More Than Superhuman

by A. E. van Vogt

  'I'm here at the pool,' John Hammond's voice told her. 'We've just fished his body out. Helen, the fellow is alive. Some reflex prevented any intake of water. But we'll need an oxygen tent.'

  Helen's left hand reached for another telephone. 'You want the ambulance?' she asked, starting to dial.

  'Yes. You have the street number. Tell them to pull up at the side gate. We have to act swiftly.'

  'Police uniforms, also?' Helen asked.

  Yes. But tell them to stay in the cab unless needed. We're out of sight, behind a high fence. And it's dark. I'll come back with them. Has Barbara been apprehended?'

  'No,' Helen said.

  'I really didn't expect she would be,' Hammond said. 'I'll question the guards when I get there.'

  * *

  Barbara had allowed Ames to escort her to the nearest elevator, while she continued to have him think that she was his mother.

  Once in the elevator, she pushed the up-button and came out presently on the roof. As she had already perceived, a helicopter was scheduled to take off. And though she was not an authorized passenger, the pilot took her along believing her to be his girl friend. Her sudden arrival seemed perfectly logical to him.

  A little later, he set her down on the roof of another building. And that, also, seemed the most natural act to him, her reason for going there obvious.

  He flew off and promptly forgot the episode.

  The hasty landing was an urgent necessity for Barbara. She could feel the new injection beginning to work. So in her scanning of the buildings flitting by below, she perceived one in which the upper floors were unoccupied.

  'I'll try to make it down to some office,' she thought. But she didn't get beyond the top floor. She actually began to stagger as she went down the first steps from the roof. And there was no mistaking. the out-of-control state of her body. To her left, a door opened into a warehouse-like loft. She weaved through it, closed it behind her, and bolted it. Then she half-lowered herself, half-fell to the floor.

  During that evening and night she never quite lost consciousness. Blackout was no longer possible for her. But she could feel her body changing, changing, changing —

  The energy flows inside her took on a different meaning. They were separate from her. Presently they would be controllable again, but in another fashion entirely.

  Something of Barbara seemed to disappear with that awareness.

  'I'm still me!' the entity thought as it lay there on the floor. 'Flesh, feeling, desire — '

  But she had the distinct realization that 'me' even in these early stages of the five-hundred-thousand-year transformations was ME PLUS.

  Exactly how the self was becoming something more was not yet clear.

  The slow night dragged by.

  XI

  Tuesday.

  Shortly before noon, Helen Wendell came along the hallway that led from John Hammond's quarters to the main office. Hammond was sitting at the far side of her desk. He glanced up at her as she approached.

  How are the patients?' he asked.

  'Gloge is role-perfect,' Helen said. 'I even allowed him to spend part of the morning talking to his assistants here. He's already had two conversations by Telstar with Sir Hubert about his new task overseas. I've put him to sleep again, but he's available. When did you come in?'

  'Just now. How's Strather?'

  Helen tapped the recorder. 'I checked with the MD machine on him twenty minutes ago,' she said. 'It gave me its opinion in detail. I took it all down. Do you want to hear it?'

  'Sum it up for me.'

  Helen pursed her lips; then: 'The MD verifies that he didn't swallow any water, that some newly developed brain mechanism shut off breathing and kept him in a state of suspended animation. Vince himself has no conscious memory of the experience, so it was evidently a survival act of the lower brain. MD reports other developments are taking place in Vince, regards them as freakish in nature. It's too soon to tell whether or not he can survive a third injection, He's under sedation.'

  Hammond looked dissatisfied. 'All right,' he said after a moment 'What else do you have for me?'

  'A number of transmitter messages,' Helen said.

  'About Gloge?'

  'Yes. New Brasilia and Manila agree with you that there are too many chances of a revealing slip-up if Dr Gloge remains at Research Alpha any longer than is absolutely necessary.'

  'You said Gloge is role-perfect.'

