by C. L. Moore
"Abe—I've had the maddest notion that every time I show this the figures come back realer than before into the scenes they play. Maybe they don't always hold to the action we photographed—maybe the plot carries them on beyond what Shakespeare wrote—more violently than—"
-
SILVERS' fingers gripped the other man's shoulders hard. Sharply he shook him, an absurd uneasiness darkening his memory of that impression of fiercer violence in the quarrel between Oberon and Titania the last time he saw the play, even as he said firmly:
"Snap out of it, Blair! You've been working too hard. Maybe someone else could run the picture tonight—you need rest."
O'Byrne looked up at him apathetically, his alarm gone suddenly flat.
"No, I'll do it. If you're really determined to run the thing, maybe I'd better. Maybe I can control them better than an assistant could. After all, I created them ...
Silvers looked down at him for a moment in frowning silence. Then he shrugged and turned toward the last empty bar-platform where the audience waited the beginning of the show. O'Byrne was dangerously overworked, he told himself. After this was over he must go to a sanatorium for a long rest. His mind was cracking. ; . .
Misty radiance closed down about him, veiling the hundred and fifty from his vision. There was a moment of murmurous wonder, punctuated by small, half-frightened screams from a few of the women as each spectator was shut off into a little world of silence and solitude.
Into the silvery mist that familiar rich voice rolled smoothly. For the third time Silvers saw the broad gray glades of faeryland, hedged with immemorial forest, opening magically up about him. For the third time Titania trailed her streaming wings into the moonlight. Oberon strode with a jingle of mail from among the trees, and they met in fury halfway down the glade, their feet pressing the bending grass with elfin lightness. But there was no lightness in their anger. That ancient quarrel flared up in violence between them, and the breezes shivered with their wrath.
Again Hermia and Lysander came half laughing, half fearful into the woods. Again Helena sobbed Demetrius' name among the unanswering trees. Puck flitted in goblin glee about his business of enchantment and Titania lay down to sleep on the spangled grass among the wild thyme.
-
THIS time no telephone bell broke into the magic of the dream. And again these were living people who moved so tangibly before the audience, the wind of their passing brushing them, the sound of their breathing in their ears when they stood near, going about their magic-haunted ways as obliviously as if the spectators were the phantoms, not they. Their loves and hates and heartbreak were vividly real under that incredibly real moon.
Once or twice Silvers thought vaguely that here and there in the action things happened not exactly as he remembered them. Had Titania actually slapped Oberon's dark, angry face before she swept out of the glade? Had Hermia and Lysander kissed quite so lingeringly under that deep-shadowed oak? But as the play went on Silvers lost all thought of times that had gone before, and sank fathoms deep in the reality of the scene before him. Puck lured the spell-bewildered lovers into the fastnesses of the forest. They went stumbling through the fog, quarreling, blinded by mist and magic and their own troubled hearts. Swords flashed in the moonlight. Lysander and Demetrius were fighting among the veiled trees. Puck laughed, shrill and high and inhuman, and swept his brown arm down. And from Lysander came a choked gasp, the clatter of a fallen sword.
Demetrius bent fiercely above him. Silvers watched the bright blood bubbling from his side, saw the blade drip darkly, smelled the acrid sharpness of that spreading stain. The illusion was marvelous. Lysander's death was a miracle of artistry from the first choked gasp of pain to the last bubbling of blood in his throat, the last twist of handsome silk-sheathed limbs. Lysander's death—
Something troubled Silvers' memory, but before he could capture it a woman's voice cried hysterically somewhere in the misty forest, "He's dead—he's dead!" and suddenly, blankly, the forest was gone from about them and he was staring into dazed, half-dreaming faces where an instant before faeryland had stretched depth upon depth of moonlit dimness, where Lysander had lain dying on the moss. Somewhere in the crowd a woman was sobbing hysterically.
"He's dead, I tell you! Lysander's dead, and he doesn't really die in the play! Someone's killed him! That was real blood—I smelled it! Oh, get me out of this awful place!"
