The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  Time on the Moon has a different quality from time on Earth. He had to count up laboriously sometimes to discover how long it had been since he left ILC. He had a reason for wondering, because there was a message he expected. A message from Archer. Before he left Earth, he had asked Archer to notify him in case anything developed. A good many months must have gone by, though here on the Moon they didn't seem so long. But no message came.

  When he saw the dull colors of winter spreading down from the pole, he knew his six-months' period was up and he would have to think about going back soon. And now he had to face it; he was afraid to go back, until he heard from Archer. Eventually he undertook the considerable expense of a person-to-person call. It was not, after all, an expense. The call could not be completed. Archer had disappeared.

  It was hard to check from this far away, but apparently the Fixer's office had been closed some months ago, and there was no forwarding number. By the time Ferguson's reservation for the return trip came up, he knew what he had to do.

  If he had gone straight home, things might have worked out quite differently. But at that time of year the space liner was operating between Tycho and a port in South Africa. An old compulsion which had been haunting Ferguson for some time now saw its chance and broke out of all control.

  For a long while he had wanted very much to kill a gorilla. It was not as irrational as it sounded. Psychiatrically speaking, he knew it involved symbolism and displacement. Emotionally, he knew what face he would see across the sights of the gun when he found his gorilla. It had to be an adult male.

  With all the resources of his time, this wasn't difficult to arrange; but the disgraceful ease with which the telephoto analyzers located a specimen, the simplicity of driving the sullen brute into an ambush with supersonics, the facility with which Ferguson, in his fast armored Hunter, shot his quarry, left the man completely dissatisfied. Men had killed gorillas before. It proved nothing. It didn't prove the point that bothered him.

  Sight and memory of the gorilla's face, in death, stayed with him. The monster had been mature, for his species. Antisocial and dangerous. But dangerous only to whatever intruded into his domain.

  With a mature superman, Ferguson thought, human progress might stop. A superman would not feel insecurity, that goad which has always driven mankind. A superman would be a law unto himself. Would he behave like an anthropomorphic god, lending a helping hand to Homo sapiens, or would mankind seem to him as alien and unimportant as a savage tribe?

  Lesser breeds without the law—

  But the world belonged to man. Not to Lawson. ILC was the law. ILC was the fortress. Without ILC's stability, there would be no protection. I'm not safe any more, Ferguson thought. I could never stand alone. Maybe that merely means racial immaturity; ILC does stand in loco parentis, but it's always been that way—man has always wanted an All-Father image—

  Ferguson turned in the rifle, but he kept the pistol.

  -

  There was no difficulty about locating Lawson. He still lived in the same cottage. But he seemed to be looking slightly older. He nodded cheerfully to Ferguson when the latter came in.

  "Hello," he said.

  Ferguson took out the gun and aimed it at Lawson.

  Lawson looked scared, or pretended to.

  "Don't," he said hastily. "I can explain. Don't shoot me."

  His apparent fright was the only thing that stopped Ferguson's finger on the trigger.

  "You don't need to be afraid of me," Lawson assured him in a soothing voice. "Please put down that gun."

  "I know all about you. You're dangerous. You could conquer the world if you wanted to."

  "I doubt it," Lawson said, his fascinated stare on the gun-muzzle. "I'm not really a superman, you know."

  "You're not ordinary Homo sapiens."

  "Now look. I know a good deal about you, too. You could hardly expect me not to after what's happened. A man's investments don't all go haywire at once unless somebody's been manipulating the market against him."

  "So that's what happened to Archer." Ferguson's voice rose. "I suppose I can expect the same thing, whatever it is."

  "Archer? You must mean Reeve's Fixer. So far as I know, he's going about his business as usual." Lawson was eying his adversary warily. "You're the problem right now," he said. "You're not going about your business; you're going about mine. I wish you'd lay off, Ferguson. I know what you're thinking, but honestly, I'm not doing anyone any harm. Maybe you have reason for some of your conclusions about what you call my super-powers, but there's nothing miraculous about them. It ... it's just—"

  "It's what?" Ferguson demanded as the other man hesitated.

