Selected Stories

by Eddy C. Bertin

  "The whole thing is your fault, S-76. Your stupid idea of opening all the lenses at the same time gave him the initial shock that started the whole mess."

  "Discussing past errors of judgment is of no avail now, gentlemen. Maybe this return into subjectivity will turn out for the best. If he returns far enough, maybe we'll find the base of his instability, the starting point of all tubereacs."

  "But when will he stop? He just can't go on and on till he's a blubbering six-month-old baby. We have to return the Needle, no use losing all that expensive equipment. We'll have to find another guinea pig and start all over again."

  “Why? Even if we return the Needle, we can't do anything with it, it's all fitted and adapted to his brain-patterns. We send the Needle out to discover what sends a man mad beyond Venus and psychotic or not, we'll learn it from him. The Needle MUST continue."

  "But he's INSANE right now! There must be a way to end this psychosis, some cure or shock therapy which we can put through to him, even in his condition."

  "He's had all this, after his first marriage was canceled. A dally dose of subliminal images through his viewphone at the office. The therapy was stopped when they thought him normal again, especially as there were at that time several more urgent cases of tubereacs to deal with. But he wasn't cured, as Dr. Marge found out, he only put it all deeper and deeper in his subconscious, and now he has opened all the dark caves of his mind."

  "There must be a plug even for this hole. He's living in memories, in hallucinations, right now, isn't he? Can't we produce some of our own and shock him back to reality?"

  "We can always try, though you realize that we're very limited when dealing with the Needle."

  Slowly I feel myself going through the dark sea of nothingness, although the stars don't move. They keep on staring at me, a hideous painting of dead eyes, something out of a nightmare, a surrealistic three-dimensional freak painting. And I am going out and out, and the fear is crawling around in my nonexistent belly as some rare bee-fie in the killing bottle.... But I don't have anything to fear, really, have I? I don't exactly know where I am, and why I am here, but surely there is a reason for my being here, and moving here. There always is a reason for everything. Soon now, school will be finished, and the speakvisionoperators will transmit their "lesson finished" signal. I will take off my earcaps, and take my fingers from the electrowriter, and then I'll leave with the hated others. Toby B-65 will be there, and Harvill 00-3A, and Mac 33, and Ho-Ling 98-C, and all the girls with their tattooed legs and neck-blouses, leaving their breasts free, and I'll have to keep myself from staring at them. They're all too big and too heavy for their age, ever since they started distributing the hormopills at the age of twelve.

  The corridor will fill with their secret whisperings and stupid giggling. I'll have to face them, knowing that they all know by now about my unsuccessful meeting with Caroll D-1226. I should have known that the stolen energeopill was cheap stuff, and that I wouldn't be able to give it to her three times in a row. I'm afraid to pass them, but it's no use staying here till they're all in the recreation rooms. I tried it once, but then the screen had flared up with DESK 5 WHY DON’T YOU LEAVE? I had mumbled something, but then they had come and taken me to that special room where they began asking all those funny questions. No, it is better to go now, and walk through that endless corridor of mocking smiles and remarks. I'll just ignore them. Maybe later I can slip out of recreation room VN-77 and go out for a walk in the synthopark. There I'll be alone, looking upward to the dark velvet with the diamond tears. I'll watch them till the tears come into my eyes, till they seem to fail down on me.

  "Maybe this will help. There isn't much else we can do. Now, send this tape through the emitter, and try to make his brain project it as deafly as possible. We can't be sure, of course, how well a projection will succeed on the insides of the lenses."

  A shadow moving in the emptiness? Something alive? That's impossible, there's no atmosphere here, so there can be no life. Yet it is beside me, growing, colors flowing into shapes. An enormous face is materializing. It is looking at me lovingly, a deep understanding glance. It brings tears to my eyes. I am crying now, my tears are white pearls falling away from me. I cry from love for that face, which is growing and reshaping from a spectral protoplasm. This is the woman I know, the woman I love, and have searched for so long. I stretch my arms out to her. Yes, yes, I'm coming to you! But what is that?

  Who is that man? That little man who leaves me and is running to the woman? A small, idiotic, distored man, who stops now and is staring at the enormous face. The figure doesn't stir, yet now I can see the face of the man, a grown-up man, but his eyes are the staring eyes of a madman, his tongue hangs out of his mouth, dripping saliva onto his chin. A man whose face I know. I... I do not know it. I do not know that man.

