by John Brunner
“Well—”
“I’m asking you,” Redvers cut in, “to do it today. I haven’t any authority for that, but … well, the Agency is a kind of planetary fire brigade, isn’t it? And I smell smoke.”
Dan thought for a long moment.
“I’ll put in a report at once,” he said finally. “And what’s more I’m going to code it red.”
“Thank God,” Redvers said. “If that means anything. I used to think it did. Nowadays I’m not sure any longer.”
Dan had left his Binton being passed from hand to hand among the marveling members of the stardropper commune. He didn’t bother going back for it. It was expensive, and he’d be required to account for its loss, but right now, he’d as soon have gone to take back a bagful of rattlesnakes.
The report he planned to file could be turned in over an ordinary phone circuit; however, there were good reasons for preferring privacy at the speaking end of the connection, and since Redver’s men had already checked his hotel room for bugs, he headed straight back there. He was given a clear transatlantic satellite connection very quickly, it being by now after business hours in London, and shortly heard a familiar recorded voice inviting him to go ahead, followed by the three shrill pips which were a key to his personal code. He closed his eyes.
“Oh-four,” he said. “Equanimity is inversely by the clyster. When it was in the trivial four-by-four the virtue was imported, but the wall fell between the crackle and the potiphar…”
It was a curious uplifting sensation to hear himself speak this way, perhaps akin to the transcendental insight some people claimed to achieve through drugs or starvation or delirium. During his first two years with the Agency, he had undergone a complete course of analysis conducted by a specially trained neo-Freudian. From the complex personal associations revealed by the analysis they had built up a word-for-word code covering the equivalent of a good-sized desk dictionary. New words and personal names could be spelled out; for every letter of the alphabet and for every number up to a hundred there were a dozen associated phrases. Next he had been made to learn the code, pumped into him under deep hypnosis. The Agency used hypnosis a great deal, having refined the traditional techniques with the aid of drugs.
The memorizing had taken a mere three months. Now, at the Agency’s main office in New York, there was a computer—number 04—into which they would feed the tape bearing his report, and it would print out in clear.
The method wasn’t perfect. It was fat, to begin with, running a minimum twenty percent longer than clear language and occasionally as much as sixty percent, and sometimes sentence structure survived the coding procedure. But because the equivalence depended on Dan’s personal memories and not on a process that could be attacked statistically it would probably take longer to break than it had taken to build up. Even Dan himself could not decipher a transcript of one of his own reports; it required a post-hypnotic trigger, such as the three pips he’d heard on the phone this time, to make the code accessible to his conscious mind.
Four pips on a lower tone followed his signing off, and he instantly forgot again how to speak in the code. His sense of elation lingered, though. It was sometimes very strong, as he imagined the aftermath of a vision might be to a mystic—a feeling that he had been briefly in closer touch with reality. He’d asked the analyst who had laid the foundations for the code about this, and had been told that in fact there was a more mundane explanation. Most people, the analyst asserted, had the ability to recall in the proper context a word they hadn’t thought of for years, even decades: perhaps a technical term, perhaps a foreign name. Given the right stimulus, up it would pop. And this of itself usually made the person affected feel pleased. In the case of an Agency code, there was a reinforcement Ordinary language was a series of labels invented by other people; Agency codes were derived from remembered events that were exclusively significant to the user, so recovering the knowledge of them and knowing them to have been usefully employed was a little like the case of a composer, say, who while walking down the street heard other people, total strangers, humming a song he had made up so long ago he’d almost forgotten about it.
Whatever explanation might account for the experience, it was a valid one. Dan felt like a cat full of cream as he lounged in his armchair after completing his report. It wasn’t until, feeling for his cigarettes, he discovered a slip of paper in his pocket that he snapped back into contact with reality.
He’d abandoned his stardropper at the Carlton’s commune. But he’d claimed the note Lilith had left, with its single scribbled word bold and black on the narrow white page.
Had she slipped away like a mouse into a hole, wanting perfect privacy for some reason of her own? Or had she gone as Dr. Rainshaw alleged his son had gone—“miraculously”? If so, should he pity her?
Or envy her?
Which?
IX
Through the main bar of the Hunting Horn pub, up a flight of stairs, he reached the meetingplace of the Club Cosmica. At the head of the stairs a girl volunteer was taking admission fees—a student, by the look of her. She was furnished with a list of recognized guests on which she found his name, and waved him by without charging anything.
He passed on into a large room, divided by a heavy curtain three-quarters drawn into a meeting hall with rows of chairs facing a dais and a kind of antechamber where there was a bar. It was still nearly twenty minutes before the advertised time of starting, but already there were some forty people standing around in knots of four to six.
The people he’d met at the commune this afternoon had been—congruous? Was there such a word? The hell with it. They fitted. He recalled Redver’s wry joke about “stardropping out.” The members of the commune were the Carltons’ age or younger, clean but shabbily dressed, with the indefinable stamp of the social rebel. Here, in utter contrast, the atmosphere was that of a heavily patronized bar in some prosperous business district: the men wore well-tailored suits, the women and girls had fashionable outfits and expensive coiffures, not to mention jewelry restrained enough to be very valuable. And they were drinking vodkatinis or dry sherry.
