The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  On the third day, as Dawson sat waiting in Hendricks' outer office, he remembered.

  The familiar, leaden, sick inertia swept over him. Desperately he tried to focus on the buildings outside the window. But he could not battle the tide. At the last moment Hendricks' advice occurred to him, and, as he felt the cold, hard object under his palm, he made a tremendous effort to move his hand.

  To the left, something told him. To the left.

  It was hard to battle that lethargy, that smothering, dusty suffocation of despair. And it was hard to move. But he strained to send the impulse down his arm, into stiff fingers, and the effort told. He felt something click into place, and ... and—

  He remembered.

  The last thing before—

  Before what?

  -

  "Vital therapy," a voice said. "We grow fewer yearly. And we must guard against that plague."

  Karestly ran an eight-fingered hand over his sweating, bald head. "The tests show you need it, Dawsao."

  "I hadn't—"

  "You wouldn't know of course. It'd be imperceptible except by the instruments. But you need the therapy, that's certain."

  "I can't spare the time," Dawsao said. "The simplification formulas are just beginning to clear up. How long must I stay in the vorkyl?"

  "Half a year," Karestly said. "It doesn't matter."

  "And Pharr went in last month."

  "He needed it."

  Dawsao stared at the wall, made a mental signal, and opaqueness faded to translucence and transparency. He could see the City.

  Karestly said, "You'd never vorkylled before. You're one of the youngest. It isn't bad. It's stimulating, curative, and necessary."

  "But I feel normal."

  "The machines don't lie. The emotion factor is wrong. Listen to me, Dawsao. I'm a great deal older than you, and I've been in the vorkyl twelve times."

  Dawsao stared. "Where to?"

  "Different eras each time. The one best fitted for my particular warp. Once it was Brazil in 1890. Another time, Restoration London. And the Second Han Empire. I had plenty to do. I spent ten years in Brazil, building a rubber empire."

  "Rubber?"

  Karestly smiled. "A substance—it was important at that time. I kept busy. It's fine therapy. In those days, the only therapy they knew involved painting, construction—visual and tangible, not the emotional and psychic therapy we use. However, their minds weren't developed."

  "I hate the idea of being shut up in a five-sensed body," Dawsao said.

  "You wouldn't know any better. There's the artificial mnemonic angle. Your life-force will take possession of the body that's created for you at the therapic epoch we choose, and you'll have a full set of phony memories, created especially for that period. You'll probably begin as a child. There may be temporal compression, so you'll be able to live thirty or forty years in a half-year of our time."

  "I still don't like it."

  "Time travel," Karestly said, "is the best therapy known today. You live in a new environment, with a new set of values. And that's the vital part. You get away from the current herd instinct that's caused all the trouble."

  "But—" Dawsao said, "but! Only four thousand of us still sane, in all the world! And unless we work fast—"

  "We're not immune. The whole trouble is that for hundreds of generations the race has followed false values, which conflicted with the primary instincts. Overcomplication plus oversimplification, both in the wrong places. We haven't kept pace with our growing mentality. There was a man—Clemens—who owned a mechanical typesetter that was perfect except for one thing. It was too complicated. When it worked, it was ideal, but it kept breaking down."

  "Old stuff," Dawsao said. "I know the trouble. The machines are so enormously complicated now that humans can't keep up with them."

  "We're solving it," Karestly said. "Slowly, but surely. There are four thousand of us. And we know the right therapy now. After you've had six months in the vorkyl, you'll be a new man. You'll find temporal therapy is foolproof and absolutely certain."

  "I hope so. I want to get back to my work."

  "If you went back to it now, you'd be insane in six months," Karestly pointed out. "Temporal travel is like preventive serum shots. You'll be occupied; we'll send you back to the twentieth century—"

  "That far back?"

  "That period's indicated, in your case. You'll be given a complete set of artificial memories, and, while you're in the past, you'll have no consciousness of reality. Of this reality, I mean."

  "Well—" Dawson said.

