by C. L. Moore
When the last echo struck the ceiling Torren dropped the gun and fell back into his enormous tank, caught his breath and laughed, tentatively at first and then with increasing volume until great billows of sound rolled up the walls and poured between the pillars toward the stars. Enormous hands flailed the water, sending spray high. The vast bulk wallowed monstrously, convulsed and helpless with its laughter.
On the screen the roar of the coming planes grew until their noise swallowed up even Torren's roaring mirth.
The End
HEIR APPARENT
Thresholders 02
Astounding Science Fiction – July 1950
Harding stepped from the pier to the little submersible's deck and moved instantly into the shadow, black velvet on moon-white steel. He could hear nothing except water lapping softly, the distant thud and throb of machinery, and very far away, the hollow bellowing of riven air, either a jet plane passing over from Java, or a spaceship blasting off from one of the nearer islands. Phosphorescent waves rippled in the moon-track and the strong tropic stars regarded Earth dispassionately. On the deck there was no sound at all.
Harding glanced once at the white jagged dazzle that was Venus near the skyline. That diamond dot represented sixty-one thousand troubled human beings—if you could call them human—whose relations with the mother-planet had once been Edward Harding's responsibility. Or a seventh of his responsibility.
He shook his head at the bright world in the sky. He would have to get over the habit of regarding the heavens as a chart with a glittering pinhead for each planet, and so many thousand Thresholders, ex-Earth-born, bred for the ecology of alien worlds, pinned up there upon the black velvet back drop for study and control. It wasn't his problem any more. Forget the Thresholders on Mars and the Secessionists of Ganymede and the whole tangled, insoluble mess that confronted the Integration Teams. Think about this current job, which was very simple now. Harding moved quietly toward the open companionway. Either the submersible wasn't guarded at all, or Harding was expected.
He was expected.
The big man in the tiny cabin below sat back in his chair and looked up to meet Harding's gaze squarely, the china-blue eyes watchful but calm. Billy Turner was a Buddha, solidly fat, solidly placid, the heavy face turned to Harding with an oddly innocent look of surprise.
"Something?" Turner asked mildly.
"You could call it that," Harding said. "Lay off, or I'll have to kill you, Turner."
The fat man waited a minute, his gaze holding Harding's. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth, squinted at it, clucked a little and struck an old-fashioned kitchen match on the edge of the table. He sucked the flame downward into the bowl and exhaled a cloud of pungent violet smoke that smelled of the Martian deserts in full sunlight.
"Seems like I don't quite place you," he said calmly to Harding. "We met before?"
"We didn't need to," Harding said. "Wait a minute." He stood perfectly motionless by the table, listening, his eyes going unfocused with the completeness of his concentration. It was a totality almost machine-like, both more and less than human. Then he grinned a tight, confident grin and pulled out a chair, sat down across the table from Turner.
Harding was a strongly built man with an incongruously academic look about him in spite of his stained and somewhat ragged clothing. He looked younger than his real years, and he looked ageless.
"No crew aboard," he said to Turner confidently. "Just the one Kanaka up forward. No guard. But you were expecting me, Turner."
Turner blew out a cloud of aromatic smoke from a tobacco that hadn't grown on Earth. His china-blue eyes were watchful and expectant.
"Today," Harding went on, "I was fired. Incompetence. I'm not incompetent to handle a radar fish-location unit. If I were, it wouldn't have taken the fishery a month to find it out. O.K. You assume I'll try for other jobs and lose them—through your interference. I'll end up combing beaches with a home-made Geiger counter, you figure. Then you'll buy me for whatever dirty job you have in mind. It's your usual method, they tell me. It generally works. It won't work with me, because I'm one man in the Archipelagic who could figure out a fool-proof way to kill you."
"Oh, you think so?" Turner asked, opening his blue eyes wide.
"You know what my job used to be," Harding said gently.
Turner blew out smoke, gazed thoughtfully at it.
"You were with an Integrator Team," he said.
