Gordon R. Dickson's SF Best

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "I'm very sorry!" said Brayt, firmly: "I tell you, Mal. None of this makes any difference. The decision of the Foundation is based on financial reasons. They've got just so much money available to donate, and this station's allotment has already gone in other directions. There's nothing that can be done, now."

  He pulled his arm free.

  "I'm sorry," he said again. "I'll be back in a week at the outside. You might be thinking of how to wind up things, here."

  He turned with that, and went away, around the building toward the parking spot of the station copters. Mal, stunned, watched the tall, slim, broad-shouldered figure move into darkness.

  "It doesn't matter," said the gentle voice of Jane comfortingly at his ear. He jerked about and saw her facing him. "You won't need the Willernie funds any more."

  "He told you?" Mal stared at her as she shook her head, smiling in the growing dimness. "You heard? From way over there?"

  "Yes," she said. "And you were right about Brayt. I got your answer for you. He was a hatchet man – sent here by the Willernie people to decide whether the station deserved further funds."

  "But we've got to have them!" Mal said. "It won't take much more, but we've got to go into the sea and work out ways to talk to the dolphins in their own mode. We've got to expand to their level of communication, not try to compress them to ours. You see, this afternoon, I had a breakthrough –"

  "I know," she said. "I know all about it."

  "You know?" He stared at her. "How do you know?"

  "You've been under observation all afternoon," she said. "You're right. You did break through the environmental barrier. From now on it's just a matter of working out methods."

  "Under observation? How?" Abruptly, that seemed the least important thing at hand. "But I have to have money," he said. "It'll take time and equipment, and that costs money –"

  "No." Her voice was infinitely gentle. "You won't need to work out your own methods. Your work is done, Mal. This afternoon the dolphins and you broke the bars to communication between the two races for the first time in the history of either. It was the job you set out to do and you were part of it. You can be happy knowing that."

  "Happy?" He almost shouted at her, suddenly. "I don't understand what you're talking about."

  "I'm sorry." There was a ghost of a sigh from her. "We'll show you how to talk to the dolphins, Mal, if men need to. As well as some other things – perhaps." Her face lifted to him under the star-marked sky, still a little light in the west. "You see, you were right about something more than dolphins, Mal. Your idea that the ability to communicate with another intelligent race, an alien race, was a test that had to be passed before the superior species of a planet could be contacted by the intelligent races of the galaxy – that was right, too."

  He stared at her. She was so close to him, he could feel the living warmth of her body, although they were not touching. He saw her, he felt her, standing before him; and he felt all the strange deep upwelling of emotion that she had released in him the moment he first saw her. The deep emotion he felt for her still. Suddenly understanding came to him.

  "You mean you're not from Earth –" His voice was hoarse and uncertain. It wavered to a stop. "But you're human!" he cried desperately.

  She looked back at him a moment before answering. In the dimness he could not tell for sure, but he thought he saw the glisten of tears in her eyes.

  "Yes," she said, at last, slowly. "In the way you mean that – you can say I'm human."

  A great and almost terrible joy burst suddenly in him. It was the joy of a man who, in the moment when he thinks he has lost everything, finds something of infinitely greater value.

  "But how?" he said, excitedly, a little breathlessly. He pointed up at the stars. "If you come from some place – up there? How can you be human?"

  She looked down, away from his face. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't tell you."

  "Can't tell me? Oh," he said with a little laugh, "you mean I wouldn't understand."

  "No –" Her voice was almost inaudible, "I mean I'm not allowed to tell you."

  "Not allowed –" He felt an unreasoning chill about his heart. "But Jane –" He broke off fumbling for words. "I don't know quite how to say this, but it's important to me to know. From the first moment I saw you there, I . . . I mean, maybe you don't feel anything like this, you don't know what I'm talking about –"

  "Yes," she whispered. "I do."

  "Then –" He stared at her. "You could at least say something that would set my mind at rest. I mean . . . it's only a matter of time now. We're going to be getting together, your people and I, aren't we?"

  She looked up at him out of darkness.

  "No," She said, "we aren't, Mal. Ever. And that's why I can't tell you anything."

  "We aren't?" he cried. "We aren't? But you came and saw us communicate – Why aren't we?"

  She looked up at him for the last time, then, and told him. He, having heard what she had to say, stood still; still as a stone, for there was nothing left to do. And she, turning slowly and finally away from him, went off to the edge of the pool and down the steps into the shallow water, where the dolphins came rushing to meet her, their foamy tearing of the surface making a wake as white as snow.

  Then the three of them moved, as if by magic, across the surface of the pool and out the entrance of it to the ocean. And so they continued to move off until they were lost to sight in darkness and the starlit, glinting surface of the waves.

  It came to Mal then, as he stood there, that the dolphins must have been waiting for her all this time. All the wild dolphins, who had come to the station after the first two captives, were set free to leave or stay as they wanted. The dolphins had known, perhaps for centuries, that it was to them alone on Earth that the long-awaited visitors from the stars would finally come.