  "Come on." Karestly rose and floated toward the transporter-disk. "The vorkyl's ready for you. The matrix is set. All you have to do is—"

  Dawson got into the case. It closed behind him. He took a last look at Karestly's friendly face and tightened his hand on the control. He moved it toward the right.

  Then he was Fred Dawson, with a complete set of artificial memories, in the orphan asylum in Illinois.

  -

  But now he lay in the vorkyl, his nose against dusty glassocene that smelled of dead flies, and the vitiated air tore at his throat as he tried to breathe. All was in gray semidarkness around him. He sent out a frantic thought-command.

  Somewhere light grew. The distant wall faded to transparency. He could see the city.

  It had changed. It was older. And a heaped pile of dust made a canopy atop the vorkyl in which he rested.

  The immense, red sun washed the city in bloody gloom. There was no sign of organized activity. Figures moved here and there in the ruins. He could not make out what they were doing.

  He looked for Administration Building, the last stronghold of the race. It had altered, too. A long time must have passed since he had entered the vorkyl. For ruin had touched the great tower, and the white, naked shapes that crawled up and down the structure showed no sign of intelligence. The last light had gone out, then. The tide of madness had engulfed the four thousand.

  He used his seventh sense of perception, and his guess was confirmed. In all the world, there was no sanity. The herd instinct had triumphed.

  And he could not breathe. That suffocating horror was a reality now. The last oxygen left in the sealed case was rapidly being absorbed by his now-active lungs. He could, of course, open the vorkyl—

  To what?

  Dawsao moved his hand. The control swung to the right again.

  -

  He was sitting in the psychiatrist's outer office. The receptionist was at her desk, scribbling something; she didn't look at him. The white light of morning sunshine made patterns on the rug.

  The reality—

  "You may go in now, Mr. Dawson."

  Dawson stood up and walked into Hendricks' sanctum. He shook hands, muttered something, and sank into a chair.

  Hendricks referred to his charts. "O.K., Fred," he said. "Feel up to another word-association test? You're looking a bit better."

  "Am I?" Dawson said. "Maybe I know what the symbol represents now."

  Hendricks looked at him sharply. "Do you?"

  "Maybe it isn't a symbol at all. Maybe it's a reality."

  Then the familiar sensation came back, the dusty, suffocating claustrophobia, and the windowpane, and the brownish, dry smell, and the sense of terrible urgency. But there was nothing to be done about it now, nothing at all. He waited. In a moment it was gone again, and he looked across the desk at Hendricks, who was saying something about the danger of secondary delusions, of rationalizing.

  "It's a matter of finding the right sort of therapy," insisted the hollow man.

  The End

  RAIN CHECK

  Astounding Science Fiction - July 1946

  with Henry Kuttner

  (as by Lewis Padgett)

  It wasn't human, or even remotely human. The race that created it had given it great powers. But one power it desperately wanted was denied it—

  -

  The thing that seemed to be in the transparent block came f
rom the past, not the future, and its alienage was due more to environment than to heredity. It had no heredity, except by proxy. The iGlann—which is not a typographical error but a pre-paleolithic race—created it when the glaciers began to grind down on the Valley. However, the iGlann died anyway, and, partly because they weren't human, none of their artifacts was ever found by later cultures of homo sapiens.

  The iGlann were sapiens but they weren't homo. So the thing they made during their last desperately experimental days was a super-iGlann. It wasn't a superman, or probably Sam Fessier couldn't even have communicated with it when he found the transparent cube.

  This happened a little before World War II.

  -

  Fessier came back to his apartment in a dither. He was a thin, red-haired man of twenty-eight, with blue eyes, a harassed expression, and at the moment a great longing for a drink. After he had had one, he discovered that company was even more desirable, so he went out, bought a fifth, and went to see Sue Daley.

