The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  For a second, his senses threatened to crack under hysteria, but he caught them up. In the small bathroom, he found a four-year-old box of barbiturates and swallowed two of them. He knew they wouldn’t work for minutes, but the psychological relief of taking them meant something.

  The idea of a strange attack on him hit Blake; at once, his fingers flew out to a knob on the desk, pressing it in a secret combination. A concealed drawer slipped out, and he grabbed at the papers inside—they were all there. His brother, James, had spent ten years—and fifty million dollars, that had bankrupted and killed him, to get a few diagrams and instructions onto these papers.

  Silas McKinley had postulated that some form of military absolutism was inevitable when the greatest weapons of the time required great means to use them—as had the phalanx, the highly trained Roman Legion, the heavy equipment of feudal knights, or the atomic bombs, planes, and tanks of modern war. Contrariwise, when the major weapons could be owned and used by the general citizenry, then reasonably peaceful democracy must result, as it had from the colonial muskets of the eighteenth century, and would do from the use of James Blake’s seemingly impossible accomplishment.

  Unless, Tom added to himself, it could be suppressed. Stealing the papers wouldn’t be enough for that; he had them all completely memorized. He managed to grin at his fear, and closed the drawer, just as a knock sounded and Gideon Pierce came in.

  Watching the man’s public mask slip off and reveal a cynical, old face did more to stabilize Blake’s emotions than any amount of barbiturates could have done. He motioned to another chair and poured whiskey and soda into a glass, adding ice from the small freezer in the little bar. “Rough down there?”

  The older man shook his head. “No—not after we knew you won; I’m used to celebrations. But—my God, Tom—the last month—the way you were going, you didn’t have a chance! Getting the nomination was miracle enough—you had no business winning with the stuff you were handing out! It’s all right to promise things—but you have to be realistic about even that! When you can’t deliver…”

  “I’ll deliver,” Blake told him. “I’ve always delivered on everything I ever said I’d do; and I’ve always tried to give them what they really wanted. Now 1 want something—and they give it to me. The old principle, Gideon—cast thy bread upon the water and it shall return after many days.”

  “Yeah—soggy!” Pierce swirled the drink in his mouth and swallowed it without tasting it. “So what do you get out of it, if you do manage to keep some of your promises?”

  Insanity, maybe, Blake thought, remembering the mind-wrenching; then he thrust it down. “I get to be President—where I can really do some good; where I can give them decent, honest, democratic peace and self-respect.”

  “Sure.” Pierce dragged out a cigar and began chewing on it, shaking his head. “Tom, I’m beginning to believe You mean it. If you do, take the advice of a man who has been around longer; get out of politics! It’s no place for you. You’re too naive—too filled with bright ideals that are one hundred percent right—except that they neglect human nature. You’ll find even the President has opposition, boy, once you have the power and somebody bucks you, well—you’ve seen it happen. And you get bitter. I was full of noble thoughts once myself; take a look at what you see on my face now. You don’t belong in this racket.”

  Blake held out a lighter to the other, grinning. “They told me I didn’t belong in the newspaper business, Gideon. When I inherited my foster father’s string of yellow, warmongering journals and decided to build them into the honest, fighting group they are now, they told me I’d go broke. I doubled the circulation.”

  “Yeah—and probably convinced a few thousand voters to change their ideas—until they voted; then they cast their ballot for favors, and with the same selfish reasons they’d had before. You’re as hopeless as your brother James; burning himself out and wasting a fortune on a perpetual motion machine. But you’re going to break my heart when you find out the facts. Oh, hell! Good night, Governor!”

  Pierce got up and went out, grumbling before Tom could sputter the words that came to his lips. Then he shrugged; James Blake had deliberately built up a reputation as a crackpot while he went ahead turning a gadget out of the wildest of science fiction speculations into reality. He’d developed a hand weapon which was equal to a cannon, for offense, and simultaneously protected the user from anything up to the first blast of a hydrogen bomb.

  And now it was up to Tom Blake to get to a position where he could have this weapon produced in quantity, and released before it could be suppressed. As President, there would be ways he could do that; with it would come an end to war, once and for all, and the genuine equality of all men. Maybe this was idealism, perhaps even naive—but the Blakes got what they wanted.

  He started to undress, and then flopped down on the bed with half his clothes on. It had been a hard day, and those two attacks hadn’t helped any; they must have been caused by nervous strain, he thought…and knew he was only trying to deceive himself. But the barbiturates were working, finally, bringing a cloudy euphoria that kept him from pursuing his doubts.

  He was reaching up for the light switch when the third attack came.

  CHAPTER 2

  This time it was different; the first ones had been mere feelers; now the attack on his mental stability had the sure drive of power and firmness behind it.

  The euphoria vanished, as if Blake’s thoughts no longer had any relation to his body—which seemed to be the case. He tried to see, and found that there was jet darkness around him. He could no longer feel his arm raised toward the switch—though he was sure he hadn’t dropped it, and that the light must still be on. There was no feeling of any kind.