Immediately, in the most curious way, Edward Harding's mind withdrew quietly into the middle of his head, pulling down blinds and closing doors as it went, receded along a lengthy corridor into the past that led by many closed episodes and half-forgotten things, until it came at the far end to a door. This was the door to a little square black-steel room called the Round Table. It was an entirely empty room, except for a tri-di screen, a chair and a table with a flat metal plate let into its surface.
Edward Harding in his mind's chamber sat down in the chair and put his palms flat on the plate. Instantly, as always, the tingling activation began. At first it was like wind under his hands, then water, then soft sand gently embedding his palms. He moved his fingers. Soundlessly his mind's image spoke. "Ready, boys. Come in."
Then in the chamber of memory the Composite Image moved slowly into being in the depths of the tri-di screen. Now the Round Table was open and the Integrator Team sat together at one table, no matter where the accident of their bodies placed them. Seven men made up the Team. Seven blended minds and bodies stood composite and whole in the screen of Harding's memory, as they stood perhaps at the very moment in the same screen, three thousand miles away before somebody else's watching face. Perhaps the Image spoke to somebody else as it had spoken to Edward Harding when he was … before he … well, in the old days. He wondered what the Image looked like now, with no Edward Harding in its make-up.
In the memory which Turner's careless words evoked, Edward Harding was in the make-up of the Composite Image. And as always, facing it anew, he looked for some trace of his own features in the blended synthesis of the seven Team-members. And as always, he failed.
Seven faces, seven minds—but you never could filter out the separate features of the men you knew so well. Always they blended into that one Image you knew even better than your own face in the mirror. The Round Table was open when you sat across the board from the Composite Image with the specialized knowledge of six other picked and long-trained Teammates literally at your fingertips, each man sitting in a chair like your own, each idly molding the test-pattern under his palms.
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief—biochemist, physicist, radio-astronomer—the needs of each Team met at the Round Table in the carefully chosen attributes of each member. And the needs could never have been fulfilled if all the men involved were actually in the same room, face to face. For knowledge had grown too complex. They talked a technical language made incomprehensible to one another by ultimate specialization. It took the Composite Image to integrate and co-ordinate the knowledge each member brought with the knowledge of each other member, and with the great Integrator itself.
But you could never find your own face in the Image, and you could never see the Image without your face blended into it. Harding thought of the Image as it had looked after George Mayall—left. By request. The first time the Team gathered at the Round Table with a new man in Mayall's place, how curiously flat and strange the intimate, composite features seemed with the new face incorporated. He had wondered then how Mayall felt, wherever he was, out in the cold, strange world after such a long time in the warm, intricately interlocking closeness of the Integration Team.
Well, Harding knew, now.
He thought as he had so often thought before, What does it look like without me? And he pictured the Composite Image cold and strange in the tri-di screen of the room no longer his, Doc Valley's face, and Joe Mall's, and the others, blending with the faces of strangers, linking with the minds of strangers, working on the old, complex, fascinating
problems that weren't Edward Harding's any longer.
He slammed the door at the end of that long corridor of the mind, hauled his memory back past the shut doors and the closed episodes, and scowled into Turner's watching blue eyes.
"So let's get down to cases," Harding said harshly. "Make me an offer. I'm in a hurry. Six months from now, maybe you could pick me up off the beach and hire me for a bottle of gin. I won't wait. What are you driving at, Turner. Or would you rather I just killed you?"
Turner chuckled unperturbedly, his fat face quivering.
"Well, now," he said, "maybe we can arrange something. I'll tell you one thing that's been on my mind a while. I'm a busy man. I get around a lot. I got plenty of contacts. Been hearing about a fellow named George Mayall. You know him?"
Harding's hands closed on the table edge. His face went perfectly blank, like a clock's face, or a dynamo's. His eyes searched Turner's. Then he nodded.
"Mayall knows me," he said.
"I'll bet he does," Turner said, chuckling and quivering. "I'll just bet. Hates you like poison, doesn't he? He was on your Integrator Team and he got kicked off. You got him kicked off. Oh yes, Mayall knows you, all right. Like to get his hands on you, wouldn't he?" The chuckles broke into a thick laugh that made Turner shake like a heavy and solid jelly.
