Enemies In Space

by Groff Conklin (Ed. )

  It would be difficult, she tells me, and sometimes painful. Most of the effort would be hers, but some of it would have to be mine. In her period of infantile education, she elected what we should call zoology as her life work; for that reason she was given intensive theoretical training in this technique. Right now I guess she knows more than anyone else on this planet not only about what makes a hen tick, but how it feels to be a hen.

  Though a beginner, she is in all essentials already an expert. She can help me, she thinks, if I choose this alternative. At any rate, she could ease me over the toughest spots, keep my courage from flagging.

  For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect—without condescension, she calls us very advanced—because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning! Hardly stronger than an infant’s first effort to focus his eyes.

  I AM merely wondering how much of my life, if I choose this way, will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the “good deeds” which I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.

  Not that I am a bad man, in any reasonable sense of the term. I respect myself; no occasion to grovel and beat my chest. I’m not ashamed to stand comparison with any other fair sample of the species. But there you are: I am human, and under the aspect of eternity so far, plus this afternoon’s newspaper, that is a rather serious thing.

  Without real knowledge, I think of this total recall as something like a passage down a corridor of a myriad images, now dark, now brilliant, now pleasant, now horrible— guided by no certainty except an awareness of the open blind door at the end of it. It could have its pleasing moments and its consolations. I don’t see how it could ever approximate the delight and satisfaction of living a few more years in this world with the angel lighting on my shoulder when she wishes, and talking to me.

  I had to ask her how great a value such a record would be to them. Obvious enough—they can be of little use to us, by their standards, until they understand us, and they came here to be of use to us as well as to themselves. And understanding us, to them, means knowing us inside out with a completeness such as our most dedicated and laborious scholars could never imagine. I remember, about those twelve million years: they will not touch us until they are certain no harm will come of it.

  On our tortured planet, however, there is a time factor. They know that well enough, of course …

  Recall cannot begin unless the subject is willing or unresisting; to them, that has to mean willing, for any being with intellect enough to make a considered choice. Now, I wonder how many they could find who would be honestly willing to make that uneasy journey into death, for no reward except an assurance that they were serving their own kind and the angels.

  More to the point, I wonder if I would be able to achieve such willingness myself, even with her help.

  When this had been explained to me, she urged me again to make no hasty decision. And she pointed out to me what my thoughts were already groping at—why not both alternatives, within a reasonable limit of time? Why couldn’t I have ten or fifteen years or more with her, and then undertake the total recall, perhaps not until my physical powers had started toward senility? I thought that over.

  This morning I had almost decided to choose that most welcome and comfortable solution. Then my daily paper was delivered. Not that I needed any such reminder.

  IN THE afternoon I asked her if she knew whether, in the present state of human technology, it would be possible for our folly to actually destroy this planet. She did not know, for certain. Three of the other children have gone away to different parts of the world, to learn what they can about that. But she had to tell me that such a thing has happened before, elsewhere in the Universe. I guess I won’t write a letter to the papers advancing an explanation for the occasional appearance of a nova among the stars. Doubtless others have hit on the same hypothesis without the aid of angels.

  And that is not all I must consider. I could die by accident or sudden disease before I had begun to give my life.

  Only now, at this very late moment, rubbing my sweaty forehead and gazing into the lights of that wonderful ring, have I been able to put together some obvious facts in the required synthesis.

  I don’t know, of course, what forms their assistance to us will take. I suspect human beings won’t see or hear much of the angels for a long time to come. Now and then disastrous decisions may be altered, and those who believe themselves wholly responsible won’t realize why their minds worked that way. Here and there, maybe an influential mind will be rather strangely nudged into a better course. Something like that. There may be new discoveries and inventions of kinds that will tend to neutralize the menace of our nastiest playthings.

  But whatever the angels decide to do, the record and analysis of my fairly typical life will be an aid. It could even be the small weight deciding the balance between triumph and failure. That is Fact One.

  Two: my angel and her brothers and sisters, for all their amazing level of advancement, are also of perishable protoplasm. Therefore, if this ball of mud becomes a ball of flame, they also will be destroyed. Even if they have the means to use their spaceship again or to build another, it might easily happen that they would not learn their danger in time to escape. And for all I know, this could be tomorrow. Or tonight.

  So there can no longer be any doubt as to my choice, and I will tell her when she wakes.

  July 9

  TONIGHT* (*At this point Dr. Bannerman’s handwriting alters curiously. From here on he used a soft pencil instead of a pen, and the script shows signs of haste. In spite of this, however, it is actually much clearer, steadier and easier to read than the earlier entries in his normal hand.—BLAINE) there is no recall; I am to rest a while. I see it is almost a month since I last wrote in this journal. My total recall began three weeks ago, and already the first twenty-eight years of my life have been saved.