  Helen nodded. 'At the moment. But he is a highly recalcitrant subject, and naturally I can't give him the kind of final conditioning he'd get at Paris center. That's where they want him. The courier, Arnold, will take him aboard the Paris-jet at five-ten tonight.'

  'No!' Hammond shook his head. 'That's too early! Gloge is our bait to catch Barbara. His experiments indicate that she won't be able to function until sometime this evening. I calculate that somewhere around nine o'clock will be a good time to let Gloge out from behind the defense screens.'

  'Helen was silent a moment, then said, 'There seems to be a general feeling, John, that you're overestimating the possibilities of any really dangerous evolutionary developments in Barbara Ellington.'

  Hammond smiled tautly. 'I've seen her. They haven't Mind you, for all I know, she may be dead or dying of the effects of the third shot by now. But if she's capable of coming, I think she'll come. She'll want that fourth injection. She may start anytime looking for the man who can produce the serum for her.'

  By Tuesday a new awareness had come to Barbara.

  She had developed brain mechanisms that could do things with space — do them on an automatic level, without her conscious mind knowing what, or how. Fantastic things....

  As she lay there, a new nerve center in her brain reached out and scanned a volume of space 500 light-years in diameter. It touched and comprehended clouds of neutral hydrogen and bright young O-type stars, measured the swing of binaries, took a censuse of comets and ice asteroids. Far out in the constellation of Ophiuchus a blue-white giant was going nova, and the new, strange linkage in Barbara's mind observed its frantic heaving of spheres of radiant gas. A black dwarf emitted its last spray of infrared light and sank into the radiationless pit of dead star.

  Barbara's mind encompassed it all, and reached farther ... reached out effortlessly until it touched a specific Something ... and withdrew.

  Brimming with ecstasy, Barbara cried out in her mind, What did I touch?

  She knew it had been something the brain mechanism was programmed to search for. But no conscious perception was involved. All she could be sure of was that the nerve center seemed satisfied, and ceased its scanning.

  But she sensed, in an intensely happy way, that it remained aware of What it had contacted.

  She was still savoring the joy a while later when she became aware that the shifting energy flows inside her had resumed.

  Gradually, then, she permitted her body and mind to sink into a receptive state.

  Midsummer heat built up over the city throughout the day. In the locked room on the vacant top floor of the multistoried building three miles from Research Alpha, the heat grew stifling as the sun shifted overhead, began to beat in through closed, unshaded windows. Barbara, curled on her side on the dusty floor, did not move. Now and then she uttered a moaning sound: Sweat ran from her for a long, long time, as the heat increased; then the skin of her face dried and turned dirty white. She made no more sounds. Even a close study would not have been able to prove that she still breathed.

  By four o'clock the sunblaze had shifted past the windows, and the locked room lay in shadows. But it was another hour before the temperature in it gradually began to drop. About six, the curled figure moved for the first time.

  She straightened her legs slowly, then, with a sudden convulsive motion, rolled over on her back, lay flat, arms flung loosely to the sides.

  The right half of her face was smeared grotesquely with thick dust caked in drying sweat. She breathed — lay quiet again. Several minutes l
ater, her eyelids lifted. The eyes were a deep, brilliant blue, seemed oddly awake and alert, though they remained unfocused and did not shift about the room. After a while, the lids slowly closed and remained closed.

  The day darkened; the city's lights awoke. The empty warehouse stood silent. More than an hour passed before the figure in the room on the top floor moved again. This time, it was motion of a different order. She rose suddenly and quickly to her feet, went to the nearest window, and stood looking out through the dirt-stained glass.

  The towering Research Alpha complex was a glow of white light to the west The watcher's eyes turned toward it....

  A second of time went by. Then the mind that directed the eyes moved on an entirely new level of extended perception.

  Night-shift activities in the research complex were not essentially different from those of the day; but there were fewer people around as the awareness that was Barbara drifted along familiar, lighted hallways, about corners, dropped suddenly to a sublevel which contained the biology section. Here she flicked through the main laboratory and up a narrow corridor, pausing before the door to Dr Gloge's office.