  SAY IT, DAMN YOU! REMEMBER THAT FACE. REMEMBER.

  Voices. My own voice maybe, multiplied by echoes? Why should I say that to myself? I don't know that face. I don't want to.

  REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. WHO IS THAT MAN? REMEMBER.

  The words are drumming in my radio-ears, a voodoo drum. The voices continue. Why don't they stop? I don't want to remember that face. I DON'T WANT TO.

  REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER.

  NO, NO, NO!

  REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER. REMEMBER.

  NO NO NO NO

  REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEM-

  STOP IT, STOP IT! YES, I REMEMBER. I REMEMBER. I KNOW THAT MAN. I AM THAT MAN.

  BUT THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE. I AM HERE. I HAVE JUST LEFT SCHOOL. I CAN'T BE THAT MAN.

  YOU ARE THAT MAN. YOU ARE THAT MAN.

  I CAN'T BE. WHY DON'T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE? WHY DO THEY KEEP ON TORTURING ME? I HATE THEM. ALWAYS TRYING TO MAKE ME REMEMBER THINGS I DON'T WANT TO REMEMBER. THEY'RE ALL THERE, THE SMILING AND MOCKING FACES OF THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF MY ROOM, AND THE CORRIDOR STRETCHES ENDLESSLY BEFORE ME.

  I WALK THROUGH THEM, I HATE THEM, I HATE THEM! HATE. RECOGNITION. SOMETHING IN ME RECOGNIZES!

  THOSE WHITE LIGHTS OUTSIDE, THEY FORM A PATTERN, AND I KNOW THAT PATTERN, I FLOW INTO IT, I RESPOND COMPLETELY TO IT, AND IT IS ME AND I AM IT, TWO BLUEPRINTS OVERLAP AND COMPLETE, WE'RE FREE, I'M FREE!

  STOP IT! STOP THE PROJECTION, SOMETHING'S GOING WRONG. STOP THE PROJECTION AND TURN BACK THE NEEDLE, QUICK NOW, BE QUICK.

  I'LL SHOW THEM! I RAISE MY FISTS AND I STRIKE OUT, I SMASH INTO THEIR CURSED MOCKING FACES, I GRIP THEM AND THROW THEM AGAINST THE WALLS AS PAPER DOLLS. I BREAK THEIR BONES BY BRUTE FORCE, THEY ARE JUST AS TOYS TO ME, PLAY SOLDIERS, STUPID LIFELESS DOLLS, THEY CRUSH BETWEEN MY FINGERS, FADE INTO TRAILS OF BLOODIED DUST, I DANCE ON THEM, STAMP ON THEM, WITH HANDS AND FEET, I AM LAUGHING AND CRYING BECAUSE I HATE THEM, OH! HOW I HATE THEM!

  Circuits are clicking, lamps explode as miniature novas, small red suns who quickly die. The rubber heart is beating and beating, pseudoblood is running through plastic veins.

  "Projection turned off. Now the transmitter."

  "Transmitter turned off."

  "Good. Tranquilizers, and quick."

  "Done."

  "No, you didn't."

  "But I did! Here, tranqies three to six, injected... That's funny, the control lights aren't burning. The brain should have had them."

  "Try ranges seven to nine."

  "Done. They don't work either!"

  "That's impossible, they can't fail ALL at the same time. Something's going very wrong. ATTENTION! ALL CONTROL UNITS OF THE NEEDLE. EMERGENCY PLAN THREE. START SIDE CONTROL AT THE NEEDLE. TRY ALL TRANQIES UP TO RANGE FOURTEEN. BEGIN CLOSING OFF CENTRAL PROPULSION. THEN START SIDEWARD PROPULSION AND BEGIN OPERATIONS FOR TURNING THE NEEDLE."

  "Sideward propulsion isn't working."

  "Central propulsion refuses to stop!"

  "EMERGENCY PLAN FIVE. CLOSE ALL LENSES OF THE NEEDLE. TRANQIES RANGE SIXTEEN, IMMEDIATELY ON THE BRAIN. SLOW DOWN HEARTBEAT AND RESPIRATION."