Silvers brushed the fog of dreamland from his eyes and was halfway across the floor to the projection machine before the scream had ended, for he remembered now that tug of memory as Lysander fell. Shakespeare's play was romance, not tragedy. Lysander should not have died.
O'Byrne clung to his high stool, his fingers white-knuckled as he stared into Silvers' eyes.
"You see?" he said in a strained monotone. "You see what mass hypnotism will do? They couldn't help it—poor things—they must be half alive—wandering in the fog ..."
"Blair!" Silvers' voice rang sharply. "Blair, snap out of it! What are you raving about? Are you mad?"
The staring eyes turned to his almost apathetically.
"I was afraid," said O'Byrne, in that whispering monotone as if he spoke in a dream. "I was afraid to run it before this many people—I should have guessed what would happen when Acton and Graves and—"
"Are you still harping on that coincidence?" demanded Silvers in a fierce undertone. "Can't you see how foolish it is, Blair? What earthly connection can there be between pictures on a screen and living people, some of them half the world away? I'll admit what happened tonight was—"
"Did you ever hear—" broke in Blair softly, as if he were following some private train of thought and had not heeded a word of Silvers' harangue—"of savages covering their faces when explorers bring out their cameras? They think a photograph will steal their souls. It's an idea so widespread that it can't have originated in mere local superstition. Tribes all over the world have it. African savages, Tibetan nomads, Chinese peasants, South American Indians. Even the ancient Egyptians, highly civilized as they were, deliberately made their drawings angular and unlifelike. All of them declared and believed that too good a likeness would draw the soul out into the picture."
"Well, yes—everybody's heard of such things—but you're not suggesting—"
"After the Templeton elopement—after Anne Acton's fainting-spells and Philip Graves' illness—yes, after what happened tonight, how can you deny it, Abe? No, the Egyptians, the modern savages, were closer to the truth than we. Only before now no likeness has been perfect enough to absorb sufficient personality so that people could notice it. But these illusions of mine—they're real, living, breathing. While you watch you can't believe the actual men and women aren't standing in front of you.
"It had an effect on Acton and Graves when only you were watching—enough of their personality was drained out of them into the illusion by your own temporary conviction that they were there, so that they went into vague dreams of woodland and music. I don't know how the other actors were affected—I do know that several of them were sick and dizzy that day. I haven't checked—maybe I've been afraid to ...
"When the twelve board-members were watching, the drain was stronger; so that Graves was really ill on shipboard and Acton couldn't be roused from her faint until the telephone call to you broke the illusion here. It affected Templeton and Bill Fredericks another way—hypnotized them into believing what the audience was believing, that they were really in love—"
-
RECOLLECTION flooded into Silvers' mind. He remembered what he had felt when he read the headlines of the elopement. He said:
"Could it happen that way, Blair? How greatly could a mass mind affect the reactions of the people it concentrates on? I thought of it before—if twelve individuals, each convinced for a time that he saw two people desperately in love, might really work a sort of persuasion on those two—No, that's crazy! It couldn't happen!"
"You saw it happen," murmured Blair quietly. "You sa
w what happened when a hundred and fifty people joined in that fierce concentration—that utter conviction that they saw a man's sword poised, aimed, descending—mass hypnotism, it was! For a majority of them that sword really struck—their imagination outran the actual fact and they thought they saw Lysander spitted on Demetrius' blade. They thought they saw him die."
"Well, he didn't, did he? I mean, nothing happened this time or they'd have called me."
A thin smile twisted up O'Byrne's strained mouth. He reached behind him. Silvers heard a click and realized that the telephone had been lying out of its cradle on the desk ever since he reached Blair's side.