  Sue was a pretty little blonde who wanted to be a career woman. She worked for an advertising firm, a position which Fessier loudly scorned. He himself was a gag cartoonist, one of that band who habitually see the world through slightly cockeyed glasses. The passing of years had changed his allegiance from Winsor McCay to such mad modern Titians as Partch and Addams. (Titian is not a typographical error either, but the second i may be omitted without altering the sense.)

  "I'm going to change my name," Fessier said after the third cocktail. "You can call me Aladdin from now on. Gad!"

  Sue tried to scowl. "Don't use that ridiculous word."

  Fessier said sadly, "Can I help it if most of my publishers are hypersensitive about blasphemy? I've got to be so careful about what I put in my captions that I've started talking that way. Anyhow, you missed the point. I said I'm going to change my name to Aladdin."

  Sue picked up the cocktail shaker and made it tinkle. "Two more," she said. "One apiece. Drink up and then tell me the gag."

  Fessier pushed her away as she tried to pour. "I suppose I'll meet this skepticism everywhere from now on. No, really, Sue. Something's happened."

  Sue sobered. "Really, Sam? If this is one of your—"

  "It isn't," he said desperately. "The hell of it is, it'll sound like a gag. But I can prove it. Remember that. Sue, I went into an auction sale today and bought something. A glass block, about as big as your head."

  "Indeed," Sue said.

  Fessier, oblivious to feminine nuances, plunged on. "There was a little mannikin or something in the block. The reason I bought it—" He slowed and stopped.

  "It looked at me," Fessier said lamely. "It opened its beady little eyes and looked at me."

  "Of course it did," Sue encouraged, pouring the man a drink. "Out of its beady little eyes, did it? This had better be good."

  Fessier got up and went out into the hall. He came back with a paper-wrapped parcel, about as large as Sue's head. He sat down again, the bundle on his knees, and began to unwrap it.

  "I was curious, that's all," he said. "Or ... well, I was curious."

  "Maybe its beady little eyes hypnotized you into buying it," Sue suggested, looking at him innocently over the rim of her glass.

  Fessier's hands stilled on the knots. "Yeah," he said, and presently continued his task. There emerged a transparent cube, about nine inches to a side, with a mandrake embedded in the substance. At any rate, it looked like a mandrake, or what the Chinese call a ginseng root. It was roughly man-shaped, with well-defined limbs and head, but so brown and wrinkled that it might easily have been merely an oddly-shaped root. Its beady little eyes, however, were not open.

  Sue said, "How much did you pay for that thing?"

  "Oh, ten bucks."

  "Then you were hypnotized. Still, it's unusual. Is it for me?"

  Fessier said "No" very abruptly. The girl looked at him.

  "Got another wench on your string? I know. She lives in a mausoleum. Instead of giving her flowers, you bring her nasty little—"

  "Wait a minute," Fessier said. "I think it's going to open its eyes."

  Sue stared first at the block and then at Fessier. When nothing happened, she put out an exploratory hand, but Fessier shook his head warningly.

  "Wait a minute, Sue. When I first saw the thing in that auctioneer's, it was all dusty. I rubbed it. That's when it opened its eyes. Then when I got it home, I rubbed it again."

  "Just like Aladdin, huh?" Sue said.

  "It was talking to me," Fessier murmured.

  -

  Night had begun to darken the city. Outside the windows grayness had turned into shadow. Electric signs were glowing in the distance, but they did not impinge like the sounds that came up softly from the street below, they were impersonal. It is as easy to be alone in New York as it is in Montana, and that aloneness is somewhat less friendly. Perhaps that is because a great city is an extremely intricate, complicated social mechanism, and the moment one gets out of step with the machine, the immensity of the city makes itself sensed. It is overwhelming.

  For the mandrake had opened its eyes. As Fessier had said, they were both small and beady.

  When Sue became conscious of herself again, she thought that the creature had been talking for quite a while. It was purely telepathic, of course. Sound waves could not penetrate that nearly impermeable block. She was surprised to find that she wasn't surprised.

