by C. L. Moore
"I saw it," Louis said, but Jeng leaned forward.
"Was that the earth that was destroyed by the chain reaction?"
"Oh, no. Gamma's still very much in existence. A uranium pile can blow off without wrecking a planet. There was a hundred-mile radius explosion on Gamma, that's all. The important thing is that there was a social explosion too. The various rebellious elements like the Neoculturalists—they existed on Gamma, too—began to rebel. GPC's superiority had depended on status quo, the stability of the uranium piles. People assumed that a policeman has authority and will protect them, but if the policeman's gun is proved not only useless but dangerous to innocent victims—well, there was chaos on Gamma, and then anarchy. GPC fought for its life and lost. It was dog eat dog. GPC had moral superiority and weapons; the first vanished when the uranium pile blew up, and it isn't hard to make weapons. So there was atomic warfare again, decentralization—as on our world, long ago—and then germ warfare. Now they're beginning to rebuild on Gamma. They'll have time. They've already extended their life span considerably, and that means their research men will get a lot better as they acquire more experience—hundreds of years of experience, probably."
"Have they cured cancer?" Breden asked.
"Some forms. It mutates, you know. We—"
"Have you a cure?"
"Yes. Whether or not our mutated strains are the same as yours—"
Louis asked quick questions, and emerged with a doubtful frown. "We might be able to do it," he said.
Van Buren said, "Cancer isn't incurable. Given a research fund and skilled men, you can find a cure fairly easily."
"Wait a minute, Joe," Louis said. "Don't count too much on this yet. I said we might—but not yet."
"Why not?"
"Time and equipment. It takes months to grow penicillin, and you need power and equipment—X ray, ultraviolet, and so on. Insulin's a specific for diabetes, but you need an industrial plant to get it from the pancreatic glands of dead animals. Look. Omega's a hundred years or more ahead of us, and it's got the time and the facilities for these things. GPC has some of the facilities, but won't permit research, and I think GPC's time is running out. Research depends on stability."
"GPC's got stability," Breden said doubtfully. Jeng glanced at him.
"Has it?" he asked.
"You can use a magic wand," Louis said, "but first you've got to make the wand. We'll be able to cure cancer, but Van Buren's specific won't be any help till we can produce it."
And, after a time—
"But one earth was destroyed by the chain reaction, Van Buren," Jeng said. "What about that?"
"I've been considering that since you told me. I hadn't seen that particular probability before. But—"
Louis broke in, and there was a period of technical discussion, from which one factor emerged triumphant. Van Buren said, "Yes, I believe that must be it. In some probability earths there have been artificial radioelements created—there are plenty besides the uranium isotopes, of course. In some of the worlds I've seen—right, Louis?—they work with radioelements we've never created on Omega. On that destroyed planet they must have created an element so powerful and unstable that the chain reaction could and did vaporize their world. But here in Omega we work daily with all the radioactive elements you have available, and the safety factor on all of them is known. Destroying your Uranium Pile Number One will make a big noise—but not big enough to do more than smash GPC."
"If I can get near Number One," Breden said.
Louis studied him. "You've got a new weapon, Joe. Your instinct, or super-logic, or—whatever it is. You've enough motive, enough drive, to keep it in operation. You'll instinctively know the right thing to do."
"Yes," Breden said, "I'll know, all right—but what about physical limitations? I'm not a superman."
Ilsa said, "Van Buren, can't you explode Uranium Pile Number One from your world?"
"Yes," the voice from Omega said, "I could. But it would destroy both our planets. That's why I can never visit your world, or you mine. I told you the energy-potentials of our continua are too different. If a channel were opened, they'd equalize—and the difference in voltage is rather inconceivable. The higher-voltage continuum would drain into the lower one instantly, and at the point of contact—there'd be neither Alpha nor Omega. Even a few volts difference would mean a big bang—a release of energy that would make quite a noise—and there's more than a few volts difference between your universe and mine. I think it depends on Joseph Breden."