  That was wrong, though; he could feel a pull, but it bore no relation to anything he had experienced before, except in the two previous fantasies. It was as if immaterial tongs had clasped his thoughts and were lifting them, delicately, but with all the power of the universe. There was a snapping, and then only a wild, confused feeling of transition.

  Everything seemed slower than before. Now the pressure guided him toward something—and there was a resistance which the guiding force could overcome only partially. Streamers of emotion shot out at him—and his own wild desire for a locus and a point of stability met them and clashed in something which managed to be agonizingly painful, yet without sensation!

  Idiocy again!

  The brain set against Blake’s own mind resisted without thought, without the slightest trace of knowledge. He could sense the wild frenzy with which it collected data as it went and tried to find answers that were not there. Something that might have been a soundless scream of desperation went up from it, as the force guiding Blake managed to press it aside.

  Blake felt the probing brain wrenched more wildly than he himself had been handled; again, there was a feeling of something snapping. Beside him, something tried to maintain itself, but without enough individuality to hold; it began drifting into nothing, and then was gone. But where it had been, was a suction that dragged him toward it.

  He settled suddenly, feeling the alienness of a new location. It wasn’t either of the two other places where he had been—this was new. There were nothing here to contest with him for his place, but something tried to erase him into the emptiness that had been the idiot thing before him. From somewhere outside, force and pressure seemed to descend, to mold Blake’s new haven into the patterns of his thoughts, and made it accept him. The effort of holding his own, where he himself was still alien, became less; but it now fitted his mind. It was cramped, and without the warmth of his own body, but he was physically alive again.

  The pressure vanished, and he relaxed back on the bed suddenly.

  But this wasn’t Tom Blake’s own bed, any more than it was his own body. This was a hard pad under him, in place of the foam rubber cushion—and this new body seemed to be quite unmindful of the bumpiness, which his own body would have found intolera
ble.

  Blake shook himself, chasing away the final stages of the fantasy this had to be. He was probably half-asleep, which made this one last longer; if he opened his eyes…

  They seemed to work with difficulty, but they came open finally, to show the contour of a body under a dingy, gray sheet—something that must have been black, before it faded. Blake moved his hand, glancing at it. His eyes focussed slowly on a heavy, muscular arm, deep brown from sun and wind, that ended in a hand covered with hair, and lacking a finger.

  Blake tried to scream. He was hysterical inside, but no sound came out; the lack of physical response struck him like a second blow, snapping him out of it.

  He wasn’t in his own body, and this wasn’t a dream. Somehow, something had picked up his thoughts and memories and planted them in the skull of an entirely different man. It couldn’t be done, but Blake was here to prove it.

  “Magic,” came the memory of his brother’s words from their adolescence, “does not exist. It is only a distortion of what could be scientific facts, if properly understood. If poltergeists exist, then accept them, but remember they’re natural phenomena obeying natural principles we don’t fully understand. That’s science.”

  Blake clutched at the idea. Nobody had conjured him here, wherever here was; it was the work of intelligence, operating with natural laws—and that could never be fully horrible. He was only feeling horror because the cave beast that feared the dark was part of his emotional and environmental heritage.

  He put the cave beast down enough to try to find where “here” was.

  He found that his head was strapped down, and that webbing under the sheet restrained his new body. Inability to move more than his eyes limited his view to one end of this room. He could see monotracks over his head, with great machines that might have been anything from lamps, to oversized routers sliding along them, under the cold glare of fluorescent tubes. The wall ahead of him was a featureless gray; the floor was out of his view. And along the wall was a single bench, covered with cots, each holding a body strapped down as Blake’s was. Their heads were clamped, hiding them from him; but he could see that each had a hairy hand outside the sheet, and that all the bodies were about the same height and build—fairly tall, and uniformly solid in build. He supposed he fitted the same description, since there was so much uniformity.

  As he watched, the machines traveled down the track, stopping in clusters over a few heads at a time, while odd lights glowed, and a whirring sound came from them. From each man under a cluster of machines, there would be a mutter, then a prolonged groan…and silence, until the machines moved on.

  It wasn’t an inspiring view, and it told Blake almost nothing. He seemed to have seen bits of it before in his first attack, but he couldn’t be sure.

  As he watched, a door opened in the wall, and a man came through, dressed in a smock that fell to the floor and was of shiny black material. He was tall and thin but wide-shouldered, with a face that was frozen into complete lack of expression. A chill shuddered through Blake; this was the same face he’d first seen. Then, somehow, even that bit of familiarity made it easier to take.

  He wasn’t surprised to hear a mutter in the voice of an old man. It was a complaining sound, ending in a sharp question.

  The smocked man shrugged. “I know, Excellency, but we’re beyond even the borderland of familiar science here. If it works, it will be a miracle. I told you that then, and I still say it. Once we catch him, we can erase him. But the problem is to catch him—on fancy guesswork as to just what mind pattern we’re looking for, way back then.”

  “Something worked before.” The figure coming through the door now looked at the rows of men, with a sharpness oddly in contrast with the voice. He was of indeterminate age—somewhere between sixty and eighty, Blake thought. But his body was reasonably straight, and with none of the fat or gauntness most older men have. His hair was steel grey—just a shade darker than the soft grey uniform he wore—and his movements were seemingly easy and sure. His face was handsome except for the expression there. The mouth was too straight, the eyes too cynical—and over the aura of power was a hint of repressed but seething fear.

