Earthman, Beware! and others

by Poul Anderson

  He whistled, and the cat jumped from his lap. Another whistle, and the animal was across the room pawing at a switch. Several large plates were released, which the cat carried back in its mouth.

  Margaret drew a shaky breath. “I never yet heard of anyone training a cat to run errands.”

  “This is a rather special cat,” he replied absently, and leaned forward to show her the plates. “These are X-rays of myself. You know my technique for photographing different layers of tissue? I developed that just to study myself. I also confess to exhuming my mother's bones, but they proved to be simply a female version of my own. However, a variation of the crystalline-structure method did show that she was at least five hundred years old.”

  "Five hundred years!"

  He nodded. “That's one of several reasons why I'm sure I'm a very young member of my race. Incidentally, her bones showed no sign of age, she corresponded about to a human twenty-five. I don't know whether the natural life span of the race is that great or whether they have artificial means of arresting senility, but I do know that I can expect at least half a millennium of life on Earth. And Earth seems to have a higher gravity than our home world; it's not a very healthy spot for me.”

  She was too dazed to do more than nod. His finger traced over the X-ray plates. “The skeletal differences aren't too great, but look here and here—the foot, the spine—the skull bones are especially peculiar—Then the internal organs. You can see for yourself that no human being ever had—”

  “A double heart?” she asked dully.

  “Sort of. It's a single organ, but with more functions than the human heart. Never mind that, it's the neural structure that's most important. Here are several of the brain, taken at different depths and angles.”

  She fought down a gasp. Her work on encephalography had required a good knowledge of the brain's anatomy. No human being carries this in his head.

  It wasn't too much bigger than the human. Better organization, she thought; Joel's people would never go insane. There were analogues, a highly convoluted cortex, a medulla, the rest of it. But there were other sections and growths which had no correspondents any human.

  “What are they?" she asked.

  “I'm not very sure,” he replied slowly, a little distastefully. “This one here is what I might call the telepathy center. It's sensitive to neural currents in other organisms. By comparing human reactions and words with the emanations I can detect, I've picked up a very limited degree of telepathy. I can emit, too, but since no human can detect it I've had little use for that power. Then this seems to be for voluntary control of ordinarily involuntary functions—pain blocs, endocrine regulation, and so on—but I've never learned to use it very effectively and I don't dare experiment much on myself. There are other centers—most of them, I don't even know what they're for.”

  His smile was weary. “You've heard of feral children—the occasional human children who're raised by animals? They never learn to speak, or to exercise any of their specifically human abilities, till they're captured and taught by men. In fact, they're hardly human at all.

  “I'm a feral child, Peggy.”

  She began to cry, deep racking sobs that shook her like a giant's hand. He held her until it passed and she sat again at his knee with the slow tears going down her cheeks. Her voice was a shuddering whisper:

  “Oh, my dear, my dear, how lonely you must have been....”

  * * * *

  Lonely? No human being would ever know how lonely.

  It hadn't been too bad at first. As a child, he had been too preoccupied and delighted with his expanding intellectual horizons to care that the other children bored him—and they, in their turn, heartily disliked Joel for his strangeness and the aloofness they called “snooty.” His foster parents had soon learned that normal standards just didn't apply to him, they kept him out of school and bought him the books and equipment he wanted. They'd been able to afford that; at the age of six he had patented, in old Weatherfield's name, improvements on farm machinery that made the family more than well-to-do. He'd always been a “good boy,” as far as he was able. They'd had no cause to regret adopting him, but it had been pathetically like the hen who has hatched ducklings and watches them swim away from her.

  The years at Harvard had been sheer heaven, an orgy of learning, of conversations and friendship with the great who came to see an equal in the solemn child. He had had no normal social life then either, but he hadn't missed it, the undergraduates were dull and a little frightening. He'd soon learned how to avoid most publicity—after all, infant geniuses weren't altogether unknown. His only real trouble had been with a psychiatrist who wanted him to be more “normal.” He grinned as he remembered the rather fiendish ways in which he had frightened the man into leaving him entirely alone.

  But toward the end, he had found limitations in the life. It seemed utterly pointless to sit through lectures on the obvious and to turn in assignments of problems which had been done a thousand times before. And he was beginning to find the professors a little tedious, more and more he was able to anticipate their answers to his questions and remarks, and those answers were becoming ever more trite.

  He had long been aware of what his true nature must be though he had had the sense not to pass the information on. Now the dream began to grow in him To find his people!

  What was the use of everything he did, when their children must be playing with the same forces as toys, when his greatest discoveries would be as old in their culture as fire in man's? What pride did he have in his achievements, when none of the witless animals who saw them could say “Well done!” as it should be said? What comradeship could he ever know with blind and stupid creatures who soon became as predictable as his machines: With whom could he think?

  He flung himself savagely into work, with the simple goal of making money. It hadn't been hard. In five years he was a multimillionaire, with agents to relieve him of all the worry and responsibility, with freedom to do as he chose. To work for escape.

  How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable

  Seem to me all the uses of this world!

