“I was thinking about you today,” Judy said, and Anders knew that she had sensed the change in his mood.
“Do you see?” the voice asked him. “You’re getting much better at it.”
“I don’t see anything,” Anders thought, but the voice was right. It was as though he had a clear line of inspection into Judy’s mind. Her feelings were nakedly apparent to him, as meaningless as his room had been in that flash of undistorted thought.
“I really was thinking about you,” she repeated.
“Now look,” the voice said.
ANDERS, watching the expressions on Judy’s face, felt the strangeness descend on him. He was back in the nightmare perception of that moment in his room. This time it was as though he were watching a machine in a laboratory. The object of this operation was the evocation and preservation of a particular mood. The machine goes through a searching process, invoking trains of ideas to achieve the desired end.
“Oh, were you?” he asked, amazed at his new perspective.
“Yes . . . I wondered what you were doing at noon,” the reactive machine opposite him on the couch said, expanding its shapely chest slightly.
“Good,” the voice said, commending him for his perception.
“Dreaming of you, of course,” he said to the flesh-clad skeleton behind the total gestalt Judy. The flesh machine rearranged its limbs, widened its mouth to denote pleasure. The mechanism searched through a complex of fears, hopes, worries, through half-remembrances of analogous situations, analogous solutions.
And this was what he loved. Anders saw too clearly and hated himself for seeing. Through his new nightmare perception, the absurdity of the entire room struck him.
“Were you really?” the articulating skeleton asked him.
“You’re coming closer,” the voice whispered.
To what? The personality? There was no such thing. There was no true cohesion, no depth, nothing except a web of surface reactions, stretched across automatic visceral movements.
He was coming closer to the truth.
“Sure,” he said sourly.
The machine stirred, searching for a response.
Anders felt a quick tremor of fear at the sheer alien quality of his viewpoint. His sense of formalism had been sloughed off, his agreed-upon reactions bypassed. What would be revealed next?
He was seeing clearly, he realized, as perhaps no man had ever seen before. It was an oddly exhilarating thought.
But could he still return to normality?
“Can I get you a drink?” the reaction machine asked.
At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be. Viewing one’s intended as a depersonalized, sexless piece of machinery is not especially conducive to love. But it is quite stimulating, intellectually.
Anders didn’t want normality. A curtain was being raised and he wanted to see behind it. What was it some Russian scientist—Ouspensky, wasn’t it—had said?
“Think in other categories.”
That was what he was doing, and would continue to do.
“Good-by,” he said suddenly.
The machine watched him, open-mouthed, as he walked out the door. Delayed circuit reactions kept it silent until it heard the elevator door close.
“YOU were very warm in there,” the voice within his head whispered, once he was on the street. “But you still don’t understand everything.”
“Tell me, then,” Anders said, marveling a little at his equanimity. In an hour he had bridged the gap to a completely different viewpoint, yet it seemed perfectly natural.
“I can’t,” the voice said. “You must find it yourself.”
“Well, let’s see now,” Anders began. He looked around at the masses of masonry, the convention of streets cutting through the architectural piles. “Human life,” he said, “is a series of conventions. When you look at a girl, you’re supposed to see—a pattern, not the underlying formlessness.”
“That’s true,” the voice agreed, but with a shade of doubt.
“Basically, there is no form. Man produces gestalts, and cuts form out of the plethora of nothingness. It’s like looking at a set of lines and saying that they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material, extract it from the background and say it’s a man. But in truth there is no such thing. There are only the humanizing features that we—myopically—attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of viewpoint.”
“You’re not seeing it now,” said the voice.
“Damn it,” Anders said. He was certain that he was on the track of something big, perhaps something ultimate. “Everyone’s had the experience. At some time in his life, everyone looks at a familiar object and can’t make any sense out of it. Momentarily, the gestalt fails, but the true moment of sight passes. The mind reverts to the superimposed pattern. Normalcy continues.”
The voice was silent. Anders walked on, through the gestalt city.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Anders asked.
“Yes.”
What could that be, he asked himself. Through clearing eyes, Anders looked at the formality he had called his world.
He wondered momentarily if he would have come to this if the voice hadn’t guided him. Yes, he decided after a few moments, it was inevitable.
But who was the voice? And what had he left out?
“Let’s see what a party looks like now,” he said to the voice.
THE party was a masquerade; the guests were all wearing their faces. To Anders, their motives, individually and collectively, were painfully apparent. Then his vision began to clear further.
He saw that the people weren’t truly individual. They were discontinuous lumps of flesh sharing a common vocabulary, yet not even truly discontinuous.
The lumps of flesh were a part of the decoration of the room and almost indistinguishable from it. They were one with the lights, which lent their tiny vision. They were joined to the sounds they made, a few feeble tones out of the great possibility of sound. They blended into the walls.