  It was a week after I told the angel my decision before she was prepared to start the recall. During that week she searched my present mind more closely than I should have imagined was possible: she had to be sure.

  During that week of hard questions, I dare say she learned more about my kind than has ever gone on record even in a physician’s office; I hope she did. To any psychiatrist who might question that, I offer a naturalist’s suggestion. It is easy to imagine, after some laborious time, that we have noticed everything a given patch of ground can show us. But alter the viewpoint only a little—dig down a foot with a spade, say, or climb a tree-branch and look downward— it’s a whole new world.

  When the angel was not exploring me in this fashion, she took pains to make me glimpse the satisfactions and million rewarding experiences I might have if I chose the other way. I see how necessary that was; at the time it seemed almost cruel. She had to do it, for my own sake, and I am glad that I was somehow able to stand fast to my original choice. So was she, in the end; she has even said she loves me for it. What that troubling word means to her is not within my mind. I am satisfied to take it in the human sense.

  Since I no longer require normal sleep, the recall begins at night, as soon as the lights begin to go out in the village and there is little danger of interruption. Daytimes, I putter about in my usual fashion. I have sold Steele my hens, and Judy’s life was saved a week ago. That practically winds up my affairs, except that I went to write a codicil to my will. I might as well do that now, right here in this journal, instead of bothering my lawyer. It should be legal.

  To Whom It May Concern: I hereby bequeath to my friend Lester Morse, M.D., of Augusta, Maine, the ring which will be found at my death on the fifth finger of my left hand. I would urge Dr. Morse to retain this ring in his private posse
ssion at all times, and to make provision for its disposal, in the event of his own death, to some person in whose character he places the utmost faith.

  (Signed) David Bannerman*

  (*In spite of superficial changes in the handwriting, this signature has been certified genuine by an expert graphologist.—BLAINE)

  Tonight she has gone away for a while, and I am to rest and do as I please till she returns. I shall spend the time filling in some blanks in this record, but I am afraid it will be a spotty job, because there is so much I no longer care about.

  EXCEPT for the lack of desire for sleep, and a bodily weariness which is not at all unpleasant, I notice no physical effects thus far. I have no faintest recollection of anything that happened earlier than my twenty-eighth birthday. My deductive memory seems rather efficient, and I am sure I could reconstruct most of the story if it were worth the bother. This afternoon I grubbed around among some old letters of that period, but they weren’t very interesting.

  My knowledge of English is unaffected; I can still read scientific German and some French, because I had occasion to use those languages fairly often after I was twenty-eight. The scraps of Latin dating from high school are gone. So are algebra and all but the simplest proposition of high school geometry: I never needed them.

  I CAN remember thinking of my mother after twenty-eight, but I do not know whether the image this provides really resembles her. My father died when I was thirty-one, so I remember him as a sick old man. I believe I had a younger brother, but he must have died in childhood.* (*Dr. Bannerman’s mother died in 1918 of influenza. His brother (three years older, not younger) died of pneumonia, 1906.—BLAINE)

  Judy’s passing was tranquil— pleasant for her, I think. It took the better part of a day. We went out to an abandoned field I know, and she lay blinking in the sunshine with the angel sitting by her, while I dug a grave and then rambled off after wild raspberries. Toward evening the angel came and told me I could bury Judy—it was finished. And most interesting, she said. I don’t see how there can have been anything distressing about it for Judy. After all, what hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away, and I don’t think Judy had any.

  I have not found the recall painful, at least not in retrospect. There must have been sharp moments, mercifully forgotten along with their causes, as if the process had gone on under anesthesia. Certainly there were plenty of incidents in my first twenty-eight years which I should not care to offer to the understanding of any but the angels. Quite often I must have been mean, selfish, base in any number of ways, if only to judge by the record since twenty-eight. Those old letters touch on a few of these things. To me, they now matter only as material for a record which is safely out of my hands.

  However, to any person I may have harmed, I wish to say this: you were hurt by aspects of my humanity which may not, in a few million years, be quite so common among us. Against these darker elements I struggled, in my human fashion, as you do yourselves. The effort is not wasted.

  One evening—I think it was June 12—Lester dropped around for sherry and chess. Hadn’t seen him in quite a while, and haven’t since. There is a moderate polio scare this summer and it keeps him on the jump.

  The angel retired behind some books on an upper shelf—I’m afraid it was dusty—and had fun with our chess. She had a fair view of your bald spot, Lester. Later she remarked that she liked your looks, but can’t you do something about that weight? She suggested an odd expedient, which I believe has occurred to your medical self from time to time—eating less.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have done what she did with those chess games. Nothing more than my usual blundering happened until after my first ten moves; by that time I suppose she had absorbed the principles, and she took over. I was not fully aware of it until I saw you looking like a boiled duck. I had imagined my astonishing moves were the result of my own damn cleverness.