  "Call it a—way of thinking. That's as close as I can come to explaining what it is I've got. I just don't make mistakes. Not ever."

  "You made one when you let me come in just now, with a gun in my pocket."

  "No, I didn't," Lawson said.

  There was a pause.

  He went on: "Suppose I tell you a little about it. You were partly right, you know, in what you've been saying about me. I am immature. Normally, I'd never have known I wasn't mature at twenty-one. There weren't any standards of comparison. But this—thing—in my mind helped there. It isn't prescience, it's just a ... a way of thinking. You might call it precision and knowledge of precision tactics. An ability to disassociate the personality from pure thought. I can disassociate logic from emotion, you see—but that's only part of it. Before I graduated from the crêche, I knew it would take a good many years before I really matured."

  "You're not human. You don't give a care about human beings."

  Lawson said, "Look at it this way. Long ago, there was child labor. Kids were put to work in mines and factories when they were ten—or even before that. How could they reach normal maturity under those conditions? They needed normal childhood, with the right facilities. I had the same problem, with a maturation delayed years beyond the time of everybody else. I couldn't take a job—any job. I could have coped with the requirements, of course, but it would have—warped me. Even before I got my particular ability fully developed, I had a sort of protective instinct pointing out the right direction to take—generally. Just as a new-hatched chicken runs from danger. I needed a normal childhood—one that would be normal for me."

  "I suspected what you were."

  "Because of what you are," Lawson said gently.

  -

  Ferguson blinked. "You're antisocial and dangerous," he said. "Your record shows that. You wrecked the Nestor."

  "You know better than that. You're trying to make me a personal devil."

  "You insured the Nestor, and the Nestor ran into an atomic warhead in space. What about logics of probability?"

  "What about logic?" Lawson countered. "I can think and integrate without emotional bias when necessary, that's all. It's not prescience. It was a matter of hard work, research, astronomy, historical study, and integration. I found out the exact time of the Nestor's departure. I found records of spaceships that had noted radiations in certain areas above the stratosphere. I checked on what atomic shells were fired during the Atomic War. I don't think any ordinary human would have had the patience or the speed to do the integration I did, but—it's simply hard work, plus extensions of the brain that have always been shackled before."

  "You can foretell the future?"

  "Given the factors, I can formulate the probable final equation—yes. But as for this special talent of mine—I can't tell you. All I can say is that technology has its limits, but the human mind hasn't. We've gone tremendously far with technologies—so far that we nearly killed ourselves with atomics because we didn't know how to use nuclear fission. But every weapon creates the man to use it—and to hammer it into a plowshare. I'm a mutation. Eventually we'll know how to handle atomics without danger—"

  "We?"

  "I’m the first. But there are others like me in the crêches now. Immature as yet. But my brothers will grow—"

/>   Ferguson thought of the gorilla.

  Lawson said, "I know how to think. I'm the first man in the world who ever knew how to do that. I'll never need a psychiatrist. I don't think I'll ever make a mistake, because I can really think impersonally, and there's nobody who's ever been able to do that before. That's the basis of the future—not technologies that people misuse, but people who can use technology. Right now, there are over eighty children in crêches who have that special factor for logic in their minds. It's a dominant mutation. We don't want to rule; we'll never want that. It's only autocrats who need power — those who tag groups as ‘little people' so that by comparison they'll be big people. My job, just at present, is to see that my brother mutants get the immaturity pension they need. I must provide that money somehow. I can do it; I've worked out some methods—"

  "Nevertheless I'm going to kill you," Ferguson said. "I'm afraid of you. You could rule the world."

  "Madmen rule," Lawson said. "Sane men work, directionally. Atomics have to be controlled; that's one step. It takes pure, sane thought to handle that. And I'm the first truly sane man who has ever existed on Earth."

