The Empire of Isher

by A. E. van Vogt

  Hedrock deliberately stopped that intense emotional reaction. “Just a minute,” he said, amazed. “I’m beginning to feel as if I am his brother.”

  “That, ”came a thought, “is one of the astonishing characteristics of human beings. The easy way that one nervous system responds to the impulses from another. The sensory equipment involved has no parallel in the world of intelligence. But now, sit up and look around you. ”

  Hedrock studied his ’stat plates. He saw that there had been a change in the scene. The big ship, whose captive he was, had rolled upward; its immense bulk filled the forward and rear plates, and was visible also on the upper right and left panels. Where it had been before was a gulf of space, and deep in that gulf swam two white, yellow-tinged suns. They were tiny at first, little more than bright stars. But they grew. They grew. And far to the left another, tinier sun appeared. The two larger stars showed after a while six inches in diameter. They had seemed a foot apart; they separated farther. One remained small while the other drew nearer and took on more size. The second sun swung farther and farther to the left; his estimators showed it finally as about three billion miles away.

  Further tests showed the angular diameter of both the nearer suns of the system to be larger than that of Sol, though only one was brighter. The third sun was a mere blur of light in the distance. It would have taken a long time for his inadequate instruments to compute its character. But the fact that it was there made Hedrock frown. He searched for, and presently found a red point in the distance, the fourth sun of that system. He was beginning to feel excited, when the alien mind directed its cold vibrations at him again.

  “Yes, man, you are correct. These are the suns of the system you call Alpha Centauri. The two nearest are Alpha A and Alpha B. The third white sun is Alpha C, and the red point is, of course, the insignificant Proxima Centauri, known for centuries to be the nearest star to the solar system.

  These latter two do not concern us. What matters is that the dead twin is on a freak planet of this system. There is only one freak. It is a planet which, by describing a figure 8, revolves in turn around the Centauri suns Alpha A and Alpha B. It does this by traveling at the unusual speed of three thousand miles a second. In its eccentric orbit, it passes very close to each star, much as a comet might. But unlike a comet it is forever unable to break away. The gravitational fields of Alpha A and Alpha B alternately whip it on its way. It is now approaching ever nearer to Alpha A, the star almost directly ahead, and we must work swiftly if we are to revive the dead body—”

  “If we are to what? ” said Hedrock.

  There was no answer, nor did he need one. He leaned weakly back in his chair, and he thought, “Why, of course, it’s been obvious from the beginning. I took it for granted they were going to try to rig up some sensory connection between a living and a dead body, but that was an assumption based upon my conviction that a man who has been dead two days is not only dead but decomposing.”

  He felt genuinely awed. For thousands of years he had been striving to prolong the lives of living men to some approximation of the immortality that he had accidentally achieved. Now, here were beings who could undoubtedly not only solve that problem but could also resurrect the dead.

  Curiously, the discovery dimmed his hope that he would be able to survive in spite of their determination to kill him. He had been trying to imagine some method of defeating them based on their extremely logical approach to existence. But, while that still seemed the only possible way out, it had become a remote chance, an opportunity to be planned for because the alternative was so final. Their scientific achievements made the result extremely doubtful.

  “You will now, ” said a thought impulse, “submit to the next phase. ”

  He lay under a light. Just where he was, or even where they wanted him to think he was, he had no idea.

  His body rested comfortably in what could have been a form-fitting coffin. The comparison made a gruesome titillation along his nerves, but he quieted that jumpiness. He lay steady, determined, cold with his own intentions, and watched the light. It hung in blackness above him or—the thought made a curious pattern—was he staring down at it? It didn’t matter. There was only the light, shining out of the darkness, shining, shining. It was not, he noticed after a long while, a white light; and yet, conversely, it seemed to have no definite color. Nor was it bright, nor was it warm. His thought paused; he flinched. It was the notion of heat that did it, that brought consciousness of how cold it was. The light was icy.

  The discovery was like a signal, like a cue. “Emotion, ” said a spider’s mind vibrations from afar, “is a manifestation of energy. It acts instantaneously over any distance. The reason why the connection between the twins diminished in intensity, so far as their reception of it was concerned, was their mutual expectation that it would so diminish. This expectation was almost entirely unconscious.

  Their respective nervous systems naturally recognized the widening distance when one set out for Centaurus. Instinctively, they yielded their connection, though the emotional rapport between them remained as strong as ever. And now, since you have become a part of the relationship ... accept the connection. ”

  It seemed instantaneous. He was lying, Hedrock saw, on a grassy bank beside a stream. The water gurgled and babbled over rocks. A gentle breeze blew into his face, and through the trees to his left a glorious sun was rearing above the horizon. All around him on the ground were boxes and packing cases, several machines, and four men lying quietly asleep. The nearest man was Gil Neelan. Hedrock controlled his mind again, thinking desperately, “Steady, you fool, it’s only an image, a thing they’ve put into your brain. Gil is on sand, on a freak planet, headed into hell. This is a dream world, an Eden , Earth in its sweetest summertime.”