>   "They don't work! My God, NONE OF THEM WORKS!"

  "None of the control units works. He has turned them off somehow."

  "But that's impossible. That would mean that..."

  "Exactly. We can't turn the Needle back, because it's ours no longer. He has taken over completely."

  "His position. H-65, ask the comp to calculate his exact position right now.”

  "Done already. The same point where the other ships failed."

  "Then there's no doubt possible: his return in subjective time was more than only an escape mechanism! Something has been influencing him, maybe from the very start, unnoticed by us; just as it has influenced the others before him."

  "Then it must be a completely unknown force, a mental power strong enough to dive into the subconscious parts of a man's brain, and unlock something which even we have been unaware of. That force, whatever it turns out to be, has given him the power to seize control of the Needle and close all our control units down."

  "Not that force itself, but that which it has freed from his subconscious.”

  "Who can tell? We can't even guess if it's artificial or not. It can be something out of his own mind, or something else, like a cloud of energy that moves around the sun at those coordinates, a form of psychic energy undetectable by our instruments."

  "No, it has to be something else. The reaction started with his first sight of the naked stars. The second shock reaction came when he passed the Venus orbit. It would have to be something with a pattern... remember the words of the brain? RECOGNITION... THOSE WHITE LIGHTS OUTSIDE, THEY FORM A PATTERN. IT IS ME AND I AM IT... TWO BLUEPRINTS. WE'RE FREE. I'M FREE! What about a pattern of stars?"

  "There's no way of finding out right now. He, or else that which has taken him over, is in full control of the Needle now. But the instruments are still sending, he hasn't turned them off, only those by which we could control him."

  Slowly time flows on, through unending landscapes of lightpointed darkness, sparkling energy beacons on clouded velvet. Sometimes I think I have slept, but I can't be sure. I am going quicker. Slowly, I begin to see the sun. I really begin to SEE the sun.

  SUN. The right words don't exist to tell what I see. It is a blazing ball, a firecrown in the heart of the universe. A burning eye in the chaotic center of nothingness. Flames as lazy tongues, slowly they rise and sink down again, as a slowed-down picture. A star of everlasting morning, but not lighting the darkness around it.

  The sun is my companion now. The sun is always, unending. The sun is the indisputable empress of space, blazing through all eternity in anger and fury, a tyrant, a queen, a mother. Her burning arms reach out for me. She begins to mingle with the other images in the stars. Now she is burning above a rock landscape, and hairy things who walk on two legs are kneeling before her. Then she becomes the eye of a gray-greenish monstrosity of teeth and nails, whose shriek seeds fear into the jungle. The images change, and now all is silent, a world of red lava, and a petrified sun above it, so red that I can't stare into it. But I am warm and safe, protected from everything. There is a constant static movement in time and space, and I am part of it. I am dozing, I am content. Then suddenly there is chaos, fear, eruption. I am rejected by Mother, falling into darkness and fear, into fight and terror. Burning, painful light everywhere, but it fades, and the darkness comes back; I want to go back to the darkness, where there is peace and rest and safety, return to sleep, endless dreamless sleep.

  Sometimes the voices speak to me, they order me to do things I don't want to do, and don't do. But they are fading too, and I just don't listen to them anymore.

  "That's it! That's the pattern of it all. Fools that we were, there's nothing out there, no unknown force, but man himself. Man and everything that is man has been inside him for centuries. We should have understood it as soon as his mind began returning to the past. Man has memories reaching further back than his own life, patterns endlessly repeated on his very brain cells, racial memories of the time when reptiles walked the earth, and even further. Man grew out of the molecules and atoms of earth, and they left their traces imprinted on the cellular brain construction of man. Deep down in the subconscious it has been waiting for something, maybe a pattern of stars from the time when the earth was closer to the sun after its birth, to wake it. Now he is retreating fully, milliards of years in time, though time has no meaning left now. The world's past becomes one with his own, can't you see that? Don't you understand what symbol the sun has become to him? He is disintegrating himself, going beyond unbirth."

  There is only ME now. I am a small needlepoint in eternity, a lost miniature planet, a tumbling meteor. The stars are far lightning, unimportant.

