by C. L. Moore
Ferguson could read nothing in Archer's face. The barrier still stood between them. He thought there was more than met the ear behind that statement, but he knew that he could only wait. He went out through the door and down the walk, in the bright yellow sunshine of his familiar world. It was a world that depended on him for its salvation. And a world he could not save because it would not heed his warning.
Flickers of hope rose irrationally in his mind. Had Archer, after all, been trying to tell him that Lawson was fallible? If ILC had refused a policy, it might mean that their suspicions were roused at last. It might mean that he had not lost the battle after all. Perhaps they would listen now. Rapidly he began to calculate how long it would take him to get back to headquarters—
But between him and his calculations kept swimming the recollection of the liner Nestor and the derelict warhead, moving closer and closer in uncharted space toward the rendezvous that only Lawson had foreseen.
-
Two hours later Ferguson closed the door of his office behind his secretary's somewhat indignant back, and glanced with a sigh of relief around the small, empty room. He knew he hadn't done his cause any good by his unswerving course through the building, brushing aside the surprised greetings of what friends he had left after the last two years. The most important thing in the world just now was solitude. He locked the door and turned to his private visor screen.
"Get me the current file on Benjamin Lawson," he said. "Recently he applied for a policy that was refused. I want to know why." He waited impatiently, drumming on the resilient plastic frame with unsteady fingers.
"Hello, Mr. Ferguson," the screen said pleasantly. "Glad you're back. There's been nothing new on Lawson since you left, but I'll send the file up right away."
"Don't bother, then. I want to know about this new policy. Hurry it up, can't you?" He heard his voice rise shrilly, and with an effort forced it to more normal tones.
There was a moment's silence. Then the face said, with a shade of embarrassment, "Sorry, Mr. Ferguson; that seems to be under TS."
"What do you mean?" he asked irritably, and before she could speak—"Never mind, never mind. Thanks." He snapped the switch.
They had never pulled TS on him before. Top Secret stuff was technically limited to the three highest-ranking officers of the company, though actually staff members of Ferguson's rank honored such rules more by their breach than by their observance.
I mustn't let it throw me, he said silently. I can't let it throw me. And after a moment he knew what he could do. There were three men whose televisor screens would automatically reply to a TS query. He made two calls before he found an empty office. It was lunch time, fortunately for him.
He unlocked his door, went down the corridor to the emergency stairs, and climbed three floors. On the way he formulated a plausible enough tale, but he didn't need to use it. By a stroke of better luck than had attended him so far, the first vice president's office was empty. He closed and locked the door behind him, and switched on the screen for one-way visual.
"Give me the latest TS on Benjamin Lawson."
-
"Well, that's that," Archer said.
Lawson lay back in his chair, lifted the trumpet to his lips, and blew a long clear note at the ceiling. It might have been a note of derision at the human race, but Archer did not choose to read that into it. He knew Lawson too well—or he thought he did.
"It's a pity," Archer went on. "I was sorry we had to do it, but he wouldn't leave us any other out."
"Does it bother you?" Lawson asked, squinting at him over the rim of the trumpet's horn. Reflected in the brass Archer saw his own distorted face and the shadow of worry on it.
"I suppose it does, a little," he said. "But it couldn't be helped."
"It's not as if we'd planted a booby-trap on him" Lawson pointed out. "We only arranged for him to know the truth."
Archer laughed shortly. "Misused semantics. Truth sounds innocuous, doesn't it? And yet it's the deadliest thing you could ask any human to face. Or any superhuman, either, I should think."
"I wish you wouldn't call me superhuman," Lawson said. "You sound like Ferguson. I hope you don't think I want to conquer the world."
"I tried to tell him you didn't, but by then he was seeing a superman behind every tree, and there was nothing I could say that would make sense to him."
Lawson slid further down into the chair and ran through a brief series of riffs. The room was full of clear resonance for a moment. Before it died away Lawson put aside the trumpet and said, "I don't suppose it would make sense to anybody brought up on anthropomorphic thinking."
