The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  Vomact stood up and spoke to Grosbeck and Timofeyev. “Now,” he said, “let us see what happens when we apply the pain.”

  The two stepped back without being told to do so.

  Timofeyev waved his hand at a small white-enameled orderly-robot who stood in the doorway.

  The pain net, a fragile cage of wires, dropped down from the ceiling.

  It was Vomact’s duty, as senior doctor, to take the greatest risk. The patient was wholly encased by the net of wires, but Vomact dropped to his hands and knees, lifted the net at one corner with his right hand, thrust his own head into it next to the head of the patient. Doctor Vomact’s robe trailed on the clean concrete, touching the black old stains of blood left from the patient’s “swim” throughout the night.

  Now Vomact’s mouth was centimeters from the patient’s ear.

  Said Vomact, “Oh.”

  The net hummed.

  The patient stopped his slow motion, arched his back, looked steadfastly at the doctor.

  Doctor Grosbeck and Timofeyev could see Vomact’s face go white with the impact of the pain machine, but Vomact kept his voice under control and said evenly and loudly to the patient:

  “Who—are—you?”

  The patient said flatly, “Elizabeth.”

  The answer was foolish but the tone was rational.

  Vomact pulled his head out from under the net, shouting again at the patient, “Who—are—you?”

  The naked man replied, speaking very clearly:

  “Chwinkle, chwinkle, little chweeble,

  I am feeling very feeble!”

  Vomact frowned and murmured to the robot, “More pain. Turn it up to pain ultimate.”

  The body threshed under the net, trying to resume its swim on the concrete.

  A loud wild braying cry came from the victim under the net. It sounded like a screamed distortion of the name Elizabeth, echoing out from endless remoteness.

  It did not make sense.

  Vomact screamed back, “Who—are—you?”

  With unexpected clarity and resonance, the voice came back to the three doctors from the twisting body under the net of pain:

  “I’m the shipped man, the ripped man, the gypped man, the dipped man, the hipped man, the tripped man, the tipped man, the slipped man, the flipped man, the nipped man, the ripped man, the clipped man—aah!” His voice choked off with a cry and he went back to swimming on the floor, despite the intensity of the pain net immediately above him.

  The doctor lifted his hand. The pain net stopped buzzing and lifted high into the air.

  He felt the patient’s pulse. It was quick. He lifted an eyelid. The reactions were much closer to normal.

  “Stand back,” he said to the others.

  “Pain on both of us,” he said to the robot.

  The net came down on the two of them.

  “Who are you?” shrieked Vomact, right into the patient’s ear, holding the man halfway off the floor and not quite knowing whether the body which tore steel walls might not, somehow, tear both of them apart as they stood.

  The man babbled back at him: “I’m the most man, the post man, the host man, the ghost man, the coast man, the boast man, the dosed man, the grossed man, the toast man, the roast man, no! no! no!”

  He struggled in Vomact’s arms. Grosbeck and Timofeyev stepped forward to rescue their chief when the patient added, very calmly and clearly:

  “Your procedure is all right, Doctor, whoever you are. More fever, please. More pain, please. Some of that dope to fight the pain. You’re pulling me back. I know I am on Earth. Elizabeth is near. For the love of God, get me Elizabeth! But don’t rush me. I need days and days to get well.”

  The rationality was so startling that Grosbeck, without waiting for orders from Vomact, as chief doctor, ordered the pain net lifted.

  The patient began babbling again: “I’m the three man, the he man, the tree man, the me man, the three man, the three man…” His voice faded and he slumped unconscious.

  Vomact walked out of the vault. He was a little unsteady.

  His colleagues took him by the elbows.

  He smiled wanly at them. “I wish it were lawful…I could use some of that condamine myself. No wonder the pain nets wake the patients up and even make dead people do twitches! Get me some liquor. My heart is old.”

  Grosbeck sat him down while Timofeyev ran down the corridor in search of medicinal liquor.

  Vomact murmured, “How are we going to find his Elizabeth? There must be millions of them. And he’s from Earth Four too.”

  “Sir and Doctor, you have worked wonders,” said Grosbeck. “To go under the net. To take those chances. To bring him to speech. I will never see anything like it again. It’s enough for any one lifetime, to have seen this day.”

  “But what do we do next?” asked Vomact wearily, almost in confusion.

  That particular question needed no answer.

  VII

  The Lord Crudelta had reached Earth.

  His pilot landed the craft and fainted at the controls with sheer exhaustion.

  Of the escort cats, who had ridden alongside the space craft in the miniature spaceships, three were dead, one was comatose, and the fifth was spitting and raving.