"Very funny," Harding said coldly. "What of it?"
The jelly subsided slowly.
"Thought I'd hire you to pilot me out to Akassi," Turner said, watching Harding. "Trouble is, I don't think you're ready yet."
"I'm no pilot," Harding said impatiently. "I don't know these waters."
"Ah," Turner said in a wise voice, cocking his head, "but you know the Integrator. You could get me past the barriers around Akassi. Nobody else in the world could do that."
"Barriers?"
"Acoustics, visual, UHF, scrambler," Turner said in a comfortable voice, sucking his pipe. "Playing dumb, are you? Never heard of Akassi, eh?"
"What about it?"
"Quiet place these days," Turner said. "Strong defensive system all around it. As if you hadn't heard. Ha. Nobody goes in, nobody goes out. You and I could go in and come out with more loot than this submersible would carry—or we could stay and play god, with your talents and training. Except for one little thing—George Mayall. He might not like it."
Harding's eyes dwelt steadily on the fat, calm face. He did not speak.
"Didn't know Mayall was out here?" Turner asked. "Never even heard a rumor?"
"Rumors, sure," Harding said, and thumped the table with an impatient finger. "But not just where. Not this close. What are you getting at? What's Mayall up to?"
"In short, what's in it for you, eh?" Turner said. "Ah, that would be telling. Couldn't even guess, could you? What's likely to happen, when an Integrator man gets kicked off the Team?"
"He's given his choice of outside jobs, naturally," Harding said with some bitterness. "He doesn't stick with them." (How could a man stick with an outside job, once he had known the tight-knit interperceptivity of the Round Table? Membership in an Integrator Team is an experience which few men attain and none willingly forfeit. It is a tremendous psychic and emotional experience, the working out of a problem on the Round Table. Afterward, ordinary jobs are like watching two dimensional, gray television when you've got used to full-color tri-di images—) "A man doesn't stick," Harding said. "He drifts. He winds up in a fishery in the Archipelagic and then a trader with a lot of influence gets him fired. And won't tell a straight story afterward. Come on, Turner, let's have it."
"Don't like getting kicked out when you're on the receiving end, eh?" Turner said. "What did they throw you out for, Harding?"
Harding felt his face grow hot. He set his teeth and held his breath, trying to force the heat and the anger down. Turner watched him narrowly. After a moment he went on.
"Don't try to tell me," he said, "that it's bare coincidence brought you here, this close to Mayall. Don't say you haven't an idea what he's up to. You know more than I do, don't you, Harding?"
Harding struck the table hard.
"If you want something, say so!" he said. "If you don't, lay off and let me earn my living my own way. Coincidence? I haven't got any connection with Mayall any more. But I did once. We were picked for the same Team, and if you know what that means you won't think it's coincidence we drift the same way when we're free to drift. So we both wind up in the Archipelagic. What of it?"
"Mean to say you haven't been approached?" Turner asked keenly. "You've been out here this long and haven't heard a murmur from—anyone?"
"Murmur of what? Come to the point, Turner!"
Turner shook his head doubtfully. "Maybe they don't know about you. Maybe one Integrator man's all they needed. My good luck, anyhow. You mean the Secesh Thresholders haven't even tried to get to you?"
"Would I be here now if they had?" Harding asked reasonably. "Go on."
"Well, they got to Mayall. They set him up on Akassi with an islandful of machinery and he's feeding them all they need in Integration to organize a withdrawal from the empire. Big stuff. Now maybe you see how I could use you, if you were ready to throw in with me."
"I see," Harding remarked coldly, "how I could get to Akassi and take over Mayall's work and cash in on the Secessionist deal for just about as much money as an Integrator could count. But I don't see where you come in, Turner."
"Oh, Mayall works through me," Turner said, puffing blandly. "I've got my network spread out from the Celebes to the Solomons. The Archipelagic States couldn't hide a secret from me if their lives depended on it. Mayall needs outside contacts, and I'm the contacts." He rolled ponderously in his chair.