  Several seconds passed, and the body of Gil Neelan slept on with flushed face, breathing stertorously, as if it couldn’t get enough air into it, as if life was returning the hard way, and clinging with effort. A faint thought came into Hedrock’s mind. “Water,” it said. “Oh, God, water!”

  He hadn’t thought that. Literally Hedrock threw himself at the stream. Twice, his cupped hands trembled so violently that the precious water spilled onto the green grass. At last a measure of sanity came, and he searched one of the boxes and found a container. He kept letting the water trickle in and around Gil Neelan’s mouth. Several times, the emaciated body contorted in dreadful coughing. But that too, was good—dead muscles jarring back to life. Hedrock, eyes glinting, persisted. He could feel Gil’s slow heartbeat, could see all the mind pictures that pushed hesitantly into the brain that had scattered far. It was the sensory relation that, until now, had belonged exclusively to the brothers. Gil stirred in awareness.

  “Why, Dan—” there was a vast amaze in Gil’s thought—“you old devil! Where did you come from?”

  “From Earth.”Hedrock spoke aloud into the breeze that blew in his face. Later he would explain that he was not Dan.

  The answer seemed all that Gil needed. He sighed, smiled, and turning over, withdrew mentally into a deep sleep. Hedrock began to prowl around the boxes, looking for dextrose tablets. He found a bottle of the quick-acting food, and slipped a tablet into Gil’s mouth. It should, he thought, dissolve gradually.

  Satisfied that he had done all he could for the moment, he turned to the other men. He doled out water to each of the three in turn, and then dextrose tablets. He was straightening from the work when a spider-thought touched him, matter-of-fact in its steely overtones.

  “You see, ” it said, “he did attend the others, too. The emotion involved is more than just an artificial extension of paired spermatozoa reacting sympathetically. ”

  That was all there was, just that comment. But it stopped Hedrock in his tracks. It wasn’t that he had forgotten the spiders. But the memory of them had been pressed into the background of his mind by the urgency of events. And now here was the reality again. He stared up into the blue sky, up at that gloriou
s, yellow-white sun, and hated the spider folk. But that, he realized, was like savages of old shaking their fists and mouthing their maledictions at the evil demons who lurked in the heavens.

  He grew calmer, and again fed his sick charges, this time a liquid made of highly digestible fruit juice concentrates dissolved in water. One of the men, a lean, handsome fellow, revived sufficiently to smile up at him in a puzzled fashion, but lie asked no questions and Hedrock volunteered no information. When the patients were sleeping again, Hedrock climbed the tallest tree he could find, and studied his surroundings. But there were only trees and rolling hills and far, far away, almost lost in the mist of distance, a wider glint of water. What interested him more were patches of yellow color on a tree a quarter of a mile along the creek. He shinnied to the ground and walked with some excitement, following the stream bed. It must have been farther than he had estimated, for when he came back with a container full of fruit, the sun was past the zenith.

  But the trek had done him good; he felt better, more alive; and he was thinking shrewdly: Gil and Kershaw—if one of these chaps was Kershaw—must have visited this planet. They must have tested the fruits they found, and as soon as they recovered sufficiently, they’d be able to tell him whether this yellow stuff was edible. There might even be a pocket analyzer in one of the packing cases.

  If there was, he couldn’t find it. But he did uncover a number of instruments, including a recorder for communication disks, used in surveying and marking land sites. They probably had left a lot of those on their various points of landing. The sun lowered itself toward, well, the west. He’d call it that, Hedrock decided wryly. Late in the afternoon, the second sun came up in the east, tinier, a pale orb. For a while, then, it grew warmer, but cooled off when the larger sun sank behind the horizon, and “night” set in. It was like a dull day on Earth, with a ghost of a sun peering through heavy clouds, only the sky wasn’t cloudy and there was none of the humidity and closeness of a dull day. Soft winds blew. The third sun came up, but its dim light seemed to add nothing. A few faint stars showed. The bright gloom began to get on Hedrock’s nerves. He paced along the creek bank, and he thought finally: How long would this ...

  this sensory investigation continue ? And why did they want to kill him?

  He had not intended it as a direct question to his captors, but, surprisingly, he received an answer at once. It seemed to float at him out of the dim, cloudless sky, precise and supernally dispassionate:

  “We are not quite what we seem, ” the spider-thought said. “Our race is not, as you suggested, one of Nature’s successes. In this ship is actually the remnant of our people. All of us here present are immortal, the winners in the struggle for supremacy and existence on our planet. Each and every one of us is supreme in some one field by virtue of having destroyed all competition. We intend to remain alive, our existence unsuspected by the several other races in the universe. Because of an accident that precipitated you into our midst, you must die. Is that clear? ”

  Hedrock had no answer, for here at long last was a completely understandable logic. He was to be killed because he knew too much.

  “It is our intention, ” said the cold mind at him, “to make a final investigation of man’s sensory equipment on the basis of what we have discovered through you, and then leave this portion of space forever. The investigation will take some time. You will please have patience until then.