  But not of every world! Somewhere, somewhere out among the grand host of the stars....

  The long night wore on.

  “Why did you come here?” asked Margaret. Her voice was quiet now, muted with hopelessness.

  “I wanted secrecy. And human society was getting to be more than I could stand.”

  She winced, then: “Have you found a way to build a faster-than-light spaceship?”

  “No. Nothing I've ever discovered indicates any way of getting around Einstein's limitation. There must be a way, but I just can't find it. Not too surprising, really. Our feral child would probably never be able to duplicate ocean-going ships.”

  “But how do you ever hope to get out of the Solar System, then?”

  “I thought of a robot-manned spaceship going from star to star, with myself in suspended animation.” He spoke of it as casually as a man might describe some scheme for repairing a leaky faucet. “But it was utterly impractical. My people can't live anywhere near, or we'd have had more indication of them than one shipwreck. They may not live in this galaxy at all. I'll save that idea for a last resort.”

  “But you and your mother must have been in some kind of ship. Wasn't anything ever found?”

  “Just those few glassy fragments I mentioned. It makes me wonder if my people use spaceships at all. Maybe they have some sort of matter transmitter. No, my main hope is some kind of distress signal which will attract help.”

  “But if they live so many light-years away—”

  “I've discovered a strange sort of—well, you might call it radiation, though it has no relation to the electromagnetic spectrum. Energy fields vibrating a certain way produce detectable effects in a similar setup well removed from the first. It's roughly analogous to the old spark-gap radio transmitters. The important thing is that these effects are transmitted with no measurable time lag or
diminution with distance.”

  She would have been aflame with wonder in earlier times. Now she simply nodded. “I see. It's a sort of ultrawave. But if there are no time or distance effects, how can it be traced? It'd be completely nondirectional, unless you could beam it.”

  “I can't—yet. But I've recorded a pattern of pulses which are to correspond to the arrangement of stars in this part of the galaxy. Each pulse stands for a star, its intensity for the absolute brightness, and its time separation from the other pulses for the distance from the other stars.”

  “But that's a one-dimensional representation, and space is three dimensional.”

  “I know. It's not as simple as I said. The problem of such representation was an interesting problem in applied topology—took a good week to solve. You might be interested in the mathematics, I've got my notes here somewhere—But anyway, my people, when they detect those pulses, should easily be able to deduce what I'm trying to say. I've put Sol at the head of each series of pulses, so they'll even know what particular star it is that I'm at. Anyway, there can only be one or a few configurations exactly like this in the universe, so I've given them a fix. I've set up an apparatus to broadcast my call automatically. Now I can only wait.”

  “How long have you waited?”

  He scowled. “A good year now—and no sign. I'm getting worried. Maybe I should try something else.”

  “Maybe they don't use your ultrawave at all. It might be obsolete in their culture.”

  He nodded. “It could well be. But what else is there?” She was silent.

  Presently Joel stirred and sighed. “That's the story, Peggy.”

  She nodded, mutely.

  “Don't feel sorry for me,” he said. “I'm doing all right. My research here is interesting, I like the country, I'm happier than I've been for a long time.”

  “That's not saying much, I'm afraid,” she answered.

  “No, but—Look, Peggy, you know what I am now. A monster. More alien to you than an ape. It shouldn't be hard to forget me.”

  “Harder than you think, Joel. I love you. I'll always love you.”

  “But—Peggy, it's ridiculous. Just suppose that I did come live with you. There could never be children ... but I suppose that doesn't matter too much. We'd have nothing in common, though. Not a thing. We couldn't talk, we couldn't share any of the million little things that make a marriage, we could hardly ever work together. I can't live in human society any more, you'd soon lose all your friends, you'd become as lonely as I. And in the end you'd grow old, your powers would fade and die, and I'd still be approaching my maturity. Peggy, neither of us could stand it.”

  “I know.”

  “Langtree is a fine man. It'd be easy to love him. You've no right to withhold a heredity as magnificent as yours from your race.”

  “You may be right.”

  He put a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to his. “I have some powers over the mind,” he said slowly. “With your cooperation, I could adjust your feelings about this.”

  She tensed back from him, her eyes wide and frightened. “No—”

  “Don't be a fool. It would only be doing now what time will do anyway.” His smile was tired, crooked. “I'm really a remarkably easy person to forget, Peggy.”

  His will was too strong. It radiated from him, in the lambent eyes and the delicately carved features that were almost human, it pulsed in great drowsy waves from his telepathic brain and seemed almost to flow through the thin hands. Useless to resist, futile to deny—give up, give up and sleep. She was so tired.

  She nodded, finally. Joel smiled the old smile she knew so well. He began to talk.

  She never remembered the rest of the night, save as a blur of half awareness, a soft voice that whispered in her head, a face dimly seen through wavering mists. Once, she recalled, there was a machine that clicked and hummed, and little lights flashing and spinning in darkness. Her memory was stirred, roiled like a quiet pool, things she had forgotten through most of her life floated to the surface. It seemed as if her mother was beside her.