"Thing is," he went on, "maybe I feel it isn't enough, just being contact man. Maybe I want a bigger cut. Maybe that's why Mayall put a roof over Akassi, just in case somebody like me got my kind of ideas. I couldn't do a thing about it—without you. You know how his mind works. You know what screens he'd dope out. But without somebody like me, Harding, you'd never even find Akassi."
"I wouldn't? Don't be too sure."
"If you could, you'd have done it before now. Maybe you haven't tried? Never mind. Mayall's no fool. He's dug himself a hole in the ocean and pulled Akassi in after him, if you want to look at it that way. The Secesh boys aren't paying him to set up an island the first stray radar beam could pick out blindfolded. Those barriers around Akassi—well, they erase Akassi, that's all. You can't see it. You can't find it. It isn't there—unless you work with Mayall and know his code. Even then you can't pass the barriers unless Mayall invites you." He puffed violet smoke and squinted through it at Harding's face.
"You ready to risk your neck yet, my boy?" he asked. "It'll take the two of us. But Mayall hates you. He'll kill you on sight. That means a risk on your part. I'll buy you higher than the bottle of gin it'd cost next January. I'd cut you in for half the take—if you get me ashore at Akassi and help me work out my scheme to take over from Mayall."
"You'll have to have something pretty good to kick Mayall out a second time," Harding said thoughtfully.
"Well now, I expect I will," the fat man agreed. He took the pipe from his mouth and narrowed his eyes at Harding. "Surprised?" he asked. "You don't look it."
"If you expect perfectly normal human reactions from me," Harding said quite gently, laying his palms flat on the table with a soft, reminiscent gesture, "you're the one who's in for a surprise. A man doesn't work ten years on an Integrator Team and stay entirely human. A gradual occupational mutation sets in. For example—" He looked up and grinned suddenly.
"For example, I know we've been under weigh for about three minutes now. There's no perceptible vibration and no roll, so how could I have guessed?"
Turner grunted, but the blue eyes gleamed.
"You tell me."
"I am the boat," Harding said, and laughed. There was no amusement in the laughter. "I've got a score of my own to settle—with society. All right, Turner. I'm with you. Where's the con
trol room?"
-
That was the question.
From Pluto to Mercury its echoes ran. From the New Lands mankind was molding into fertile red soil out of the stuff of fire and ice, on worlds where no man could have lived before technology brought the elements of life, from all the new colonies on the new planets that question went echoing endlessly. Where is the control room?
The artificial Threshold Experiments that mold humanity into shapes which can live on alien worlds had done their part. Thresholders inhabited the planets and the empire of Earth spun in a tight network around its sun. Interstellar drive was on the way. Paragravity was already a little more than theoretical. The enormous complexities of science sprang in century-long leaps across time. An engineering process would drag with it a dozen allied fields frantically trying to catch up, a biological method that could enable men to survive interstellar trips shoved rivals impatiently out of its all-important path, hustled other sciences along with it.
The web from Earth had spun out, intricate and tangled, through the Solar System. Now it stretched tenuous threads toward the tremendous macrocosm of the stars, and the moment the first star was reached—Earth could fall.
It could fall as Rome fell, and for the same reason. The New Lands beyond the stratosphere grew, young and strong and integrated, but for century after century Earth had been the control room. The controls grew so complex that unification became an almost impossible task. Only by absolute unity, by a complete and bonded sense of solidarity, could the intricate socio-technological system of Earth stay below critical mass. And it couldn't stay there long.
For Earth had grown to be too small a planet. And the other planets were not ready yet to take up their burden. They brawled among themselves and they complained against Earth. They threatened secession. The isolationism of the New Lands became a menace that threatened the unity of the Solar Empire as Thresholders tugged angrily at the cords which bound them to the Earth from which they had sprung. And desperately in the meanwhile man strove for one major goal—sanity, rational thought, system, organization—integration.