  When the port authorities tried to slow the Lord Crudelta down to ascertain his authority, he invoked Top Emergency, took over the command of troops in the name of the Instrumentality, arrested everyone in sight but the troop commander, and requisitioned the troop commander to take him to the hospital. The computers at the port had told him that one Rambo, “sans origine,” had arrived mysteriously on the grass of a designated hospital.

  Outside the hospital, the Lord Crudelta invoked Top Emergency again, placed all armed men under his own command, ordered a recording monitor to cover all his actions if he should later be channeled into a court martial, and arrested everyone in sight.

  The tramp of heavily armed men, marching in combat order, overtook Timofeyev as he hurried back to Vomact with a drink. The men were jogging along on the double. All of them had live helmets and their wirepoints were buzzing.

  Nurses ran forward to drive the intruders out, ran backward when the sting of the stun-rays brushed cruelly over them. The whole hospital was in an uproar.

  The Lord Crudelta later admitted that he had made a serious mistake.

  The Two Minutes’ War broke out immediately.

  You have to understand the pattern of the Instrumentality to see how it happened. The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a plenum of the low, the middle, and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and to keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong—ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed.

  With three Lords, the situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to citizen status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.

  This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan: “Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!”

  The Lord Crudelta had seized the troops—not his troops, but the light regular troops of Manhome Government—because he feared that the great
est danger in the history of man might come from the person whom he himself had sent through Space3.

  He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his command—an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the incomparable communications net, both open and secret, reinforced by thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged from the Ancient Wars.

  Overriding, overridden!

  These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before recorded time began. Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of weapons, most often by cutting in on other people’s mechanical and social controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as they had taken them.

  But not Crudelta’s hastily called troops.

  VIII

  The war broke out with a change of pace.

  Two squads of men were moving into that part of the hospital where Elizabeth lay, waiting the endless returns to the jelly-baths which would rebuild her poor ruined body.

  The squads changed pace.

  The survivors could not account for what happened.

  They all admitted to great mental confusion—afterward.

  At the time it seemed that they had received a clear, logical command to turn and to defend the women’s section by counterattacking their own main battalion right in their rear.

  The hospital was a very strong building. Otherwise it would have melted to the ground or shot up in flame.

  The leading soldiers suddenly turned around, dropped for cover, and blazed their wirepoints at the comrades who followed them. The wirepoints were cued to organic material, though fairly harmless to inorganic. They were powered by the power relays which every soldier wore on his back.

  In the first ten seconds of the turnaround, twenty-seven soldiers, two nurses, three patients, and one orderly were killed. One hundred and nine other people were wounded in that first exchange of fire.

  The troop commander had never seen battle, but he had been well trained. He immediately deployed his reserves around the external exits of the building and sent his favorite squad, commanded by a Sergeant Lansdale whom he trusted well, down into the basement, so that it could rise vertically from the basement into the women’s quarters and find out who the enemy was.

  As yet, he had no idea that it was his own leading troops turning and fighting their comrades.

  He testified later, at the trial, that he personally had no sensations of eerie interference with his own mind. He merely knew that his men had unexpectedly come upon armed resistance from antagonists—identity unknown!—who had weapons identical with theirs. Since the Lord Crudelta had brought them along in case there might be a fight with unspecified antagonists, he felt right in assuming that a Lord of the Instrumentality knew what he was doing. This was the enemy, all right.

  In less than a minute, the two sides had balanced out. The line of fire had moved right into his own force. The lead men, some of whom were wounded, simply turned around and began defending themselves against the men immediately behind them. It was as though an invisible line, moving rapidly, had parted the two sections of the military force.

  The oily black smoke of dissolving bodies began to glut the ventilators.

  Patients were screaming, doctors cursing, robots stamping around, and nurses trying to call each other.

  The war ended when the troop commander saw Sergeant Lansdale, whom he himself had sent upstairs, leading a charge out of the women’s quarters—directly at his own commander!

  The officer kept his head.

  He dropped to the floor and rolled sidewise as the air chittered at him, the emanations of Lansdale’s wirepoint killing all the tiny bacteria in the air. On his helmet phone he pushed the manual controls to TOP VOLUME and to NONCOMS ONLY and he commanded, with a sudden flash of brilliant mother-wit:

  “Good job, Lansdale!”

  Lansdale’s voice came back as weak as if it had been off-planet. “We’ll keep them out of this section yet, sir!”

  The troop commander called back very loudly but calmly, not letting on that he thought his sergeant was psychotic, “Easy now. Hold on. I’ll be with you.”

  He changed to the other channel and said to his nearby men, “Cease fire. Take cover and wait.”

  A wild scream came to him from the phones.

  It was Lansdale. “Sir! Sir! I’m fighting you, sir. I just caught on. It’s getting me again. Watch out.”

  The buzz and burr of the weapons suddenly stopped.

  The wild human uproar of the hospital continued.