  SERIOUSLY, Lester, think back to that evening. You’ve played in stiff amateur tournaments; you know your own abilities and you know mine. Ask yourself whether I could have done anything like that without help. I tell you again I didn’t study the game in the interval when you weren’t here. I’ve never even had a chess book in the library, and if I had, no amount of study would take me into your class. I haven’t that sort of mentality; just your humble sparring partner, and I’ve enjoyed it on that basis, as you might enjoy watching a prima donna surgeon pull off some miracle you wouldn’t dream of attempting yourself. Even if our game had been away below par that evening, and I don’t think it was, I could never have pinned your ears back three times running, without help. That evening you were a long way out of your class, that’s all.

  I couldn’t tell you anything about it at the time—she was clear on that point—so I could only bumble and preen myself and leave you mystified. But she wants me to write anything I choose in this journal, and somehow, Lester, I think you may find the next few decades pretty interesting. You’re still young, some ten years younger than I. I think you’ll see many things that I wish I might see come to pass—or I would so wish if I were not convinced that my choice was the right one.

  Most of those new events will not be spectacular, I’d guess. Many of the turns to a better way will hardly be recognized at the time for what they are, by you or anyone else. Obviously, our nature being what it is, we shall not change overnight. To hope for that would be as absurd as it is to imagine that any formula, ideology, theory of social pattern can bring us into Utopia. As I see it, Lester—and I think your consulting room would have told you the same even if your own intuition were not enough—there is only one battle of importance: Armageddon. And Armageddon field is within each individual.

  At the moment I believe I am the happiest man who ever lived.

  July 20

  ALL but the last ten years are now given away. The physical fatigue, though still pleasant, is quite overwhelming. I am not troubled by the weeds in my garden patch—merely a different sort of flowers where I had planned something else. An hour ago she brought me the seed of a blown dandelion, to show me how lovely it was. I don’t suppose I had ever noticed. I hope whoever takes over this place will bring it back to farming; they say the ten acres below the house used to be good potato land, nice early ground.

  It is delightful to sit in the sun, as if I were old.

  After thumbing over earlier entries in this journal, I see I have often felt quite bitter toward my own kind. I deduce that I must have been a lonely man, with much of the loneliness self-imposed. A great part of my bitterness must have been no more than one ugly by-product of a life spent too much apart. Some of it doubtless came from objective causes, yet I don’t believe I ever had more cause than any moderately intelligent man who would like to see his world a pleasanter place than it has been. My angel tells me that the scar on my back is due to an injury received in some early stage of the war that still goes on. That could have soured me, perhaps. It’s all right; it’s in the record.

  She is racing with a hummingbird—holding back, I think, to give the swift little green fluff a break.

  ANOTHER note for you, Lester. I have already indicated my ring is to be yours. I don’t want to tell you what I have discovered of its properties, for fear it might not give you the same pleasure and interest that it has given me. Of course, like any spot of shifting light and color, it is an aid to self-hypnosis. It is more, much more than that, but—find out for yourself, at some time when you are a little protected from everyday distractions.

  I know it can’t harm you, because I know its source.

  By the way, I wish you would convey to my publishers my request that they either discontinue printing my Introductory Biology or else bring out a new edition revised in accordance with some notes you will find in the top left drawer of my library desk. I glanced through that book after my angel assured me that I wrote it, and I was amazed. However, I’m afraid my notes are messy—I call them mine by a poetic license—and they may b
e too advanced for the present day, though the revision is mainly a matter of leaving out certain generalities that aren’t so. Use your best judgment. It’s a very minor textbook, and the thing isn’t too important.

  A last wriggle of my vanishing personal vanity.

  July 27

  I HAVE seen a two-moon night. It was given to me by that remaining grown-up, at the end of a wonderful visit, when he and six of those nine other children came to me. It was last night, I think— yes, must have been. First there was a murmur of wings above the house; my angel flew in laughing. Then they were here, all about me, full of gaiety and colored fire, showing off in every way they knew would please me. Each one had something graceful and friendly to Say to me. One brought me a moving image of the St. Lawrence seen at morning from half a mile up— clouds, eagles—now how could he know that would delight me so much?

  And each one thanked me for what I had done.

  But it’s been so easy! And at the end the old one—his skin is quite black, and his down is white and gray—gave the remembered image of a two-moon night. He saw it some sixty years ago.

  I have not even considered making an effort to describe it. My fingers will not hold this pencil much longer tonight. Oh, soaring buildings of white and amber, untroubled countryside, silver on curling rivers, a glimpse of open sea. A moon rising in clarity, another setting in a wreath of cloud, between them a wide wandering of unfamiliar stars. Here and there the angels, worthy after fifty million years to live in such night.