  She moved through the door, paused in the dark and silent office, then moved on into the library. She remained a minute or two above the big safe in a corner of the library. Then she knew.

  The safe was empty — and trapped.

  The awareness flicked out of the library, shifted to the fifth floor of the complex, drifted toward a great black door showing the words: Scientific Liaison and Investigation. She stopped before it.

  Minutes passed as she slowly and carefully scanned the outer walls of John Hammond's offices and living quarters. Here was something new ... something that seemed very dangerous. Within the walls and doors, above the ceiling, below the flooring of this section, strange energies curled and crawled like twisting smoke.

  She could not pass through that barrier.

  But though she could not enter, her perceptions might, to some extent.

  She must avoid, she decided, both the front entry door and the secret elevator which led directly to Hammond's living quarters in the rear of the section. As the most obvious points for an intruder to consider, they were also the most formidably shielded.

  She shifted back along the hall to a point some twenty feet away from the massive black door, well back from the wall between her and the front office. She waited. Gradually a picture began to form...

  This was an unfamiliar room, the inner office of the section. There was no one in it, nothing of interest except a closed door across from the one which opened on the corridor.

  The inner office disappeared ... and what came next was no picture, but a surge of savage, demanding hunger.

  Startled, shocked, already feeling the pull that in a moment would hurl her into the murderous barriers about the section, the searching awareness instantly broke the thread of visual perception, went inactive to allow herself to stabilize.

  Nevertheless, she now knew where the serum was — in a strongroom of Hammond's quarters, heavily screened, seemingly inaccessible.

  Perception cautiously opened again. Another section of the living quarters appeared, hazy with hostile energies. The other — the male counterpart — was here. Alive.

  Here, but helpless. Here, but unconscious, in a cage of dark force which permitted no more than barest identification by the searcher. She was very glad he had been rescued.

  Minutes later, she knew there was no one else in Hammond's locked quarters. She withdrew visual perception from there, and let the picture of the main office develop. The blurred image of a woman — Helen Wendell — now seemed to be speaking into an instrument connected with the apparatus before her.

  A second band of perception opened, and voices, became indistinctly audible.

  Ganin Arnold, the New Brasilia courier, was making his final call from the city jetport, nine miles south of the Research Alpha complex.

  'The doors are being secured,' he said. He was speaking into a disguised microphone clamped over his mouth and nose, which had the appearance of the tranquilizing respirators many of the other jet passengers were using now in the last moments before lift-off. Even to anyone within inches of him, his voice would have remained completely inaudible. In John Hammond's office, it emerged clearly from the device on Helen Wendell's desk.

  'Lift-off for the nonstop jet to Paris,' Arnold went on, 'will follow' — he glanced at the watch on his wrist — 'in two minutes and thirty seconds. All passengers and every member of the 'crew have passed at least once through the measurement radius. Nothing which may have preceded or followed myself and our biologist aboard registers life-energy levels significantly above the standard Earther range — that is, of course, below six.

  'To sum it up, we definitely are not being accompanied to Paris by any abnormally high human evolutionary form. Dr Gloge's behavior has been excellent. His tranquilizer has begun to take effect, and he is showing signs of drowsiness. Undoubtedly, he will sleep soundly throughout the trip.'

  Arnold paused, apparently waiting for comment. When there was none, he resumed, 'As soon as the lift-field goes on, communication by this means, of course, will be impossible. Since nothing is likely to go wrong from this moment on, I suggest, if it's satisfactory to Mr. Hammond, that I end my report now.'

  Helen Wendell's voice, seeming to speak from a point just within the left side of the courier's skull, told him pleasantly, 'Mr. Hammond prefers you to remain alert and available for final instructions until the lift has begun.'