  "Like that gorilla I shot yesterday? He was integrated. He was vicious and touchy and static. He had his feeding-ground and his harem, and that was enough for him. He wanted no progress and needed none. That's maturity for you. Progress stops—the world stops. You're a dead end, Lawson—and in a minute you'll just be dead."

  "Do you think you can kill me?"

  "I don't know. Probably not, if you're superman. But I'm going to try."

  "And if you fail?"

  "Probably you'll kill me. Because if you don't, I'll spread the word, and you'll be lynched—some day. At least, I'll talk. If that's the only weapon I have against you."

  "Animals kill," Lawson said. "Men kill. I don't kill."

  "I do," Ferguson said, and squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  -

  When the room steadied about him again, he was seated in a deep chair staring at the gun on the floor where he had dropped it. For the moment it didn't matter why he had failed—why the gun had failed. The fact of failure was enough.

  Lawson had been intolerably kind. He had a vague feeling that Lawson had gone away somewhere to fetch him a drink. His time-sense was unsteady again. Perhaps that was because he had so newly returned from the Moon. Whatever the reason, his sense of urgency was gone.

  Then on the wall he saw the television panel, and an urgency woke again in him in a new direction. Archer. Archer could give him the answer. If Archer were still alive.

  With no recollection of motion he found himself before the screen, steadying himself with braced hands on the base, giving the familiar call number for the office where Archer no longer worked. He got from the exchange the same information his lunar call had elicited—office closed, no forwarding address. He tried Archer's home, with the same lack of result. Then he tried the office of Hiram Reeve, the politician who had been Archer's patron, and here he found the right answer.

  "ZX 47-6859. That's a private number, Mr. Ferguson. ILC will keep it confidential, of course?"

  Ferguson promised, and blanked the face out quickly. His voice was a little unsteady as he repeated the ZX number. It seemed incredible that Archer's plump face should dawn so clearly and promptly in the screen. Ferguson had pictured him as dead or destroyed in some subtler way, with so many vivid variations as applied to himself, that he tried stupidly to reach out and touch the screen for reassurance. The surface was cold and smooth beneath his fingertips, but Archer jumped back and laughed, putting up a futile hand to shield his eyes from the imagined blow.

  "Hey, what's the idea?" he demanded.

  "Are you all right, Archer? Where are you? What's happened?"

  "Sure I'm all right," Archer said. "What about you? You don't look too good."

  "I don't feel too good. But I've got proof. He's admitted it!"

  "Hold on a minute. Let's get this straight. I know you just got back from the Moon, but—"

  "I'm at Lawson's house. I've confronted him with the evidence." Ferguson made a great effort and forced his mind into coordinated thought. So much depended on what he was able to put across in the next few sentences. He could not afford weakness yet. "Lawson's admitted everything I've been telling you," he said. "It was all true. For a while I almost thought I was going crazy, but now Lawson admits it—listen, Archer, he admits it! You've got to help me! I realize my record's bad—I knew, but I couldn't convince anybody, and it nearly drove me off my rocker. I suppose I've been sounding psychotic for a long time now, but they'll listen to you. They've got to—because I tried to shoot Lawson, and I couldn't. Somebody will have to do something quick." He paused, drew a deep breath, and said harshly, "There are eighty more of them. Do you hear that, Archer? They're growing up. They're going to take over. I know how that sounds, but you've got to believe me. Give me a chance to prove it! Could you get here fast? How far away are you? It all depends on you; Archer, please don't fail me!"

  Archer smiled. It was borne in upon Ferguson's mind that he looked like a different man now. Somehow in the last six months he had shed his reserve, his wariness, and seemed completely relaxed and confident. But a slight shadow darkened his look of jovial content when he answered.