  A tall doctor, with the insignia of high seniority, came gently to the troop commander and said, “You can stand up and take your soldiers out now, young fellow. The fight was a mistake.”

  “I’m not under your orders,” snapped the young officer. “I’m under the Lord Crudelta. He requisitioned this force from the Manhome Government. Who are you?”

  “You may salute me, captain,” said the doctor. “I am Colonel General Vomact of the Earth Medical Reserve. But you had better not wait for the Lord Crudelta.”

  “But where is he?”

  “In my bed,” said Vomact.

  “Your bed?” cried the young officer in complete amazement.

  “In bed. Doped to the teeth. I fixed him up. He was excited. Take your men out. We’ll treat the wounded on the lawn. You can see the dead in the refrigerators downstairs in a few minutes, except for the ones that went smoky from direct hits.”

  “But the fight?…”

  “A mistake, young man, or else—”

  “Or else what?” shouted the young officer, horrified at the utter mess of his own combat experience.

  “Or else a weapon no man has ever seen before. Your troops fought each other. Your command was intercepted.”

  “I could see that,” snapped the officer, “as soon as I saw Lansdale coming at me.”

  “But do you know what took him over?” said Vomact gently, while taking the officer by the arm and beginning to lead him out of the hospital. The captain went willingly, not noticing where he was going, so eagerly did he watch for the other man’s words.

  “I think I know,” said Vomact. “Another man’s dreams. Dreams which have learned how to turn themselves into electricity or plastic or stone. Or anything else. Dreams coming to us out of space-three.”

  The young officer nodded dumbly. This was too much. “Space-three?” he murmured. It was like being told that the really alien invaders, whom men had been expecting for fourteen thousand years and had never met, were waiting for him on the grass. Until now Space3 had been a mathematical idea, a romancer’s daydream, but not a fact.

  The Sir and Doctor Vomact did not even ask the young officer. He brushed the young man gently at the nape of the neck and shot him through with tranquilizer. Vomact then led him out to the grass. The young captain stood alone and whistled happily at the stars in the sky. Behind him, his sergeants and corporals were sorting out the survivors and getting treatment for the wounded.

  The Two Minutes’ War was over.

  Rambo had stopped dreaming that his Elizabeth was in danger. He had recognized, even in his deep sick sleep, that the tramping in the corridor was the movement of armed men. His mind had set up defenses to protect Elizabeth. He took over command of the forward troops and set them to stopping the main body. The powers which Space3 had worked into him made this easy for him to do, even though he did not know that he was doing it.

  IX

  “How many dead?” said Vomact to Grosbeck and Timofeyev.

  “About two hundred.”

  “And how many irrecoverable dead?”

  “The ones that got turned into smoke. A dozen, maybe fourteen. The other dead can be fixed up, but most of them will have to get new personality prints.”

  “Do you know what happened?” asked Vomact.

  “No, Sir and Doctor,”
they both chorused.

  “I do. I think I do. No, I know I do. It’s the wildest story in the history of man. Our patient did it—Rambo. He took over the troops and set them against each other. That Lord of the Instrumentality who came charging in—Crudelta. I’ve known him for a long long time. He’s behind this case. He thought that troops would help, not sensing that troops would invite attack upon themselves. And there is something else.”

  “Yes?” they said, in unison.

  “Rambo’s woman—the one he’s looking for. She must be here.”

  “Why?” said Timofeyev.

  “Because he’s here.”

  “You’re assuming that he came here because of his own will, Sir and Doctor.”

  Vomact smiled the wise crafty smile of his family; it was almost a trademark of the Vomact house.

  “I am assuming all the things which I cannot otherwise prove.

  “First, I assume that he came here naked out of space itself, driven by some kind of force which we cannot even guess.

  “Second, I assume he came here because he wanted something. A woman named Elizabeth, who must already be here. In a moment we can go inventory all our Elizabeths.

  “Third, I assume that the Lord Crudelta knew something about it. He has led troops into the building. He began raving when he saw me. I know hysterical fatigue, as do you, my brothers, so I condamined him for a night’s sleep.

  “Fourth, let’s leave our man alone. There’ll be hearings and trials enough. Space knows, when all these events get scrambled out.”

  Vomact was right.

  He usually was.

  Trials did follow.

  It was lucky that Old Earth no longer permitted newspapers or television news. The population would have been frothed up to riot and terror if they had ever found out what happened at the Old Main Hospital just to the west of Meeya Meefla.

  X

  Twenty-one days later, Vomact, Timofeyev, and Grosbeck were summoned to the trial of the Lord Crudelta. A full panel of seven Lords of the Instrumentality was there to give Crudelta an ample hearing and, if required, a sudden death. The doctors were present both as doctors for Elizabeth and Rambo and as witnesses for the Investigating Lord.