  "... but surprise and incredulity are the common human reactions," it said. "Even a thousand years ago that was true. People of your race at that time said they believed in witches and werewolves, but that's a different matter from actually encountering a concrete example of the supernormal. I charted the neural reactions—the chain progressing from incredulity to credulity by the logical process of demonstrative empirical proof, and worked out a convenient short cut. It's been a long time since I wasted energy unnecessarily. Take it for granted that you're convinced. I did it with something you might call psychic radiation. I can influence emotion that way, but unfortunately mnemonic control is impossible for me. Your race is insatiably curious. Next will come the questions."

  "Next will come a drink," Fessier said. "Sue, where did you put that bottle I brought up?"

  "In the kitchen," she said. "I'll get it." But they went out together. Leaning against the sink, they looked at each other wide-eyed.

  "The strange part is that I'm not a bit skeptical," Fessier said. "That thing might as well be the law of gravitation for all the reaction I get."

  "But what is it?"

  "I dunno. I just know it's ... real. I'm convinced."

  "Psychic radiation."

  Fessier said quietly, "Are you afraid?"

  The girl stared out the window. "Look, Sam. We believe in gravitation, too, but we don't lean out that window too far."

  "Uh. There are two things we can do. One is to go out the back door and never come back. The other—"

  "If it can juggle psychic radiation like ping-pong balls, it could kill us or ... or turn us into brass monkeys," Sue remarked.

  "Yeah. We could go out the back door, but I hate to think of our being chased down Lexington by a glass cube with a root in it. What am I standing here thinking for? Give me that." Fessier took possession of the bottle and used it efficiently. After a few snorts, it seemed logical that they should return to their prize.

  Fessier said, "W-what are you, anyhow?"

  It said, "I told you the questions would come next. I know your race. Perpetually curious. Perhaps, some day—"

  "Are you dangerous?"

  "Many have blessed me. I am old. I am a legend. You spoke of the tale of Aladdin. I am the prototype of the jinni in the bottle. And the lamp, and the prophetic mandrake, and the homunculus, and the Sybil, and a hundred other talismans that have survived in your legends. But I am none of these, I am the super-iGlann."

  They stood before it, unconsciously holding hands. Sue said, "The what?"

  "There was a race," it said, "not a h
uman race. In the early days, there were many mutations. The iGlann were intelligent, but their minds were constructed along different patterns from yours. They might have survived, but the Ice Age destroyed them. Now. Your science has its blind spots, because you are human, and have human restrictions. You have only binocular vision, for example, and only six senses."

  "Five," Fessier said.

  "Six. The iGlann had their own limitations. In some respects they were more advanced than your race, in others less. They tried to find a method of survival, and worked at creating a life form that would be perfectly adaptable, perfectly invulnerable—and then changing their physical structure along such lines, so the Ice Age and other perils would not destroy them. Man can create a superman, usually by genetic accident. The iGlann created a super-iGlann. Then they died."

  -

  "You're a superman?" Sue asked. She was slightly lost.

  "No. I am the super-iGlann. It is a different line. A superman would theoretically have no human limitations. But a ... let us say ... a superdog would. I am a super-iGlann, with none of the iGlann's limitations; but there are things you can do that I cannot. Conversely, I am the legendary talisman, and I can grant your wishes."

  "I wish I could be skeptical," Fessier said. "In fact, I am."

  "You are not skeptical about my existence. Only about my powers. If you expect me to conjure up a palace overnight, you will be disappointed. But if you want a palace, I can tell you the easiest way of getting one."

  Fessier said, "This is beginning to sound like 'Acres of Diamonds.' If you start telling me that pluck, luck and sweat will make me president, I'll start hoping I'm dreaming. Even in a dream, I don't like moralizing."

  "You have binocular vision and only six senses," it said, "so you cannot visualize clearly the steps that lead up to a certain end. I can get, as it were, a bird's-eye view of your world and what goes on in it. I can see what streams lead to what rivers. Do you want a palace?"

  They both said no.

  "What do you want?"

  "I'm not sure we want anything," Sue said. "Do we, dear? Fairy gold, remember."