Breden looked at his watch.
-
There was no need for hypnosis now. His new-found recessive talent, become dominant, guided him. The spark in his brain, the infallible instinct, pulled him through the psych tests.
It was not easy. It was grueling. All the while Dr. Hoag and the others worked with him, he was thinking of Carolyn Kohl, and wondering if that part of his dream would come true. He wouldn't shoot her; he had no weapon. But he would have to silence her in some way.
Automatically, instinctively, he reacted properly to the tests.
"Why did you pull your arm out of the shot box before the neutralizing agent was administered."
"I didn't. I felt the shot." He knew that was the right answer to give.
Hoag talked to the others. "Suggestion? After all, there's the booster dermal anaesthetic. He was expecting to feel the needle ... no, not pain, simply the tactile sensation—"
Margaret. They were on the same side now, fighting together, and that was as it should be. He hadn't seen her; he'd gone directly to New York, and thence to the island where the sunken ziggurat was, guarding its monstrous treasure. Beneath him he could sense the silent, thundering pulse of the thing. Uranium Pile Number One.
He had not touched a damper yet. But as he moved steadily through the psych tests, he felt the energy-level rising toward critical mass. Not really; it would not register on any instrument. Yet when he reached the Thing—
It throbbed!
Bridging the synapse between brain and monster, the illusory sensation leaped.
It pulsed!
And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Dr. Hoag was saying, "Well, Breden, I guess that's all. Take over."
Breden smiled. "Summa cum laude?"
"Sure," Hoag said. "Better get along, or you'll be late." He settled back in his chair, and Breden, nodding at the other members of the Board, got up and went out. He walked along the blank corridor and stepped into the elevator.
He touched the control. His mind was moving very swiftly, not planning ahead—he would depend on instinct for that—but weighing possibilities. He wondered how the instinct would direct him—that infallible instinct that was his own mutation. And Carrie? He hoped he wouldn't have to kill her, as, really, he'd killed Mike De Anza. But she was like Mike, after all, one of the people without drive, a person to fill a routine job capably, but never one who should be trusted to guide or plan new things. She had crystallized; she was satisfied. The fact that nuclear physics was her field didn't indicate that she was imaginative; routine nuclear physics was no longer an adventure. But other adventures existed—
Instinct warned him. The elevator was moving up, not down. Suddenly Breden's hands flashed across the controls, deftly disconnecting, rewiring, plugging—
And, as suddenly, the instinct failed.
The panel slid open. He saw a bare, blank corridor ahead. He walked along it, slowly, watchfully.
And stepped into the cabin of a helicopter. Behind him the plane's door shut. He stood there, waiting, as the copter began to rise.
He listened to the voice of his new instinct.
Dr. Hoag suspected something.
The psych tests had made the Board suspect. Not all, but enough. There was no way to outwit them—no way at all. The fight's lost. They maneuvered you out of the ziggurat cleverly. From the moment you entered Hoag's office, your path to the uranium pile was blocked and barred. They took that precaution. If you'd passed the tes
ts—but, after all, you didn't. Instinct can do only so much. This world is based on reason, not instinct. And when you're up against a machine that's simply too big for you, you fail.
So they suspect you now. You'll never be allowed on the island again. You'll be investigated, checked—made to talk. You will talk, under drugs. Instinct won't help you then—if that's what this wild talent is. Because compromise will be logical, since GPC will infallibly win. The underground movement depended on you, and you failed. So the future will be GPC's. Compromise is the answer. It will preserve your life and the lives of Margaret and your child. GPC will question you, find the truth—and cure you, condition you until you are a GPC man again.
In the probability-world where instinct, or whatever-it-was, had been eugenically bred into the race and the planet molded to fit that, you'd have fitted too. But not here. Not in Alpha. You'd be marked out, a freak, and a dangerous one, to be eliminated. This—instinct—proves that the only answer for you now is—the instinct must become recessive again, instead of dominant.