"I wanted you to understand before they broke the news to you," O'Byrne was explaining gently. "And I knew the telephone would interrupt me unless I—"
Shrill buzzing whirred from the desk. With a little spurt of terror for what he had yet to learn, Silvers snatched it up. A voice shouted thinly in his ear:
"Silvers? Is that you, chief? My God, I've been trying to get you all evening! Acton's been in a coma for over an hour—doctor can't rouse her. And a call just came in from London that Phil Graves is out too—can't be waked! And—what's that? What? Chief! Word's just come in that Templeton's passed out too, and Bill Fredericks has dropped dead! What's the matter with this town? It's like the end of the world—"
"Abe—" O'Byrne's voice behind him twisted Silvers around like a hand on his shoulder. The receiver shrilled unnoticed as their eyes met. O'Byrne's face was almost serene—knowledge of what the telephone was crying showed in his eyes. He said: "Do you believe me now? Do you understand? Do you realize how much of life itself I've woven into this damnable thing I've made? Yes—it's like two-dimensional pictures that carry a shadow of the third—enough dark to give a feeling of depth. In my three-dimensional picture I've somehow got a shadow of the fourth—life, maybe, or something too near it. Maybe that's what the fourth dimension is—life itself. But it won't kill men again—not again!"
-
THE crash of glass shattered into the hysterical buzz of the crowd. Silence like death fell over the confusion of the murmurous throng among the bar-platforms as they turned white faces toward the corner. O'Byrne's frail arms swung his heavy stool with desperate strength, crunching and smashing and crashing among the delicate intricacies of his projector. Silvers clutched the still shrilling telephone and watched him, not moving.
The End
GREATER THAN GODS
Astounding Science-Fiction - July 1939
If a man could see the end of his act, the end that comes at the far end of Time, and know what it meant—would man be greater than gods?
-
The desk was glass-clear steel, the mirror above it a window that opened upon distance and sight and sound whenever the televisor buzzer rang. The two crystal cubes on the desk were three-dimensional photographs of a sort undreamed of before the Twenty-third Century dawned. But between them on the desk lay a letter whose message was older that the history of writing itself.
"My darling—" it began in a man's strongly slanting handwriting. But there Bill Cory had laid down his pen and run despairing fingers through his hair, looking from one crystal-cubed photograph to the other and swearing a little under his breath. It was fine stuff, he told himself savagely, when a man couldn't even make up his mind which of two girls he wanted to marry. Biology House of Science City, that trusted so faithfully the keenness and clarity of Dr. William Cory's decisions, would have shuddered to see him now.
For the hundredth time that afternoon he looked from one girl's face to the other, smiling at him from the crystal cubes, and chewed his lip unhappily. On his left, in the translucent block that had captured an immortal moment when dark Marta Mayhew smiled, the three-dimensional picture looked out at him with a flash of violet eyes. Dr. Marta Mayhew of Chemistry House, ivory whiteness and satin blackness. Not at all the sort of picture the mind conjures up of a leading chemist in Science City which houses the greatest scientists in the world.
Bill Cory wrinkled his forehead and looked at the other girl. Sallie Carlisle dimpled at him out of the crystal, as real as life itself to the last flying tendril of fair curls that seemed to float on a breeze frozen eternally into glass. Bill reached out to turn the cube a little, bringing the delicate line of her profile into view, and it was as if time stood still in the crystalline deeps and pretty Salle in the breathing flesh paused for an eternal moment with her profile turned away.
After a long moment Bill Cory sighed and picked up his pen. After the "darling" of the letter he wrote firmly, "Sallie."
"Dr. Cory," hesitated a voice at the door. Bill looked up, frowning. Miss Brown blinked at him nervously behind her glasses. "Dr. Ashley's—"
"Don't announce me, Brownie," interrupted a languid voice behind her. "I want to catch him loafing. Ah, Bill, writing love letters? May I come in?"
"Could I stop you?" Bill's grin erased the frown from his forehead. The tall and tousled young man in the doorway was Charles Ashley, head of Telepathy House, and though their acquaintance had long been on terms of good-natured insult, behind it lay Bill's deep recognition of a quality of genius in Ashley that few men ever attain. No one could have risen to the leadership of Telepathy House whose mind did not encompass many more levels of infinite understanding than the ordinary mind even recognizes.