  He coughed, and turned to the nearer group of figures on the cots. His voice suddenly lost its touch of tremor, and became the firm, modulated tones of a trained speaker. “Well, don’t you think it’s time you asked where you are, young man?” he asked.

  The nearer figure struggled to sit upright. “Wahnsinnigkeit! Um Gottes Willen, wenn ich nur frei waehre…”

  “German,” the man in the black smock said. “And you don’t speak it.”

  “Never learned it,” the older man agreed. He looked down the line, started toward another, and then shrugged; a sudden smile flashed over his face. “Tom Blake, you’re the man we want; are you here?”

  “Here!” The word ripped out of Blake with an explosive force of its own, while all his uncertainties gathered themselves together in expectation of the explanation that would now mercifully be forthcoming.

  The other man beamed. “Good, Tom! Remember the desk combination? We have to be sure.” His voice was almost young now.

  “Right in, left in, left out, twice left,” Blake repeated.

  “That’s it!” The old man beamed again, and was still smiling as he turned to the man in the black smock. “Okay, Sarnoff. Burn out his brain—and do a good job of it, because I’m watching!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Blake screamed as the machines suddenly swooped over him, and one began droning again. He had no way of knowing what it would do—but the result was obvious from the shouted words. Sarnoff climbed up and inspected it, giving it a sudden test. Something in Blake’s mind slithered, and the force of the alienness grew stronger.

  “Pure luck,” Sarnoff said, his voice as emotionless as his expression. “Even with what we had to work with, guessing his resonant frequency range was just good luck. I didn’t even know whether we could reach back forty years into the past. Excellency, I deserve that bonus—but chance deserves a bigger one.”

  “You’ll get your bonus,” the older man agreed, and some of the age crept back into his speech. “Double it. We’ve got his mind matrix here—here where we can work on it with the burner; that’s all I care about. I want it eliminated permanently, Sarnoff!”

  The other nodded. The machine began to purr again, and Blake felt another scream come to his lips, and freeze there. Forty years into the future—to be eliminated! It wasn’t science or magic—it was simply horror. There was no purpose…no right…no…

  The slithering began in his brain again. This wasn’t the same as the previous force; it was an erasing of himself. Tom Blake’s memories began to blur, beginning with the earliest ones. His foster father suddenly stepped before his mental eye, chuckling at a successful creation of trouble at a disputed border that would be constant headlines for his papers. Then the foster father was gone, and Blake had no memory of anything before the age of ten.

  His brother…what had his brother said? Funny, how he’d ever gotten the chain of newspapers? Someone must have given them to Tom. Then the election was gone, and all he had heard here.

  He lay staring up at the pretty lights that glistened in the machine. A dim consciousness of self was left, but it seemed to be half outside his head—as if a funny part of him were trying to pull away and go back somewhere. He had no words, nor could he understand the words that were said in front of him.

  His eyes moved whenever sudden motion brought them around by catching their attention. But it was all something interesting in a purely sensory way. He saw Sarnoff test him; he lay for hours in a big room with other bodies that stirred senselessly. He felt them carry him to a truck and place him inside. The motion of the truck was scary and exciting at first, but he went to sleep soon after. His bodily functions woke him, just as the truck came to a sudden halt and other men climbed into it and began carting the drooling creatures with him away somewhere. But then he went to sleep a
gain.

  Far away, a part of himself as bereft of words as Tom was, began to cry unhappily, as if conscious that this was wrong. But it didn’t waken him.

  There were the beginnings of words again, when he finally did begin to come out of his sleep. Slow, bit by tedious part, his mind seemed to be reaching back to its dimmest recesses and pulling facts up for him. Sometimes whole chains of thought would pop into his mind and fade back into his permanent memory. Again, it would take what seemed like years of concentration to root out one totally unimportant thing.

  Blake was delighted when he discovered who he was. He mouthed his name to himself, soundlessly. The motion brought some attention; a sharp prick that he somehow identified as a hypodermic needle was thrust into his arm.

  “Go to sleep,” a soft voice whispered. “Sleep, Jed. We need you whole, and you’ll come back better if you don’t try too hard. That’s it, honey!”

  Blake was himself when he wakened—or rather, that other body with its alien brain which somehow had become himself. He was in a basement, from the smell and the dampness; lying on a cot across the dimly lighted room from a small, crude machine that resembled one he had seen in Sarnoff’s place. Another of the men who had been on one of Sarnoff’s cots sat near him, watching doubtfully, with some kind of a gun in his hand. And beside him, leaning over to kiss him as he opened his eyes, was a girl with an intense, half-pretty face and eyes that could have drawn the damned from hell straight through the pearly gates.

  She held him, moaning softly against him as her lips burned on his. Blake wanted to push her aside for a moment, but the body and brain in which he now lived had a warmer endocrine balance than his own. Desire washed over him, yet with a strange mingling of gentleness and protective instinct. She drew away at last, her eyes misty and shining. “Jed! Oh, Jed.”