The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  "Thought they could fool an old woman like me ... I'm not old. Making me chew bones. Was that it? There was a bad time for a while. Where's Tom? Just leave me alone—"

  And—"Telling me I was going to live forever! Scientists! He was right, though. I found that out. I was susceptible. It scared me. Everything going to pot, and Tom dying and me going on ... I got some pills. I'd got hold of them. More'n once I nearly swallowed them, too. You don't live forever if you take poison, that's certain. But I was smart. I waited awhile. Time enough, I said. It's cold."

  Her mottled, suety cheeks quivered. Dyson waited. He was beginning to feel sensation again. The hypnotic was wearing off.

  Rattling, painful snores came from the invisible Mander, hidden in the gloom. A cold wind sighed down the gully. Jane Dyson's fat white face was pale in the faint light of distant, uninterested stars. She stirred and laughed a high, nickering laugh.

  "I just had the funniest dream," she said. "I dreamed Tom was dead and I was old."

  -

  A copter picked up Dyson and the Old 'Uns half an hour later. But no explanations were made until he was back in the city, and even then they waited till Dyson had time to visit his secret laboratory and return. Then his uncle, Roger Peaslee, came into Dyson's apartment and sat down without invitation, looking sympathetic.

  Dyson was white and sweating. He put down his glass, heavily loaded with whiskey, and stared at Peaslee.

  "It was a frame, wasn't it?" he asked.

  Peaslee nodded. He said, "Logic will convince a man he's wrong, provided the right argument is used. Sometimes it's impossible to find the right argument."

  "When Administration sent me to the Home, I thought they'd found out I was doing immortality research."

  "Yes. As soon as they found out, they sent you to Cozy Nook. That was the argument."

  "Well, it was convincing. A whole night in the company of those—" Dyson drank. He didn't seem to feel it. He was still very pale.

  Peaslee said, "We framed that escape, too, as you've guessed. But we kept an eye on you all along, to make sure you and the Old 'Uns would be safe."

  "It was hard on them."

  "No. They'll forget. They'll think it was another dream. Most of the time they don't know they're old, you see. A simple defense mechanism of senility. As for that little girl, I'll admit that wasn't planned. But no harm was done. The Old 'Uns didn't shock or horrify her. And nobody will believe her—which is fine, because the Archive myth has to stand for a while."

  Dyson didn't answer. Peaslee looked at him more intently.

  "Don't take it so hard, Sam. You lost an argument, that's all. You know now that age without increasing maturity doesn't mean anything. You've got to keep going ahead. Stasis is fatal. When we can find out how to overcome that, it'll be safe to make people immortal. Right?"

  "Right."

  "We want to study that laboratory of yours, before we dismantle it. Where's it hidden?"

  Dyson told him. Then he poured himself another drink, downed it, and stood up. He picked up a sheet of paper from the table and tossed it at his uncle.

  "Maybe you can use that, too," he said. "I was just down at the lab making some tests. I got scared."

  "Eh?"

  "Jane Dyson was especially susceptible to the particular radiations that cause immortality. Like cancer, you know. You can't inherit it, but you can inherit the susceptibility. Well I remembered that I'd been working a lot with those radiations, in secret. So I tested myself just now."

  Peaslee opened his mouth, but he didn't say anything.

  Dyson said, "It wouldn't have bothered most people—those radiations. But Jane Dyson passed on her susceptibility to me. It was accidental. But—I was exposed. Why didn't Administration get on to me sooner!"

  Peaslee said slowly: "You don't mean—"

  Dyson turned away from the look beginning to dawn in his uncle's eyes.

  -

  An hour later he stood in his bathroom alone, a sharp blade in his hand. The mirror watched him questioningly. He was drunk, but not very; it wouldn't be so easy to get drunk from now on. From now on—

  He laid the cold edge of the knife against one wrist. A stroke would let out the blood from his immortal body, stop his immortal heart in mid-beat, turn him from an immortal into a very mortal corpse. His face felt stiff. The whiskey taste in his mouth couldn't rinse out the musty smell of senility.