  "I can get there right away," he said. "Hold on." He turned away from the screen. Ferguson saw the back of his head as he crossed the room and opened a door in the far wall. He heard the door open. Beyond the opening door he had a brief glimpse of a tiny, distant room in which a tiny, distant man stood with his back to the door, looking into a televisor screen. Very small and clear on that miniature screen he saw a miniature duplicate of a man opening a door upon a room in which a man stood facing a televisor screen—

  It was the sound of the opening door that rescued him from the plunge through abyss after diminishing abyss of infinite duplication. He heard the door opening twice, once in the screen and once in the wall behind him. When he turned, Archer was crossing the threshold.

  -

  This time it was a long while before the room stopped turning. "I'm sorry," Archer said. "I should have warned you. I guess I just didn't think. Things have been happening pretty fast around here."

  "What things? What happened? What are you doing here?"

  "I work here," Archer said.

  "You—work here?"

  "I've changed my patron. No law against that, is there? I worked for Reeve as long as I thought he was the best man. But now I'm working for Ben Lawson. He's the best—man."

  Ferguson made an inarticulate sound. "You traitor," he said wildly.

  "To what?"

  "Your own species!"

  "Oh, very likely," Archer said blandly. "Still, I know where I'm most useful. And I like to be useful. It's none of our business to sit in judgment, is it?"

  "Of course it's our business! Who will if we don't? I—"

  Archer interrupted. "It doesn't matter whether we do or don't. You saw what happened when you tried to shoot Lawson."

  Ferguson had entirely forgotten the pistol. Now he crossed the room unsteadily, picked it up, and broke it open. The cartridges were blanks.

  "All hunters are required to return their weapons after they've come back from expeditions," Archer said pedantically. "ILC's policy is to avoid irritation, so nobody tried to take that pistol away from you at Uganda Station. However, blank cartridges were substituted. Lawson knew what would happen. It took him seven hours of fast calculation and logic to work out the inevitable probability, including the psychological factor that involved your personal reactions—but you see the result. You can't kill him. He can always work out what's going to happen."

  "Man, you can't—" Ferguson found himself becoming incoherent. He stopped, drew a painfully long breath, and began again, with an attempt at control. "You can't be such a fool! Maybe I've failed to kill Lawson—alone. But that doesn't mean that both of us, together ... the resources of ILC ... th
e whole human race would band together to destroy Lawson if they knew—"

  "Why should they destroy him?"

  "Self-preservation!"

  "That instinct failed the race," Archer said softly, "when it made the first atomic bomb. Status quo is only a stop-gap. The single answer now is not a new control for atomics, but a new kind of man. A mature man."

  "The mature gorilla—"

  Archer interrupted. "Yes, I know. You've had that phobia in mind for a long time. But you're thinking like an immature gorilla yourself, aren't you?"

  "Of course I am. The whole race is at that stage. That's what frightens me. Our entire culture is based on progress rising out of competition and co-operation. If a really mature mind should take over, all progress would stop."

  "You really don't see the answer to that?" Archer said.

  Ferguson opened his mouth for what he realized would be only repetition. He wasn't getting anywhere with Archer; he was making no impression. All he could do was repeat what he had already said. "Like a child," he thought wildly. "Repetition, not logical argument. Only—"

  They could no longer communicate with one another. It was as though Archer had changed over to a new and incomprehensible standard of thinking. The barrier between them was as tangible as the surface of a televisor screen. They could see one another through it, but they could no longer touch.

  Ferguson's shoulders sagged a trifle as he gave up the attempt at communication. He turned toward the door, hesitating. He glanced back with a new wariness at this man who was suddenly an enemy.

  What, he wondered, were Archer's orders from Lawson? Surely they couldn't afford to let him go. He groped in vain for an understandable parallel. In this situation a normal human would have shot him as he went out the door, or locked him safely away where he could do them no harm. But Lawson had never operated with normal human weapons like these. Lawson's weapons—

  Archer said suddenly, "You're free to go whenever you like. One thing, though. Listen, Ferguson. Lawson tried to take out another policy with your company today, and was turned down. It looked like a poor risk. I thought you ought to know."