  * ["The Forsaken Merman," by Matthew Arnold, 1849.]

  Balance is achieved by the resolution of paired opposites. It is well that man be humble, as "Dolphin's Way" suggests. But humility needs to be balanced by pride. These days the science fiction woods are full of writers eloquently condemning man for a miserable mistake on the part of God, and their evidence is compelling.

  Yet at the same time there is something magnificent about the poor damned human race – something very basic in the way we respond to challenge. Something that transcends our intellectual or technological or perceptual or sociological expertise. Something much older, something God put . . .

  IN THE BONE

  I

  Personally, his name was Harry Brennan.

  Officially, he was the John Paul Jones, which consisted of four billion dollars' worth of irresistible equipment – the latest and best of human science – designed to spread its four thousand components out through some fifteen cubic meters of space under ordinary conditions – designed also to stretch across light-years under extraordinary conditions (such as sending an emergency messenger-component home) or to clump into a single magnetic unit in order to shift through space and explore the galaxy. Both officially and personally – but most of all personally – he represents a case in point.

  The case is one having to do with the relative importance of the made thing and its maker.

  It was, as we know, the armored horseman who dominated the early wars of the Middle Ages in Europe. But, knowing this, it is still wise to remember that it was not the iron shell that made the combination of man and metal terrible to the enemy – but rather the essentially naked man inside the shell. Later, French knights depending on their armor went down before the cloth-yard shafts of unarmored footmen with bows, at Crécy and Poitiers.

  And what holds true for armor holds true for the latest developments of our science as well. It is not the spacecraft or the laser on which we will find ourselves depending when a time of ultimate decision comes, but the naked men within and behind these things. When that time comes, those who rank the made thing before its maker will die as the French knights died at C
récy and Poitiers. This is a law of nature as wide as the universe, which Harry Brennan, totally unsuspecting, was to discover once more for us, in his personal capacity.

  Personally, he was in his midtwenties, unremarkable except for two years of special training with the John Paul Jones and his superb physical condition. He was five eleven, a hundred seventy-two pounds, with a round, cheerful face under his brown crew-cut hair. I was Public Relations Director of the Project that sent him out; and I was there with the rest to slap him on the back the day he left.

  "Don't get lost, now," said someone. Harry grinned.

  "The way you guys built this thing," he answered, "if I got lost the galaxy would just have to shift itself around to get me back on plot."

  There was an unconscious arrogance hidden in that answer, but no one marked it at the time. It was not the hour of suspicions.

  He climbed into the twelve-foot-tall control-suit that with his separate living tank were the main components of the John Paul Jones, and took off. Up in orbit, he spent some thirty-two hours testing to make sure all the several thousand other component parts were responding properly. Then he left the solar system.

  He clumped together his components, made his first shift to orbit Procyon – and from there commenced his explorations of the stars. In the next nine weeks, he accumulated literally amazing amounts of new information about the nearby stars and their solar systems. And – this is an even better index of his success – located four new worlds on which men could step with never a spacesuit or even a water canteen to sustain them. Worlds so like Earth in gravity, atmosphere, and even flora and fauna, that they could be colonized tomorrow.

  Those were his first four worlds. On the fifth he encountered his fate – a fate for which he was unconsciously ripe.

  The fact was the medical men and psychologists had overlooked a factor – a factor having to do with the effect of Harry's official John Paul Jones self upon his entirely human personal self. And over nine weeks this effect changed Harry without his ever having suspected it.

  You see, nothing seemed barred to him. He could cross light-years by touching a few buttons. He could send a sensing element into the core of the hottest star, into the most poisonous planetary atmospheres or crushing gravities, to look around as if he were down there in person. From orbit, he could crack open a mountain, burn off a forest, or vaporize a section of icecap in search of information just by tapping the energy of a nearby sun. And so, subtly, the unconscious arrogance born during two years of training, that should have been noted in him at take-off from Earth, emerged and took him over – until he felt that there was nothing he could not do; that all things must give way to him; that he was, in effect, master of the universe.

  The day may come when a man like Harry Brennan may hold such a belief and be justified. But not yet. On the fifth Earth-like world he discovered – World 1242 in his records – Harry encountered the proof that his belief was unjustified.

  I

  The world was one which, from orbit, seemed to be the best of all the planets which he had discovered were suitable for human settlement; and he was about to go down to its surface personally in the control-suit, when his instruments picked out something already down there.

  It was a squat, metallic pyramid about the size of a four-plex apartment building; and it was radiating on a number of interesting frequencies. Around its base there was mechanical movement and an area of cleared ground. Further out, in the native forest, were treaded vehicles taking samples of the soil, rock, and vegetation.

  Harry had been trained for all conceivable situations, including an encounter with other intelligent, space-going, life. Automatically, he struck a specific button, and immediately a small torpedo-shape leaped away to shift through alternate space and back to Earth with the information so far obtained. And a pale, thin beam reached up and out from the pyramid below. Harry's emergency messenger component ceased to exist.

  Shaken, but not yet really worried, Harry struck back instantly with all the power his official self could draw from the GO-type sun, nearby.

