T HEAR, I CAN'T HEAR, THE RED IS DROWNING ME, PLEASE STOP THAT SILENT SCREAM, WHY DON'T YOU STOP IT? SHUT OFF THE RED PLEASE, STOP IT. ANYONE STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT PLEASE PLEASE. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEEEEEEEEEE

  Pain all over my body, but they said I have no body; how can I feel pain? My hands and legs and brain, they're burning with red and blue fire, and I can't stand it, I scream and scream, a dead scream continuing and continuing, but no, it's him screaming, it's HIM it's HIM stop the pain please stop the pain please...

  Silence. Darkness.

  "It was the only alternative. We had to take the risk this time, unless we wanted a complete catatonic withdrawal on our hands."

  "Yes, the electroshock has him unconscious now. But how do we continue from here? What will he do now?"

  "I don't know. No one can know. It... he's asleep. But he's still emitting..."

  Marge, with the soft and slightly too thick lips, and her great empty eyes. Marge, to whom I can speak of all my troubles. Marge, who always understands. Always understands. Always understands.

  I remember the moving plastic texture of her dress as I lay my head in her lap. Slowly I'm descending on it, as a tired bird returning to its nest. Looking upward from there, I see her face, an enormous madonna of flesh-tinted stone. It is time-suspended in the nothingness above me, as an idol looking down between dustclouds; her mouth is smiling, partly hidden by her big breasts. My fingers crawl as crabs along her thighs, they finger the photoelectric cells, opening her dress. Now I feel the softness and warmth of her skin against my face, her laugh as my hair tickles her belly. The pounding of her heart drums into my ears, and begins to influence my own blood rhythm.

  She speaks: "I wonder why you ever asked me to sign a four-year marriage. I'll be glad when it's over. You don't need me. You don't need a real woman. The only thing you want is affection, not love, and you can't give anything in return. You're content having someone caring for you. But you don't give ANYTHING in return... "

  "We'll never get this mess sorted out. This is no job for us, we aren't qualified for that. We need a good psychmed."

  "Out of the question, we can't bring an outsider in. We must work it out ourselves, with the assistance of the psychcomp. There mus
t be something that makes sense in his behavior; some semilogical pattern to which he is adapting. Once we have discovered which one, we can try to reverse the process."

  Dimly through Marge, I can also see the other woman, the woman from the old painting, not a syncolori, but a REAL painting, with mixed colored substances put on canvas. That woman with the giving eyes, who is bent over and feeding the small child. The woman who looks like Marge; or rather is it Marge whose face reminds me of that woman? How can I tell?

  After my working hours there's the long time to kill, the many hours with nothing to do. Then I go over to the Old Museum, almost no one ever goes there now except me. I just sit on the chair, and look at the reflection of my own self in the colordimensions of the canvas. She does remind me of Marge... of Marge? Now why do I say that? Marge? Who is Marge? I don't know anyone by that name. I am painting that window into inner space-time myself, re-creating with a pencil of my mind and colors of my dreams every feature, the points of light in her eyes, the smoothness of the lines of her neck, the red crown of her bared nipple, the outstretched, wanting arms of the small child she's holding.

  "He... He's returning backward! The shock we gave helped him pass the panic scene, but he's on another sidetrack now, even further away from sanity."

  "What means sanity in his case? It's logical, in a way: his mind refused to accept a rehearsal of the amok scene, so to save him from complete collapse, it opened the channels to his own past. He's traveling backward in subjective time."

  "But why? Why doesn't he just..."

  "Can't you guess? We all know he's a tubereac, a mental throwback. They are a case apart in psychoanalysis. Something is inborn with them, which begins to distort their minds from early puberty. Finally this results in a complex search-pattern which dominates them, but not often is the end result such a violent amok murder as happened with this man. The instinct for mother-love dominates everything, though mostly they're unaware of it themselves. The old woman he cut to pieces was a symbol he had been searching for, and when she rejected him, he exploded. We learn very quickly when someone is a tubereac, and put them under strong psychcontrol. Harkson's first marriage was canceled when we found out about him, and psychcenter took all memories of this out of his mind. Then MedCent arranged his second marriage with Dr. Marge HR-889-Q. But even she couldn't give him what he wanted, so he transferred his love to the old woman, and killed her. His sane mind can't stand it, however; anything is preferable to remembering what really happened. So the present--his future--is closed to him, and the search has started again… backward this time."