"I know. It took me a long time to come around. And I suppose it was only by identifying my interests with yours that I was able to see it."
"Ferguson went to extremes, but the two things he was so afraid of are the conclusions any anthropomorphic thinker would arrive at if he knew the truth about me and the other eighty in the crêches. He was perfectly right, as far as he went, about the parallel between gorilla and human maturation, of course. The immature gorilla is naturally a gregarious, competitive critter. That's part of its growing up. That's progress, if you like. In the crêches, we kids used to think our football and baseball and skatch scores were the most important things in the world—the goal was to win. But the real idea was to develop us physically and teach us mental and social coordination, things we'd need when we grew up. You don't see grown men taking things like that so seriously."
Archer said, "Yes—but try making Ferguson see the parallel! Or any other anthropomorphic thinker."
"Progress as men see it," Lawson said pedantically, "is not an end in itself; it is as much a means to an end as any schoolboy's game."
Archer grinned. "Paragraph 1, Chapter 1, Primer for the New Race," he suggested. "There's no use trying to explain that to Ferguson. He has a big blind spot on that side of his mind. His whole culture's based on the idea of competition and progress. It's his god. He'd fight to the last ditch before he'd admit his ... his football score isn't the last great hope of the race of men."
"He has fought us to the last ditch," Lawson said. "He's in it now. We can dismiss Ferguson." He regarded his trumpet thoughtfully and said, "Paragraph 1, Sentence 2. When the end has been achieved, the means is no longer of any value. We know this is so, but never try to tell it to a human." He paused and winked at Archer. "Your case is the exception, of course," he observed politely. "Paragraph 1, Sentence 3. Never blame the human for that. We can't expect him to admit that his whole culture is no more than a childish game to which there must be an end if the game is to serve any purpose. Never look down on humans—they laid the foundations for us to build on, and we know no more than they what shape that building will take."
Archer was silent, a hint of deference in his manner. This was the only subject which he had ever seen Lawson approach seriously. "Paragraph 2," Lawson went on, scowling at the trumpet. "Never attack a human except in self-defense and then destroy him quickly and completely. Humans think autistically: they will always be convinced you want to rule their world. Their egotism will never let them admit the truth. We have no need of their toys; we must put away childish things."
There was a brief silence. Then Archer said, "We ought to get that primer on paper before very long; we'll be needing it."
"Maybe we ought to dedicate it to Ferguson," Lawson suggested sardonically, as he picked up the trumpet and delicately fingered the keys.
The clear note of the horn vibrated through the room again.
"You make me think of Joshua," Archer told him.
Lawson grinned. "Gabriel," he said succinctly.
-
Ferguson leaned tensely toward the screen. It flickered, and a voice said, "Report on policy refused November 4th to applicant Benjamin Lawson—" The voice went on, and Ferguson listened for a stunned moment and then refused to listen.
"This is the chain reaction," he told himself, in the deliberate, controlled s
ilence of his mind, while the voice spoke on unheeded from the screen. "This is the personal devil that every man has feared since the first Bomb fell. But we've watched for the wrong reaction. This is fission no one expected, fission between the old race and the new. No one knows but me—and Archer—and I'll never be able to give the warning—"
This was defeat. There was no use fighting any longer. He saw failure and disaster before him, the control of all Earth wrested from human hands and Lawson lording it like Nero over a populace of slaves. For Ferguson was an autistic thinker to the last. He saw Progress at full stop, and that was the last abyss of all, for beyond it his narrowing mind could see nothing but the dark. The last barriers of his defense went down, and he let himself listen to the words that the screen was repeating.
The screen said:
"Lawson desired to insure against the possibility of ILC officer Gregory Ferguson becoming insane. Since investigation shows that Ferguson has already exceeded the margin for error allowable for developing paranoid psychoses—"
Moving through uncharted space, the liner Nestor and the derelict warhead crashed once more in the infinite darkness of Gregory Ferguson's mind. After that, there was white incandescence.
All thinking stopped.