  The power was funneled by some action below, directly into the pyramid itself; and it vanished there as indifferently as the single glance of a sunbeam upon a leaf.

  Harry's mind woke suddenly to some understanding of what he had encountered. He reached for the controls to send the John Paul Jones shifting into the alternate universe and away.

  His hands never touched the controls. From the pyramid below, a blue lance of light reached up to paralyze him, select the control-suit from among the other components, and send it tumbling to the planetary surface below like a swatted insect.

  But the suit had been designed to protect its occupant, whether he himself was operative or not. At fifteen hundred feet, the drag chute broke free, looking like a silver cloth candle-snuffer in the sunlight; and at five hundred feet the retro-rockets cut in. The suit tumbled to earth among some trees two kilometers from the pyramid, with Harry inside bruised, but released from his paralysis.

  From the pyramid, a jagged arm of something like white lightning lashed the ground as far as the suit, and the suit's outer surface glowed cherry-red. Inside, the temperature suddenly shot up fifty degrees; instinctively Harry hit the panic button available to him inside the suit.

  The suit split down the center like an overcooked frankfurter and spat Harry out; he rolled among the brush and fernlike ground cover, six or seven meters from the suit.

  From the distant pyramid, the lightning lashed the suit, breaking it up. The headpiece rolled drunkenly aside, turning the dark gape of its interior toward Harry like the hollow of an empty skull. In the dimness of that hollow Harry saw the twinkle of his control buttons.

  The lightning vanished. A yellow lightness filled the air about Harry and the dismembered suit. There was a strange quivering to the yellowness; and Harry half-smelled, half-tasted the sudden, flat bite of ozone. In the headpiece a button clicked without being touched; and the suit speaker, still radio-connected with the recording tank in orbit, spoke aloud in Harry's voice.

  "Orbit . . ." it said. ". . . into . . . going . . ."

  These were, in reverse order, the last three words Harry had recorded before sighting the pyramid. Now, swiftly gaining speed, the speaker began to recite backward, word for word, everything Harry had said into it in nine weeks. Faster it went, and faster until it mounted to a chatter, a gabble, and finally a whine pushing against the upper limits of Harry's auditory register.

  Suddenly, it stopped.

  The little clearing about Harry was full of silence. Only the odd and distant creaking of something that might have been a rubbing branch or an alien insect came to Harry's ears. Then the speaker spoke once more.

  "Animal . . ." it said flatly in Harry's calm, recorded voice and went on to pick further words from the recordings. ". . . best. You . . . were an animal . . . wrapped in . . . made clothing. I have stripped you back to . . . animal again. Live, beast . . ."

  Then the yellowness went out of the air and the taste of ozone with it. The headpiece of the dismembered suit grinned, empty as old bones in the sunlight. Harry scrambled to his feet and ran wildly away through the trees and brush. He ran in panic and utter fear, his lungs gasping, his feet pounding the alien earth, until the earth, the trees, the sky itself swam about him from exhaustion; and he fell tumbling to earth and away into the dark haven of unconsciousness.

  When he woke, it was night, and he could not quite remember where he was or why. His thoughts seemed numb and unimportant. But he was told, so he blundered about until he found the standing half-trunk of a lightning-blasted tree and crept into the burned hollow of its interior, raking frill-edged, alien leaves about him out of some half-forgotten instinct, until his own body-warmth in the leaves formed a cocoon of comfort about him; and he slept.

  From then on began a period in which nothing was very clear. It was as if his mind had huddled itself away somehow like a wounded animal and refused to think. Ther
e was no past or future, only the endless now. If now was warm, it had always been warm; if dark – it had always been dark. He learned to smell water from a distance and go to it when he was thirsty. He put small things in his mouth to taste them. If they tasted good he ate them. If he got sick afterward, he did not eat them again.

  Gradually; blindly, the world about him began to take on a certain order. He came to know where there were plants with portions he could eat, where there were small creatures he could catch and pull apart and eat, and where there was water.

  He did not know how lucky he was in the sheer chance of finding flora and fauna on an alien world that were edible – let alone nourishing. He did not realize that he had come down on a plateau in the tropical highlands, with little variation in day and night temperature and no large native predators which might have attacked him.

  None of this he knew. Nor would it have made any difference to him if he had, for the intellectual center of his brain bad gone on vacation, so to speak, and refused to be called back. He was, in fact, a victim of severe psychological shock. The shock of someone who had come to feel himself absolute master of a universe and who then, in a few short seconds, had been cast down from that high estate by something or someone inconceivably greater, into the state of a beast of the field.

  But still, he could not be a true beast of the field, in spite of the fact his intellectual processes had momentarily abdicated. His perceptive abilities still worked.

  His eyes could not help noting, even if incuriously, the progressive drying of the vegetation, the day-by-day shifting in the points of setting and rising of the sun. Slowly, instinctively, the eternal moment that held him stretched and lengthened until he began to perceive divisions within it – a difference between now and was, between now and will be.