  The thought: Of course there's Marta. Fourscore and ten is the normal span. If I cut it off now, I'll be losing a good many years. When I'm ninety, it would be time enough. Suppose I went on for a little while longer, married Marta—

  He looked at the knife and then into the glass. He said aloud:

  "When I'm ninety I'll commit suicide."

  Young, firm-fleshed, ruddy with health, his face looked enigmatically back at him from the mirror. Age would come of course. As for death—

  There would be time enough, sixty years from now, when he faced a mirror and knew that he had gone beyond maturity and into the darkening, twilight years. He would know, when the time came—of course he would know!

  And in Cozy Nook, Jane Dyson stirred and moaned in her sleep, dreaming that she was old.

  The End

  TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

  Astounding Science Fiction - January-February 1947

  with Henry Kuttner

  (as by Lewis Padgett)

  Part One

  With the best of good intentions, someone was trying—and trying hard!—to start an atomic war that would blow their civilization off the map!

  -

  I

  He knew it was a dream when he shot Carolyn through the head. But not until then. The imperceptible shifting from reality to the familiar nightmare had come, as always, so stealthily that the shock of surprise almost woke him. Then there came the thought: I must tell the Controllers.

  And after that: But in three weeks there'll be the quarterly psych check, and they'll find out anyhow.

  Standing, he looked down at the motionless gray head aureoled in spreading red, and listened, and made a bargain with himself. If I can't get rid of this recurrent dream, this warp, this compulsion before the psych check, I'll be fired automatically. There can't be any danger from a dream. It's merely a fear-dream; it can't be wish-fulfillment.

  The thought chilled him horribly.

  He dreaded the next moment, when the pattern of weeks would repeat itself, and he would straighten up above the narrow table, with its intricate controls and warning signal lights, and turn toward the door that led to the unthinkable.

  But he turned.

  Tomorrow I'll report to the psych board.

  It won't mean being fired, really. Not washed up. I'll simply be reconditioned and tested. But I can never hold this post again!

  The ancient, powerful conditioning of his early environment stirred in savage rebellion. I can't give it up! The highest honor in the world—

  He walked down the passage. He made the secret signals that permitted his safe ingress. But he knew it was impossible; there were protective devices that even he did not know how to deactivate. In real life, he could never have penetrated this far toward—toward it.

  The dream blurred. There was a confusion of nightmare.

  That coalesced suddenly. He found himself in the brain and the heart. He stood before It.

  And as always he felt that what he had to do was impossible. He had been chosen and trained for his post simply because his psychological background was entirely trustworthy, a more important factor than his technical training. Yet the perverse devil hung on his shoulder, laughing.

  Of course, if I were awake, I would never do it. But in a dream—

  Do it. It's the release I need, said the devil at his shoulder. The release you need. That we need. You're under terrific tension, and you're neurotic and worried for fear this very thing will happen. So get your release. A dream is harmless.

  Somehow in the dream it was ridiculously easy to
do. You merely had to detach the boron dampers and pull them out. But what had happened to their locks?

  He watched the gauges on the walls. Geiger counters began to chatter insanely. Needles rose in jumpy, warning spasms as the dampers were withdrawn. The critical mass had nearly been reached.

  But it's only a dream, of course, he thought, as he woke amid the inconceivable fractional-second beginning of the atomic blast.

  -

  II

  Joseph Breden made himself sit motionless. He opened his eyes slowly, saw the tri-di chessboards in front of him, red and black, and let his lids drop against the light. But the light was not dazzling. A chain of reactions leaped through his mind; he drew a long breath of relief. He could not have been asleep longer than a few seconds, or his pupils would have contracted against light that would have seemed blinding to him.