  There is only the sun, gaping, vomiting fire, a hell mouth, and yet inviting, awaiting. I like the sun, it's the only thing alive in this universe, except me. The sun is more real than the strange voices who keep on whispering. I could shut them off if I wanted to, but I just don't care. I am gathering speed, as a leaf in a sucking river. The stars unfold around me, as small flowers.

  An eye, a burning eye looking at me, a hand, a beckoning hand, an outstretched hand, an expecting hand. For me.

  I have been bad, I have left Mother, and then I couldn't find her. But now I have found her back, and I'm going home. The naked rays beat upon my brain, patterns of bloody rivers appear on my eyes, they crack, they burn! Want. Desire. Go back. I'm breathing slower, and slower. My body tries to bend forward, but I have no hands and no body. Steel cables writhe as mad snakes in my insides. I am burning inside, but it is not important. I begin to melt, but I don't feel anything. Mother is speaking to me, with the soft voices of a million dead stars. Mother is loving me, rocking me gently in her protuberant arms. Mother needs me, Mother loves me!

  I am glowing red now, a little sun of my own, I am changing shape, going quicker and quicker. I can't see now. I'm going back. Back home. To Mamma.

  The Whispering Thing

  I have known Harvey Denver, since we were both four years old. We went together to kindergarten, and thereafter to the same small-village school. We shared the same friends, the same enemies and a dislike for the same teacher. We enjoyed the same games and hobbies, almost as two brothers. To his memory, I will now write the real facts, as much as I know them or want to know them, about that summer day, many years back now, when I ran screaming from the graveyard where Harvey was buried.

  Maybe you'll think them part of a boy's nightmare, something which doesn't or can't happen in this nice, safe little world of ours, where there is no place for the unknown, the impossible. I know otherwise, and I don’t care if you believe me or not. There is no proof, not any more. The only proof is in my brain, where it has been haunting me ever since, always returning in nightmares, in a fear for dark places. But maybe this is the way to whip it all out of my mind, where every detail is engraved, our walks together, the ruins and the whispering

  It started the summer when we both became nine years. We were born the same year, Harvey in April and I in June, which made him the natural leader for our two-man expeditions, the more as he was bigger and stronger than myself. After schooltime, we enjoyed taking long walks to go and play in the forest, which was about a kilometer from our village. The wood was nothing exceptional, a bunch of trees and bushes, thrown together by playful nature, but to us it was paradise. Usually, we didn't go deep into the wood; we had felt once (on our behinds) the troubles which arose when we had stayed out too late. Also, the forest became soon much thicker and darker, and we still feared to get lost someday.

  We didn't believe any longer in witches and gnomes, but we still feared the dark, even if we would never confess it. Still, on a free afternoon, with time to spare, we penetrated much deeper than usual. It was then that we found the house, or what was still left of it. That wasn't much —just the entrance to a cellar, a mass of stones and part of one crumbling side-wall, miraculously still standing, like a sentinel. It must have been a very small house, mostly built of timber, that l
ater on had been used for other purposes. Only the cellar seemed to be intact. Curious, we went and looked into the black hole, waiting each for the other to go in first, it would have to be Harvey, of course. But he didn’t seem very anxious to enter. He descended two steps, bent and looked once again.

  "Can't see a thing," he whispered.

  "Of coarse not, how could you?" I answered, whispering too.

  "There isn’t a single window, anywhere. Must be dark as hell, down there.”

  I don't know why we whispered. Maybe it was the loneliness of the ruins of the house, the dampness which welled up out of the dark cave in gulps of foul air. I shivered, although it wasn't cold at all, but somehow the warmth couldn't quite reach me.

  "Could there be anyone there?" Harvey asked. His voice, soft as he spoke, seemed to bounce back against the spiderwebbed cellar walls and return to us in a hollow whispering, like some lost voice, drifting of on far-away winds.

  "Are you crazy?" I hushed him. "Who could live in a hole like this? There's nothing there. Come on, let's go and play somewhere else."

  Our voices answered out of the dark entrance. The lonely, crumbling bitten through by time, the damp steps, leading down into the abyss of shadows, almost seemed to radiate a feeling of there's no right word for it. Something old, unholy, something evil —evil especially to us, intruders in its domain.