The kaleidoscopic view came so fast that Anders had trouble sorting his new impressions. He knew now that these people existed only as patterns, on the same basis as the sounds they made and the things they thought they saw.
Gestalts, sifted out of the vast, unbearable real world.
“Where’s Judy?” a discontinuous lump of flesh asked him. This particular lump possessed enough nervous mannerisms to convince the other lumps of his reality. He wore a loud tie as further evidence.
“She’s sick,” Anders said. The flesh quivered into an instant sympathy. Lines of formal mirth shifted to formal woe.
“Hope it isn’t anything serious,” the vocal flesh remarked.
“You’re warmer,” the voice said to Anders.
Anders looked at the object in front of him.
“She hasn’t long to live,” he stated.
The flesh quivered. Stomach and intestines contracted in sympathetic fear. Eyes distended, mouth quivered.
The loud tie remained the same.
“My God! You don’t mean it!”
“What are you?” Anders asked quietly.
“What do you mean?” the indignant flesh attached to the tie demanded. Serene within its reality, it gaped at Anders. Its mouth twitched, undeniable proof that it was real and sufficient. “You’re drunk,” it sneered.
Anders laughed and left the party.
“HERE is still something you don’t know,” the voice said. “But you were hot! I could feel you near me.”
“What are you?” Anders asked again.
“I don’t know,” the voice admitted. “I am a person. I am I. I am trapped.”
“So are we all,” Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that made up the gestalt city.
And then there were the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water and land.
>
All ridiculous.
“Give me a dime for some coffee, mister?” something asked, a thing indistinguishable from any other thing.
“Old Bishop Berkeley would give a nonexistent dime to your nonexistent presence,” Anders said gaily.
“I’m really in a bad way,” the voice whined, and Anders perceived that it was no more than a series of modulated vibrations.
“Yes! Go on!” the voice commanded.
“If you could spare me a quarter—” the vibrations said, with a deep pretense at meaning.
No, what was there behind the senseless patterns? Flesh, mass. What was that? All made up of atoms.
“I’m really hungry,” the intricately arranged atoms muttered.
All atoms. Conjoined. There were no true separations between atom and atom. Flesh was stone, stone was light. Anders looked at the masses of atoms that were pretending to solidity, meaning and reason.
“Can’t you help me?” a clump of atoms asked. But the clump was identical with all the other atoms. Once you ignored the superimposed patterns, you could see the atoms were random, scattered.
“I don’t believe in you,” Anders said.
The pile of atoms was gone.
“Yes!” the voice cried. “Yes!”
“I don’t believe in any of it,” Anders said. After all, what was an atom?
“Go on!” the voice shouted. “You’re hot! Go on!”
What was an atom? An empty space surrounded by an empty space.
Absurd!
“Then it’s all false!” Anders said. And he was alone under the stars.
“That’s right!” the voice within his head screamed. “Nothing!”
But stars, Anders thought. How can one believe—
The stars disappeared. Anders was in a gray nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless gray.
Where was the voice?
Gone.
Anders perceived the delusion behind the grayness, and then there was nothing at all.
Complete nothingness, and himself within it.
WhHERE was he? What did it mean? Anders’ mind tried to add it up.
Impossible. That couldn’t be true.
Again the score was tabulated, but Anders’ mind couldn’t accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself.
“Where am I?”
In nothingness. Alone.
Trapped.
“Who am I?”
A voice.
The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, “Is there anyone here?”
No answer.
But there was someone. All directions were the same, yet moving along one he could make contact . . . with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps.
“Save me,” the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed, except for his shoes and black bow tie.
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY
He said he wasn’t immortal—but nothing could kill him. Still, if the Earth was to live as a free world, he had to die.
“COME right in, gentlemen,” the Ambassador waved them into the very special suite the State Department had given him. “Please be seated.”
Colonel Cercy accepted a chair, trying to size up the individual who had all Washington chewing its fingernails. The Ambassador hardly looked like a menace. He was of medium height and slight build, dressed in a conservative brown tweed suit that the State Department had given him. His face was intelligent, finely molded and aloof.
As human as a human, Cercy thought, studying the alien with bleak, impersonal eyes.
“How may I serve you?” the Ambassador asked, smiling.
“The President has put me in charge of your case,” Cercy said. “I’ve studied Professor Darrig’s reports—” he nodded at the scientist beside him—“but I’d like to hear the whole thing for myself.”
“Of course,” the alien said, lighting a cigarette. He seemed genuinely pleased to be asked; which was interesting, Cercy thought. In the week since he had landed, every important scientist in the country had been at him.
But in a pinch they call the Army, Cercy reminded himself. He settled back in his chair, both hands jammed carelessly in his pockets. His right hand was resting on the butt of a .45, the safety off.