  XII

  In the locked room on the top floor of the empty warehouse a few miles east of Research Alpha, the womanshape standing at the window stirred suddenly out of the tranced immobility it had maintained for the past minutes. The head lifted, gaze sweeping the softly glowing night sky above the city. A hand moved, touching the thick windowpane probingly. The glass fell away like a big drop of melting ice.

  Dust swirled as cool air rushed in.

  Barbara waited, then moved closer to the opening.

  Her gaze swung to the west again, remained there. She listened. The myriad noises of the city were clear and distinct now. Overlying them was a thin fountain of skysound as, every thirty seconds — at this hour — a jet lifted vertically from the city port, cut in its engines, and vanished up into the night with a whistling shriek. Her head shifted quickly, briefly following the changing pattern of the sound. Then it steadied.

  Her gaze rose slowly, slanting to the north, following a moving, distant point in the night, eyes narrowed with intentness.

  * *

  On board the Paris jet which had left the city port a few minutes before, Dr Henry Gloge now had a very curious experience. Drowsily, almost on the verge of sleep, he had been contemplating the pleasant significance of his assignment today to Sir Hubert Roland's Paris project. Suddenly, then, there was a sensation of coming partly awake.

  He gazed around him with a rising sense of alarm, looking first of all at his seat companion.

  The fellow was big, heavily built. He looked like a police detective, and Gloge knew that the man was his guard. The curious thing was that he was slumped back in the seat, head lolling forward, eyes closed ... typical indications of a tranquilizer stupor.

  Gloge thought: 'Why is he asleep?' He had a strong conviction that it was he who should be unconscious. There was a clear memory of a device — an instrument totally unfamiliar to him — which the Wendell woman had used to implant a complete, compelling set of delusions in his mind. He had come willingly aboard the jet. And he had, at the suggestion of his guard, inhaled enough tranquilizing gas from the seat respirator to have kept him somnolent until the jet touched down in Paris.

  Instead, minutes later, he had come awake, the delusions of the day slipping from his mind!

  There must be an explanation for these apparently contradictory events.

  The thought ended. A feeling of blankness held him for a moment. Then came a churning wave of terror.
<
br />   Somewhere a voice had said: Yes, Dr Gloge — there is an explanation for this!'

  Slowly, against his every inclination, but completely unable to withstand the impulse, Dr Gloge turned, looked back. There was someone in the seat behind him.

  For an instant, it seemed to be a complete stranger. Then the eyes opened. They fixed on him, glowing brilliant demon-blue, even in the muted light of the jet.

  The woman spoke, and it was the voice of Barbara Ellington. 'We have a problem, Dr Gloge. There seems to be a group of extraterrestrials on this planet, and I still do not have any clear idea of what they are doing here. That's our immediate task — to find out.'

  * *

  You are where?' Helen Wendell said sharply.

  Her band flicked to the right, snapped a switch. A small view-screen on the right side of the desk lit up. She said? 'John - quick!'

  In the inner office, John, Hammond turned, saw the lit screen on the desk behind him. An instant later he was listening to the words tumbling hoarsely from the telephone speaker on his left. He said to Helen's tense pale profile in the screen to the right, 'Where is he?'

  'At the Des Moines jetport! The Paris jet put down for emergency repairs. Now nobody seems to understand just what was wrong with it or what repairs are needed. But the passengers have been disembarked, are to be transferred to another jet. Arnold's in a state of confusion and shock. Listen to him!'

  ' — there was a woman with him,' the courier's voice babbled. 'At the time, I thought it was one of the passengers who had come off the jet with us. Now I'm not sure. But I simply stood there and watched the two of them walk out of the hall together. It never occurred to me to ask myself why this woman was with Gloge, or to stop them, or even to wonder where they were going...'

  Hammond twisted a dial, dimming the voice. He spoke to Helen Wendell. 'When did the jet come down?'

  'From what Arnold said first,' Helen told him, 'it must have been over half an hour ago! As he puts it, it didn't occur to him to call us about it until now.'