  There was no reason to feel surprise. It always happened this way. But there was always the sense that he had been asleep for a long, long time, and that Carolyn Kohl would have noticed. She would have had to report him then. Though that would scarcely have been necessary, with the built-in visio-recorders always focused on the guardians who sat in this room, and in two others elsewhere in the enormous sunken ziggurat.

  He tapped one finger a little on the table, to show Carolyn he was awake. The recorders would catch that, too, on their wire tape. A small panic touched him. He stared at the chessboards, pawn, knight, bishop, king; to save his life he could not remember the gambit, and whose move it was. He had a feeling that this exact situation had occurred before. He remembered—

  His mind leaped on ahead, taking fire with its own irrational hysteria. He had to make the right move. It was vital. If he didn't Carolyn would notice and suspect, or the recorders would, and he would be investigated and psych-checked and lose his post; there would be disgrace—

  Stop it, he told himself frantically. Move any place. No, don't do that. Carolyn knows your game. The records note any deviation from the same. But do something!

  His brain was empty. All he could feel was that flailing panic, and all he could sense was the silent terror far under his feet, the uranium pile that hovered below the critical mass, the incubus he guarded.

  Something shifted, a soft rustle of motion, across the table, and the terror drained swiftly out of Breden. He knew, now, what it was he had feared.

  He raised his eyes and looked at Carolyn Kohl. There was no cinder-edged hole marring her smooth forehead under the gray hair. A bulky, heavy-faced woman of sixty-eight, she lay back comfortably in her chair, sharp black eyes watching Breden through her contact lenses, her rather thick lips parted to show strikingly even white dentures. Though nearly seventy, she was still a top-flight nuclear physicist, and until lately had been better than Breden. But now she was slowing down a little, and Breden silently blessed that factor; if she had been sharper, she might have suspected something.

  She was sharp, though. And Breden knew he could not go on with the game. He had to find an out. That wouldn't be easy. There must be no deviations from his habit-patterns for the recorders to pounce on. The cool, soft light of the room was smothering.

  The tension was growing again within him.

  He thought of Margaret. But his wife's familiar features blended, somehow, with the dark, placid, confident face of his brother Louis. And instantly all stability left him. It had always been that way, since he was old enough to understand that Louis was different, though not until years after that did he fully comprehend why his brother was a member of the strangest club that had ever existed on earth.

  A club of the cursed and the blessed. The damned and the saved. And membership was strictly limited; it was so highly exclusive that you had to be born into it. You had to have been born within the effective limits of a chain reaction—not so close to the monstrous center that you disintegrated or were charred or died more slowly, with your flesh flaking off and your bones rotting, and not so far distant that your parents' genes and chromosomes were unaltered. You had to have been in exactly the right place at the right time. It had only happened a few times since 1945, in Japan and New Mexico, and, some years later, in other localities, but the atomic explosions had salted humanity with a few very special specimens. Not supermen, although rumors were still highly popular about mysterious, omnipotent figures who stayed godlike in the background and moved humans like puppets. That was standard stuff in the television shows. The truth was less flamboyant, as usual. The mutants were a mixed breed. Some survived, but neither the best nor the worst. They were, however, better than humans in a number of ways. Not that they weren't human themselves; it was semantically wrong to consider them alien. They were merely humans extended, just as Louis had been. As Louis was.

  The old hatred and love and shame and fear flooded back, and Breden began to hear a totally imaginary throbbing from beneath his feet, the heartbeat of the uranium pile that was, in reality, simply a machine, waiting, latent and still, for its use to come. It was a symbol, nothing more. Its use had come. But that use would fail entirely if it ever reached critical mass.

  It throbbed!

  Its gigantic pulse crushed rhythmically into Breden's brain!

  For the first time in years he acted on impulse. He reached out at random and moved a knight on the nearest board. And, as he did so, he realized that he had made a serious mistake.

  -

  But nothing happened. Only the eyes of the recorders, watching from the walls, irretrievably photographed the blunder that did not jibe with Joseph Breden's mental and habit patterns. It would never be ignored. Breden thought: I must think of an alibi. There'll be questioning—

  Carolyn said lazily, "What the devil's the matter with you, Joe? Got a fixation or something?"