“I HAVE come,” the alien said, “as an ambassador-at-large, representing an empire that stretches half-way across the Galaxy. I wish to extend the welcome of my people and to invite you to join our organization.”
“I see,” Cercy replied. “Some of the scientists got the impression that participation was compulsory.”
“You will join,” the Ambassador said, blowing smoke through his nostrils.
Cercy could see Darrig stiffen in his chair and bite his lip. Cercy moved the automatic to a position where he could draw it easily. “How did you find us?” he asked.
“We ambassadors-at-large are each assigned an unexplored section of space,” the alien said. “We examine each star-system in that region for planets, and each planet for intelligent life. Intelligent life is rare in the Galaxy, you know.”
Cercy nodded, although he hadn’t been aware of the fact.
“When we find such a planet, we land, as I did, and prepare the inhabitants for their part in our organization.”
“How will your people know that you have found intelligent life?” Cercy asked.
“There is a sending mechanism that is part of our structure,” the Ambassador answered. “It is triggered when we reach an inhabited planet. This signal is beamed continually into space, to an effective range of several thousand light-years. Follow-up crews are continually sweeping through the limits of the reception area of each Ambassador, listening for such messages. Detecting one, a colonizing team follows it to the planet.”
He tapped his cigarette delicately on the edge of an ash tray. “This method has definite advantages over sending combined colonization and exploration teams obviously. It avoids the necessity of equipping large forces for what may be decades of searching.”
“Sure.” Cercy’s face was expressionless. “Would you tell me more about this message?”
“There isn’t much more you need know. The beam is not detectable by your methods and, therefore, cannot be jammed. The message continues as long as I am alive.”
DARRIG drew in his breath sharply, glancing at Cercy.
“If you stopped broadcasting,” Cercy said casually, “our planet would never be found.”
“Not until this section of space was resurveyed,” the diplomat agreed.
“Very well. As a duly appointed representative of the President of the United States, I ask you to stop transmitting. We don’t choose to become part of your empire.”
“I’m sorry,” the Ambassador said. He shrugged his shoulders easily. Cercy wondered how many times he had played this scene on how many other planets.
“There’s really nothing I can do.” He stood up.
“Then you won’t stop?”
“I can’t. I have no control over the sending, once it’s activated.” The diplomat turned and walked to the window. “However, I have prepared a philosophy for you. It is my duty, as your Ambassador, to ease the shock of transition as much as possible. This philosophy will make it instantly apparent that—”
As the Ambassador reached the window, Cercy’s gun was out of his pocket and roaring. He squeezed six rounds in almost a single explosion, aiming at the Ambassador’s head and back. Then an uncontrollable shudder ran through him.
The Ambassador was no longer there!
CERCY and Darrig stared at each other. Darrig muttered something about ghosts. Then, just as suddenly, the Ambassador was back.
“You didn’t think,” he said, “that it would be as easy as all that, did you? We Ambassadors have, necessarily, a certain diplomatic immunity.” He fingered one of the bullet holes in the wall. “In case you don’t understand, let me put it this way.
It is not in your power to kill me. You couldn’t even understand the nature of my defense.”
He looked at them, and in that moment Cercy felt the Ambassador’s complete alienness.
“Good day, gentlemen,” he said.
Darrig and Cercy walked silently back to the control room. Neither had really expected that the Ambassador would be killed so easily, but it had still been a shock when the slugs had failed.
“I suppose you saw it all, Malley?” Cercy asked, when he reached the control room.
The thin, balding psychiatrist nodded sadly. “Got it on film, too.”
“I wonder what his philosophy is,” Darrig mused, half to himself.
“It was illogical to expect it would work. No race would send an ambassador with a message like that and expect him to live through it. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless he had a pretty effective defense,” the psychiatrist finished unhappily.
Cercy walked across the room and looked at the video panel. The Ambassador’s suite was very special. It had been hurriedly constructed two days after he had landed and delivered his message. The suite was steel and lead lined, filled with video and movie cameras, recorders, and a variety of other things.
It was the last word in elaborate death cells.
In the screen, Cercy could see the Ambassador sitting at a table. He was typing on a little portable the Government had given him.
“Hey, Harrison!” Cercy called. “Might as well go ahead with Plan Two.”
Harrison came out of a side room where he had been examining the circuits leading to the Ambassador’s suite. Methodically he checked his pressure gauges, set the controls and looked at Cercy. “Now?” he asked.
“Now.” Cercy watched the screen. The Ambassador was still typing.
Suddenly, as Harrison sent home the switch, the room was engulfed in flames. Fire blasted out of concealed holes in the walls, poured from the ceiling and floor.
In a moment, the room was like the inside of a blast furnace.
Cercy let it burn for two minutes, then motioned Harrison to cut the switch. They stared at the roasted room.
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