The sheer paradox of it confused him terribly. When else in all of history had people joined smart social clubs to meddle with something equally dangerous?
Oh, maybe in ancient China they had fireworks parties and amused themselves elegantly with that newly discovered substance, gunpowder!
Affable, Watson spotted him and came over to greet him. Having bought him a drink, he invited him to meet some of the members. As he was piloted from group to group, Dan caught snatches of conversation, but like the articles in the hobby magazines he’d read, it all seemed dismayingly remote from the reality of a girl who had vanished from her tiny attic room, or a father mourning the loss of a son he did not believe dead yet never expected to see again.
“—but the whole question of subjective-objective comes in here, so let’s not get metaphysical. Objective so far as we are concerned means you can make it do things. Postulate a field such that—”
“—concede that an installation like his certainly uses a lot of power, but where’s the benefit in that? Anyone could hook a ’dropper on a thirty-two-thousand-volt power cable and the signals would be heard from here to Yucatan, but it’s a waste of effort, I think—”
Those speakers were both serious, intense young men, illustrating their points with slipsticks. Others were struggling, their eyes haunted, to get across meanings they were convinced no words could properly express. They seemed infinitely distant from anything Dan had encountered in other contexts.
“—nature of the signal in Berghaus’s view. I mean, identity of function isn’t identity of nature. Department of truisms now open.” This was a man of about thirty in an old suit, his hair rumpled, his eyes fierce and bright behind strong glasses. “To say this is what the signals are like tells you precisely nothing. Any day now someone may work up an explanation without reference to psychic continua at all.”
“Maybe it does to you, Angel. To me it says nothing of the kind. You’re just oversusceptible. Your imagination was caught by Berghaus’s idea, and bang! It was revealed truth.”
The girl he had called Angel raised one eyebrow. She was very pretty, but her face was drawn and tired. She said, “Well, well! Jerry Berghaus plus, I presume! You know as well as I do that Berghaus approached the matter with an open mind—”
“And leapt miles ahead of any objective evidence!” snapped Jerry.
“Because he experienced for himself the self-identifying information in stardropper signals!” the girl flared.
Watson excused himself to Dan in a whisper and went through to the other half of the hall; there were some sort of preparations going on the dais, presumably for the promised demonstration.
“Look,” the man Jerry said with careful patience, “no one disputes that Berghaus accounted neatly for precognition. What I’m saying is that when he came to stardropping he applied Occam’s razor needlessly and stretched his precog theory to include that too simply because of the one factor they had in common: neither could be explained in traditional terms.”
A lean, fiftyish man on the other side of Angel took a pipe from his mouth and frowned. “But is Berghaus what you’d call an enthusiast?” he said. “I gather he’s not.”
“He told me—” Dan said, and broke off, because instantly all the eyes of the group were on him. Well, it was a fast way of staking his claim in the conversation. “He told me he thought that if the signals are of alien origin they’ll probably be intrinsically incomprehensible.”
“You know Berghaus?” Angel said in a wondering voice.
“Well, I’ve met him and talked about this to him.”
“And that louse Wally Watson didn’t bother to mention it to us?”
“I don’t think I told him,” Dan said. He felt the mood of the group shift toward awe: here’s a man who knows Berghaus and is modest about it! All the dogmatism went out of Jerry. He spoke in a changed voice.
“Well—uh—I’m Jerry Bartlett, and this is Angel Allen. And Leon Patrick,” the man with the pipe offered his hand for a foursquare shake. “And …”
The other two in the group muttered names Dan barely heard; they both seemed to be listeners, not talkers. Angel kept her eyes on his face.
“But he must take his theory seriously,” she insisted.
“I assume he does. But he certainly doesn’t pin as much faith to it as most people seem to.”
“So much for your ‘self-identifying’ bit,” Jerry said to Angel.
“Not at all.” She rounded on him sharply. “Can you tell me how it feels to ride a bicycle?”
“Don’t be irrelevant. You sit astride it, you put one foot—”
“I didn’t ask you to explain the mechanics of it. I said tell me how it feels. You can’t verbalize the balancing sensation you experience. But you can learn it when it happen to you. Human beings can absorb nonverbal knowledge. We just aren’t very good at it.”
“You’re not falling for this supernatural-wisdom bit, are you?” Jerry’s bluster was beginning to return.
“If you’ve started to resort to loaded words like ‘supernatural,’ it seems to me you’re afraid of being convinced. In which case, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m a physicist. Stardropper signals are a phenomenon in my province, obviously. What annoys me is people like you telling me I ought to be humble—when did I claim to know more than Berghaus?”
Angel sighed. “What gives you the impression that I did? All I’m saying is that he proposed his theory because the signals convey a hint of their own nature, which I’ve experienced myself. If Berghaus does have reservations, that’s what I’ve always been taught to regard as a proper scientific attitude. Now let’s hear your reasons for contesting that!”