  In the vague foggy dawn, he let her go. There was a deep unhuman calm in her, she looked at him with something of a sleepwalker's empty stare and her voice was flat. It would pass, she would soon become normal again, but Joel Weatherfield would be a memory with little emotional color, a ghost somewhere in the back of her mind.

  A ghost. He felt utterly tired, drained of strength and will. He didn't belong here, he was a shadow that should have been flitting between the stars, the sunlight of Earth erased him.

  “Good-by, Peggy,” he said. “Keep my secret. Don't let anyone know where I am. And good luck go with you all your days.”

  “Joel—” She paused on the doorstep, a puzzled frown crossing her features. “Joel, if you can think at me that way, can't your people do the same?”

  “Of course. What of it?” For the first time, he didn't know what was coming, he had changed her too much for prediction.

  “Just that—why should they bother with gadgets like your ultrawave for talking to each other? They should be able to think between the stars.”

  He blinked. It had occurred to him, but he had not thought much beyond it, he had been too preoccupied with his work.

  “Good-by, Joel.” She turned and walked away through the dripping gray fog. An early sunbeam struck through a chance rift and glanced off her hair. He stood in the doorway until she was gone.

  * * * *

  He slept through most of the day. Awakening, he began to think over what had been said.

  By all that was holy, Peggy was right! He had immersed himself too deeply in the purely technical problems of the ultrawave, and since then in mathematical research which passed the time of waiting, to stand off and consider the basic logic of the situation. But this—it made sense.

  He had only the vaguest notion of the inherent powers of his own mind. Physical science had offered too easy an outlet for him. Nor could he, unaided, hope to get far in such studies. A human feral child might have the heredity of a mathematical genius, but unless he was found and taught by his own kind he would never comprehend the elements of arithmetic—or of speech or sociability or any of the activities which set man off from the other animals. There was just too long a heritage of prehuman and early human development for one man, alone, to recapitulate in a lifetime, when his environment held no indication of the particular road his ancestors had taken.

  But those idle nerves and brain centers must be for something. He suspected that they were means of direct control over the most basic forces in the universe. Telepathy, telekinesis, precognition—what godlike heritage had been denied him?

  At any rate, it did seem that his race had gone beyond the need of physical mechanisms. With complete understanding of the structure of the space-time-energy continuum, with control by direct will of its underlying processes, they would project themselves or their thoughts from star to star, create what they needed by sheer thought—and pay no attention to the gibberings of lesser races.

  Fantastic, dizzying prospect! He stood breathless before the great shining vision that opened to his eyes.

  He shook himself back to reality. The immediate problem was getting in touch with his race. That meant a study of the telepathic energies he had hitherto almost ignored.

  He plunged into a fever of work. Time became meaningless, a succession of days and nights, waning light and drifting snow and the slow return of spring. He had never had much except his work to live for, now it devoured the last of his thoughts. Even during the periods of rest and exercise he forced himself to take, his mind was still at the problem, gnawing at it like a dog with a bone. And slowly, slowly, knowledge grew.

  * * * *

  Telepathy was not directly related to the brain pulses measured by encephalography. Those were feeble, short-range by-products of neuronic activity. Telepathy, properly controlled, leaped over an intervening space with an arrogant ignoring of time. It was, he decided
, another part of what he had labeled the ultrawave spectrum, which was related to gravitation as an effect of the geometry of space-time. But, while gravitational effects were produced by the presence of matter, ultra-wave effects came into being when certain energy fields vibrated. However, they did not appear unless there was a properly tuned receiver somewhere. They seemed somehow “aware” of a listener even before they came into existence. That suggested fascinating speculations about the nature of time, but he turned away from it. His people would know more about it than he could ever find out alone.

  But the concept of waves was hardly applicable to something that traveled with an “infinite velocity"—a poor term semantically, but convenient. He could assign an ultrawave a frequency, that of the generating energy fields, but then the wavelength would be infinite. Better to think of it in terms of tensors, and drop all pictorial analogies.

  His nervous system did not itself contain the ultra-energies. Those were omnipresent, inherent in the very structure of the cosmos. But his telepathy centers, properly trained, were somehow coupled to that great underlying flow, they could impose the desired vibrations on it. Similarly, he supposed, his other centers could control those forces to create or destroy or move matter, to cross space, to scan the past and future probability-worlds, to....

  He couldn't do it himself. He just couldn't find out enough in even his lifetime. Were he literally immortal, he might still never learn what he had to know; his mind had been trained into human thought patterns, and this was something that lay beyond man's power of comprehension.

  But all I need is to send one clear call....

  He struggled with it. Through the endless winter nights he sat in the cabin and fought to master his brain. How did you send a shout to the stars?

  Tell me, feral child, how do you solve a partial differential equation?

  Perhaps some of the answer lay in his own mind. The brain has two types of memory, the “permanent” and the “circulating,” and apparently the former kind is never lost. It recedes into the subconscious, but it is still there, and it can be brought out again. As a child, a baby, he would have observed things, remembered sights of apparatus and feelings of vibration, which his more mature mind could now analyze.