And the instinct—became recessive.
-
But it was not infallible. It worked on the logics of one probability plane only. An hour later John Van Buren's voice said over the transmitter:
"He's in Chancery now. They're beginning to question him. He's under drug-hypnosis."
Ilsa, Jeng, and Louis Breden were listening. Behind them, in the tank, the Freak floated without a movement. Ilsa stood up and began to march back and forth.
"If we could act—!" she said.
Jeng said, "While the uranium piles remains below critical mass, we can't hope to accomplish a thing. I think we'd better disperse, for a bit."
Ilsa said, "A suicide plane, diving at the ziggurat—"
Louis said, "You know that's no good. A plane would be detected and shot down. Besides, even if you hit the ziggurat, it wouldn't do any damage. Don't you know how the thing's constructed?"
Jeng said, "My integrations are finished, until a new factor enters. Our Plan Z-15 is ready, but it depended on Breden's destroying the uranium pile. The cells of our organization are ready to act. They can't hope to conquer, but they could have triggered the anarchic movement. Except—Breden didn't succeed."
There was silence. Van Buren said, "GPC is making him talk. Under hypnosis, he's vulnerable."
"What about that instinct of his?" Ilsa asked sharply. "Doesn't that tell him he'd better keep quiet?"
"Instinct, prescience, super-logic—perhaps it's wiser than we are," Jeng said. The girl turned toward the door.
"I'm going to have a try, anyway," she said. "What else is there to do?"
"Have you any bombs?" Jeng asked. "Well, then. It's futile."
"So you're giving up?"
"No," the Tibetan said with placid patience.
Louis said, "Van Buren, can't you see any way out? Isn't there anything we can do?"
Van Buren said, "I'm sorry. Your world is psychopathic. Perhaps no psychopathic patient can ever really cure himself. The cure must be administered from outside—but I can't come into your world, and my weapons wouldn't work in your continuum anyway."
Ilsa said violently, "Then open the channel between Alpha and Omega! It's better to destroy our earth than have it work out the way it did on Gamma."
"That would destroy my world too," Van Buren said.
"Well—open the channel between us and Gamma," Ilsa said. "This whole planet's become expendable by now. Nothing can cure us—you can't, and we can't—"
Louis Breden said abruptly, "Van Buren! What about that? Could you bridge the gap between Alpha and Gamma?"
"Yes."
"At any geographical point on either earth?"
"Yes."
"What's the voltage differential between Alpha and Gamma?"
"Too much to be safe. The two earths diverged thirty-five years ago—"
Jeng said softly, "What is the difference in energy potential between our world and Beta? That divergence occurred only ten years ago."
"Two volts, perhaps," the voice from Omega said. "There have been equalizing factors that maintained a fair balance. Exactly, I could channel the potential between Alpha—your earth—and Beta, and it would make a big noise. Not big enough to destroy a planet, or even an island, but—"
"Channel the energy potential between somewhere on Beta, and Uranium Pile Number One here," Louis said. "Then?"
"Then critical mass would not be reached," Van Buren said. "But I could destroy the controls—which would do as well! That would be safe—except for the danger area about that island. Very well. It will take me an hour, perhaps. Make your plans, Jeng. I'll begin the work!"
-
It pulsed!
The monster's heart beat thudded rhythmically through the sunken ziggurat, undetected and unnoticed.
Carolyn Kohl and her new co-guardian played tri-di chess, glancing occasionally at the gauges that told them nothing.
That was on Alpha.
On Beta, the virus-and germ-mutations raged unchecked, scourging a world falling into chaos, where GPC clutched vainly at the reins rotting in its grasp.
On Omega, John Van Buren jury-rigged his machine.
On Alpha, in Chancery, GPC's best-qualified men were questioning Joseph Breden and moving the precision machinery of their police controls into swift action against the underground.