Before Jerry could utter his counterblast, plainly boiling at the tip of his tongue, they were interrupted by Watson’s voice calling them to take their places for the demonstration, and they joined a slow shuffling procession into the other half of the room. Dan hoped the argument might resume later. There was something reassuring about the fact that some people at least were approaching the subject from this highly critical standpoint, instead of simply swallowing Berghaus’s theory whole in the manner displayed by the members of the Carlton’s commune.
At Angel’s invitation, he took a place in the front row between her and the pipe-smoking Leon Patrick. On the dais stood a huge stardropper on a rubber-tired trolley, attended by Watson and a roly-poly man in shiny-seated slacks and a green sweater; while Watson made delicate adjustments to its controls, the latter was listening intently through earphones, gesturing vigorously.
The adjustments satisfactorily completed and the audience settled down, Watson called the meeting to order and read a set of formal minutes, which were largely concerned with routine matters such as raising the membership fee and organizing a charter flight for members of the club to attend a stardropping congress in Oslo. Then he called for a report from the membership secretary, a drab woman of young middle age, noticeably worse-clad than most other people here, about whom the only touch of color was her hair—faded carroty-red, and probably dyed. Dan gathered that her name was Mrs. Towler.
But he didn’t pay much attention to these proceedings; they seemed appallingly banal.
Eventually, however, all that was disposed of, and Watson rose again to introduce their guest speaker for the evening: the roly-poly man, whom he presented as Dr. Jock Neill from the University of Strathbran in Scotland.
Neill was very excitable; he talked fast, with a great deal of jargon, and what was worse from Dan’s point of view with a ferocious Scots accent. After the first few minutes it hardly seemed worth trying to follow his discourse in detail; accordingly he let his mind drift back to the line of argument Angel and Jerry had been pursuing.
The girl’s contention that the signals were self-identifying was as useful a piece of logic as a medieval schoolman’s. If you didn’t accept the postulate, it fell down; if you did, it was a perfect defense against any contrary assertion. She seemed to have accepted it in toto. Did her obvious tiredness indicate that she was in an obsession-state akin to Lilith’s, and merely better equipped than a simple schoolgirl to put her opinions into convincing words? There was no way, as yet, that Dan could tell, but he made a mental note to engage her in further conversation.
It would be very reassuring to find that in some cases, at least, stardropper “addiction” could co-exist with enduring rationality.
Was Jerry an example of that? Dan rather thought not. He was such a contrast with Angel. Clearly he was a skeptic, waiting for the evidence of some special personal experience before conceding that there were truths not accounted for in his scientific canon. He had said he was a physicist, investigating a phenomenon in his own province, but on the basis of what he’d been told in his briefing, let alone what he had more recently learned, Dan would have been prepared to argue the contrary. Even Berghaus agreed that a stardropper transcended orthodox physics. That might well be what was making Jerry so dogmatic and aggressive—the suspicion that his cherished beliefs were about to be overturned.
A painful process!
Neill reached the end of his exposition, to the relief of some people in the audience who had apparently lost track in the same way as Dan, and the lights went down and the demonstration began. From a speaker hung on the side of the stardropper trolley there swelled a vast busy noise suggesting a factory, or perhaps a whole industrial town. Having spared it his full concentration for a minute or two, Dan decided it was
just a noise as far as he was concerned, and reverted to wrestling with his own complex thoughts.
One thing was clear: not everyone gave credit to the notion that stardropping was a key to mystic alien knowledge. Jerry had specifically pooh-poohed the idea. And this man beside him, Leon Patrick, formal of manner and well past the excitable age, had seemed to incline to the same view. Dan marked him down also on the list of people he wanted to have another talk with; one would assume him to be a successful business executive—not, a priori, a very credulous type.
There was a tremendous racket coming from the loudspeaker now. It kept driving his thoughts into channels he didn’t want them to wander down, but perfect concentration was out of the question. He recalled the snatch of conversation he had overheard about an installation which used a lot of power. Could the equipment referred to have been Neill’s? If so, what benefit might the extra power offer? Granting Berghaus’s hypothesis of a non-Einsteinian continuum, was there a linear relationship between power and range in the case of a stardropper? If there were, it followed that increasing the power would defeat the object of the exercise. The more power you used, the lower would be the chance of receiving signals from one single source, into which the linearly organized human brain might conceivably read a clear meaning without distraction, and the greater the risk of picking up two, ten, or a thousand signals overlaid one on top of the other. Therefore the optimum approach should lie in employing the minimum quantity of power, to reduce equipment noise, and …
He was beginning to feel giddy. He had a curious sense of frustration, as though he had a word on the tip of his tongue, due to contemplating the improbability of a linear power-range relation in a Berghausian continuum. Given that this was a genuine problem, however, that didn’t mean it was insoluble. As Jerry had rightly said, identity of function isn’t identity of nature, and the fact that stardropper signals were conveniently presented through an earpiece was due to an accidental human predisposition. Words and mathematical symbols and variables in an analog computer went through the same motions as their real-world counterparts and were not those counterparts. The resemblance between a stardropper and a portable radio was coincidence. If some brand-new mode of conveying the information had been adopted, such as direct input through the skin, would …?