  Breden said, "I guess you've licked me so often I've developed a chessboard death-wish."

  "Well, you're certainly asking to be murdered," she said, grimacing at the board. "No use playing this through. I'd have you in three moves. Want some coffee?"

  Breden nodded. He lay back, weak with relief, exhausted from the long-maintained tension, but still knowing that he had to be wary. There was still a chance of retrieving his blunder. Carolyn, no psychologist, didn't comprehend the significance of that inexcusable knight's move, but the Controllers' psychologists would know, or at least wonder and investigate. Not even the slightest shadow of a doubt must fall upon the guardians of the sunken ziggurat.

  He studied Carolyn as she ordered coffee. Nearly seventy. A new thought came, and he was briefly shocked at himself. If he could throw suspicion on her, somehow, lay the blame for the lapse on her shoulders—She was approaching the age when she would be no longer a perfectly functioning machine. She was, even now, the oldest of the technical crew. If he could make the responsibility hers, broach, somehow, a hint that the beginnings of senility were weakening her keenness—

  He phrased a reply to a hypothetical question: I've been letting her win at chess. I felt sorry for her, a little. She used to be able to lick me easily, but not any more.

  It would have to be subtler than that to convince the questioners. Yet the germ of the idea remained. Breden tried to put it away. He thought of his mutant brother again, and, as always, became conscious of his own weaknesses; but that brought its own cure. If he lost his job now, it would prove that Louis was the better man.

  The thermobulbs of coffee popped into the analyzer, hesitated a moment while gadgets ascertained that no dynamite, uranium isotopes, or cyanide was being smuggled in, and then slid smoothly to the table. Breden turned his around till he found the right place and pushed in the sugar-cream lid. He watched it dissolve. Carolyn said something.

  "Eh?"

  "Margaret. Your wife. You remember. You married her, or has that slipped your mind? It's no use trying to work out the right gambit now; the game's over."

  Not the real game, Carrie.

  He said, "Oh, I'm sorry. She's up in the Rockies, near Denver. Thought the change of air might be go
od for her."

  "It's her first baby, isn't it?"

  Breden nodded. Carolyn sipped coffee and watched him over the rim.

  "Cheer up," she said abruptly. "I know what's bothering you. But you've got the Mendelian law on your side."

  Another out?

  -

  Breden said, "I guess I'm a little worried, Carrie. My brother is a mutant.

  "But your parents weren't," Carolyn said. "Go see a good geneticist. Of course nothing new has been discovered for a hundred years; we can't afford research in these times. But we certainly know enough about genes. How old is Louis, anyway?"

  "Fifty-two. He's twenty-two years older than I."

  "Well, good gracious," Carolyn said, looking slightly like an indignant, though more sophisticated, Queen Victoria. "Even though your parents were exposed to the hard radiations—where was it?"

  "The Hawaiian experiment in ninety-two."

  "Well! The gene-pattern trends back toward the norm. And in twenty-two years—! You can feel sure your parents were normal by the time you were conceived. There's no question about Margaret's heredity, is there?"

  "Mutation? No. No exposure. Her grandfather worked with X rays, but that was all."

  "X rays," said Carolyn, with the scorn of one who worked with mesatrons and went on from there. "Your child won't be a mutant. He can't be."

  "Unless I disprove that empirically," Breden said. "You're talking theory. There's been no independent research along those lines—along any lines—for a hundred years"—conscious suddenly of the watching recorders, he added—"which is a very lucky thing. It could happen that my parents were accidentally exposed again before I was born; they'd have been prone to the effect, after the first exposure."

  "You're no mutant."

  "Might be latent in me. Recessive."

  "It's impossible," Carolyn said decisively. "And, at worse, you'd have a mutant child like Louis. He's quite a big shot, isn't he?"