  There will be no answers meanwhile to your petty appeals. Conduct yourself accordingly. ”

  That, too, was clear. Hedrock went back slowly to the camp. The lean, tired-looking man who had smiled at him earlier was sitting up.

  “Hello,” he said cheerfully. “My name is Kershaw. Derd Kershaw. Thanks for saving our lives.”

  “You’re thanking me too soon,” said Hedrock gruffly.

  But the sound of the human voice brought a gathering excitement and, just like that, an idea. He worked, now that the hope had come, with an intense anxiety. He expected to be destroyed momentarily.

  The job itself was simple enough. With Gil’s energy gun, he cut trees into little round disks about an inch thick. The disks he kept feeding into the survey recording machine, which imprinted on the elements of each a message stating the position of himself and his companions, describing the spider folk and the threat they had made. For some of the disks, he set the recorder to various anti-gravity pressures, ten feet, twenty feet, fifty—up to five hundred—and watched them float up into the sky to the level their atoms had been adjusted for. They drifted in the vagrant currents of the air. Some just hung around and made him sweat with anger at the slowness with which they scattered. Others whisked out of sight with a satisfying rapidity. Some of them, Hedrock knew, would lodge on hillsides, some in trees, some would float for years, perhaps centuries, prey to every breeze that blew, and every hour that passed they would be more difficult to find, would take longer to search out. The spider folk were going to have a hell of a time preventing the knowledge of their presence from being spread abroad.

  The precious days dragged by, and soon there was no doubt that enough time had gone by for the disks to scatter widely.

  His patients were slow in recuperating. It was apparent that their bodies were not capable of absorbing properly the food he gave them, and that they needed medical care which was not available. Kershaw was the first to reach the convalescent stage where he wanted to know what had happened. Hedrock showed him the message on one of the disks, which, after three weeks, he was still sending out spasmodically. Kershaw read it and then lay back thoughtfully.

  “So that’s what we’re up against,” he said slowly. “What makes you think the disks will do any good?”

  Hedrock said, “The spiders are logic hounds. They’ll accept an accomplished fact. The problem is, when will the process of distribution of the disks have reached a point where they’ll instantly realize that they can’t possibly ever find all of them? Every little while I think that surely I’ve done enough, and then I begin to wonder just how intricate will distribution have to be before they’ll accept it as decisive. The reason they haven’t bothered us so far is that they’re near Earth studying man’s emotional structure. At least that was their intention, and I was told they wouldn’t talk to me for a while. My guess is they’re too far away for their brand of telepathy.”

  “But what are they after?” Kershaw asked.

  It was hard to explain what his own experiences with the spiders had taught him, but Hedrock made the attempt. He was careful to give no inkling of his activities on Earth. He finished, “I can break their mental control at any time, so that their only threat against me is physical force.”

  Kershaw said, “How do you explain their ability to draw you back to the lifeboat in spite of your resistance?”

  “I can only suggest that the nervous system is slow in setting patterns. I was back in the lifeboat before my method of opposition actually went into operation. When it did they recognized what was happening and threatened to destroy me unless I cooperated.”

  “Do you think they’ll get anywhere in their attempt to understand human emotional nature?”

  Hedrock shook his head. “For thousands of years men have been trying to gain ascendancy over their emotional impulses. The secret, of course, is not to eliminate emotion from life but to channel it where it is healthy and sane: sex, love, good will, enthusiasm, alertness, personality, and so on. These are apparently aspects of existence which are not within the possible experience of the spider beings. I don’t see how they can ever understand, particularly because they have no method of distinguishing between a man who is willing to risk his life for a cause, and a man who takes a risk, for example, for gain. The inability to understand variations of human nature is a basic flaw, and forever bars them from real comprehension.”

  Kershaw was thoughtful. At last he said, “What are our chances of rescue?”

  Hedrock said grimly, “Very good. I know it looks bad for us, but the spi
ders said they were definitely leaving this part of space. Why would they leave unless they have some reason to believe that soon great ships from Earth will be plying the Centauri traffic lanes? In my opinion the Empress will release the interstellar drive, and in these days of speedy manufacture they’ll have hundreds of drives installed into spaceships within a few weeks. And the trip itself could be completed in little more than two days, if necessary.”

  “I think,” said Kershaw quietly, “we’d better get busy. You’ve put a lot of those disks out, but a few thousand more can’t hurt. You cut the trees and pile the disks. I’ll feed them into the machine.”

  He stopped, and swayed in a curious fashion. His gaze flashed wildly up beyond Hedrock’s head.

  Hedrock whirled and stared into the sky. He saw a ship. For a moment he thought it was the spider ship as seen from far away. And then the mottled hue of it in the sun, and the great letters on its bottom snatched his attention. The letters said:

  WS—CENTAURUS—719

  The ship was not far away, but low down. It skimmed over them less than half a mile up; and turned slowly back toward them in response to their urgent telestat calls.

  It made the return run to the earth in just over forty-one hours of flight. Hedrock had taken the precaution of having Kershaw and Neelan identify him as Gil’s brother, and so he landed without incident at Imperial City, and proceeded to one of his apartments.