"I've worked myself into a stupor," announced the head of Telepathy House, yawning. "Come on up to the Gardens for a swim, huh?"
"Can't." Bill laid down his pen. "I've got to see the pups—"
"Damn the pups! You think Science City quivers every time those little mutts yap! Let Miss Brown look after 'em. She knows more than you do about genetics, anyhow. Some day the Council's going to find it out and you'll go back to working for a living."
"Shut up," requested Bill with a grin. "How are the pups, Miss Brown?"
"Perfectly normal, doctor. I just gave them their three o'clock feeding and they're asleep now."
"Do they seem happy?" inquired Ashley solicitously.
"That's right, scoff," sighed Bill. "Those pups and I will go ringing down the corridors of time, you mark my words."
-
ASHLEY NODDED, half seriously. He knew it might well be true. The pups were the living proof of Bill's success in prenatal sex determination—six litters of squirming maleness with no female among them. They represented the fruit of long, painstaking experiments in the x-ray bombardment of chromosomes to separate and identify the genes carrying the factors of sex determination, of countless failures and immeasurable patience. If the pups grew into normal dogs—well, it would be one long, sure stride nearer the day when, through Bill's own handiwork, the world would be perfectly balanced between male and female in exact proportion to the changing need.
Miss Brown vanished with a shy, self-effacing smile. As the door closed behind her, Ashley, who had been regarding the two photograph cubes on Bill's desk with a lifted eyebrow, arranged his long length on the couch against the wall and was heard to murmur: "Eenie-meenie-minie-mo. Which is it going to be, Will-yum?"
They were on terms too intimate for Bill to misunderstand, or pretend to.
"I don't know," he admitted miserably, glancing down in some hesitation at the letter beginning, "My darling Sallie—"
Ashley yawned again and fumbled for a cigarette. "You know," he murmured comfortably, "it's interesting to speculate on your possible futures. With Marta or Sallie, I mean. Maybe some day somebody will find a way to look ahead down the branching paths of the future and deliberately select the turning points that will carry him toward the goal he chooses. Now if you could know beforehand where life with Sallie would lead, or life with Marta, you might alter the whole course of human history. That is, if you're half as important as you think you are."
"Huh-uh," grunted Bill. "If you predicate a fixed future, then it's fixed already, isn't it? And you'd have no real choice."
Ashley scratched a match deliberately and set his cigarette aglow
before he said: "I think of the future as an infinite reservoir of an infinite number of futures, each of them fixed, yet malleable as clay. Do you see what I mean? At every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices among the many possible things we may do the next moment. Each crossroad leads to a different future, all of them possible, all of them fixed, waiting for our choice to give them reality. Perhaps there's a—call it a Plane of Probability—where all these possible results of our possible choices exist simultaneously. Blueprints of things to come. When the physical time of matter catches up with, and fills in, any one particular plan, it becomes fixed in the present.
"But before time has caught up with it, while our choice at the crossroads is still unmade, an infinite number of possible futures must exist as it were in suspension, waiting for us in some unimaginable, dimensionless infinity. Can you imagine what it would be like to open a window upon that Probability Plane, look out into the infinities of the future, trace the consequences of future actions before we make them? We could mold the destiny of mankind! We could do what the gods must do, Bill! We'd be greater than gods! We could look into the Cosmic Mind—the very brain that planned us—and of our own will choose among those plans!"
"Wake up, Ash," said Bill softly.
"You think I'm dreaming? It's not a new idea, really. The old philosopher, Berkeley, had a glimpse of it when he taught his theories of subjective idealism, that we're aware of the cosmos only through a greater awareness all around us, an infinite mind—
"Listen, Bill. If you vision these ... these blueprints of possible futures, you've got to picture countless generations, finite as ourselves, existing simultaneously and completely in all the circumstances of their entire lives—yet all of them still unborn, still even uncertain of birth if the course of the present is diverted from their particular path. To themselves, they must seem as real as we to each other.