And in the ziggurat the monster crouched like a cancer, a tumor that could have been benignant, but had instead grown into a malignant sarcoma in a hundred years. Like the two tumors within the body of Margaret Breden—the benignant one in her womb, and the latent, malignant cancer filtering through her blood.
The psychopathic world lay waiting, unsuspecting, while Van Buren prepared his electric shock therapy.
No patient can cure himself. But a shock from outside—
Van Buren made the last movement necessary.
The channel opened between Alpha and Beta. The energy potentials of two probability-continua, no longer insulated from each other, met—and leveled.
Only two volts difference—but enough to bring Uranium Pile Number One to critical mass.
In his tank, the Freak opened his mouth and screamed.
-
Six weeks later Louis Breden sat before the transmitter, talking to Van Buren. Now, more than ever, the organization needed Van Buren's advice. Too much had happened—more than they had expected; but the man in Omega seemed unperturbed.
"Things are working out," he said. "We have the other probability world for purposes of comparison. You say that germ warfare is already beginning; that's the natural progression."
"I hope we survive it," Louis said.
"Enough of you will. Drastic ills ... enough of you will."
"Ortega didn't."
"But already you've found a specific for his coryza-variant virus," Van Buren said. "You could cure him now, if he were alive. And you're curing others."
It was true enough. Some died, but others would survive, sometimes the unexpected ones. The Freak had not only survived, but had been cured, brought out of his shock stupor and into complete rationality. He had somehow sensed or felt the atomic blast at the island, and had realized that this world, at any rate, was not doomed to destruction by the chain reaction. There was another earth that had been so destroyed, but apparently through use of a different, unstable artificial element or isotope. The Freak was cured, and was proving extremely useful, though he was still bound to his tank.
Yet Ortega was dead, a victim of the mutated coryza virus. And the world was in chaotic anarchy. Decentralization had happened weeks ago, GPC was now only one of a dozen groups that strove for power. And through the struggle weaved the forces of the underground, not yet ready to reintegrate, deftly turning the kaleidoscope whenever it showed a tendency to settle into the wrong pattern.
Ilsa Carter was still alive and useful. And Joseph Breden was alive too—in the confusion, it hadn't been impossible to arrange his escape from the Ch
ancery of the bewildered GPC. He, too, was helping, finding some release for his talents, though not until peace came would they find their full scope. And Margaret was alive also, in a hideaway in the Rocky Mountains, nursing a baby girl who seemed perfectly normal and nonmutant.
The shock treatment had worked. Now, perhaps, it was the stage of pentothal narcosynthesis—the patient was undergoing katharsis.
"I'm on the trail of that longevity thing," Louis said. "We don't have the facilities yet, but we'll get them. However, the main thing for us now is to find protection against the coming biological attacks."
"Being able to see the other probability-worlds will help," Van Buren repeated, and Louis, eying the blank wires of the transmitter, nodded. He was trying to visualize Van Buren's face as he had seen it in the Freak's mind. It was a face much like his own, but there were differences. Within the last month, rather oddly, Louis' expression had changed so that the resemblance was very marked—to the few who could make the comparison. Yet a basic difference would always remain. For Louis it would always be a little too late. He had a chance now to catch up, and there might be more of a chance later, if the longevity genes could be maneuvered satisfactorily.
The Freak called Louis telepathically. Both Van Buren and Louis slipped into the Freak's mind, and saw, with his strange, intra-probability vision, an earth hey had not glimpsed before, far beyond the scope of Van Buren's mechanical scanner.
"A nice world," Louis said inadequately. "So will ours be, some day. That one took the right route at some crossroads—I wonder when?"
"There are so many crossroads, Louis, "Van Buren said. "There are the major ones and the minor. I think our major one was in 1945—we'd probably never have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima if the Jap kamikaze fleet hadn't destroyed Washington."
Louis said, "We might have. We've always been a sentimental nation—but we might have done it, just the same."