The End
HAPPY ENDING
Thrilling Wonder Stories - August 1948
with Henry Kuttner
(as by Henry Kuttner)
This is the way the story ended:
James Kelvin concentrated very hard on the thought of the chemist with the red moustache who had promised him a million dollars. It was simply a matter of tuning in on the man's brain, establishing a rapport. He had done it before. Now it was more important than ever that he do it this one last time. He pressed the button on the gadget the robot had given him, and thought hard.
Far off, across limitless distances, he found the rapport.
He clamped on the mental tight beam.
He rode it ...
The red-moustached man looked up, gaped, and grinned delightedly.
"So there you are!" he said. "I didn't hear you come in. Good grief, I've been trying to find you for two weeks."
"Tell me one thing quickly," Kelvin said. "What's your name?"
"George Bailey. Incidentally, what's yours?"
But Kelvin didn't answer. He had suddenly remembered the other thing the robot had told him about that gadget which established rapport when he pressed the button. He pressed it now—and nothing happened. The gadget had gone dead. Its task was finished, which obviously meant he had at last achieved health, fame and fortune. The robot had warned him, of course. The thing was set to do one specialized job. Once he got what he wanted, it would work no more.
So Kelvin got the million dollars.
And he lived happily ever after ...
-
This is the middle of the story:
As he pushed aside the canvas curtain something—a carelessly hung rope—swung down at his face, knocking the horn-rimmed glasses askew. Simultaneously a vivid bluish light blazed into his unprotected eyes. He felt a curious, sharp sense of disorientation, a shifting motion that was almost instantly gone.
Things steadied before him. He let the curtain fall back into place, making legible again the painted inscription: Horoscopes—Learn Your Future—and he stood staring at the remarkable horomancer.
It was a—oh, impossible!
The robot said in a flat, precise voice, "You are James Kelvin. You are a reporter. You are thirty years old, unmarried, and you came to Los Angeles from Chicago today on the advice of your physician. Is that correct?"
In his astonishment Kelvin called on the Deity. Then he settled his glasses more firmly and tried to remember an exposé of charlatans he had once written. There was some obvious way they worked things like this, miraculous as it sounded.
The robot looked at him impassively out of its faceted eye.
"On reading your mind," it continued in the pedantic voice, "I find this is the year nineteen forty nine. My plans will have to be revised. I had meant to arrive in the year nineteen seventy. I will ask you to assist me."
Kelvin put his hands in his pockets and grinned.
"With money, naturally," he said. "You had me going for a minute. How do you do it, anyhow? Mirrors? Or like Maelzel's chess player?"
"I am not a machine operated by a dwarf, nor am I an optical illusion," the robot assured him. "I am an artificially created living organism, originating at a period far in your future."
"And I'm not the sucker you take me for," Kelvin remarked pleasantly. "I came in here to—"
"You lost your baggage checks," the robot said. "While wondering what to do about it, you had a few drinks and took the Wilshire bus at exactly—exactly eight thirty-five post meridian."
"Lay off the mind-reading," Kelvin said. "And don't tell me you've been running this joint very long with a line like that. The cops would be after you. If you're a real robot, ha, ha."
"I have been running this joint," the robot said, "for approximately five minutes. My predecessor is unconscious behind that chest in the corner. Your arrival here was sheer coincidence." It paused very briefly, and Kelvin had the curious impression that it was watching to see if the story so far had gone over well.
The impression was curious because Kelvin had no feeling at all that there was a man in the large, jointed figure before him. If such a thing as a robot were possible, he would have believed implicitly that he confronted a genuine specimen. Such things being impossible, he waited to see what the gimmick would be.
"My arrival here was also accidental," the robot informed him. "This being the case, my equipment will have to be altered slightly. I will require certain substitute mechanisms. For that, I gather as I read your mind, I will have to engage in your peculiar barter system of economics. In a word, coinage or gold or silver certificates will be necessary. Thus I am—temporarily—a horomancer."
"Sure, sure," Kelvin said. "Why not a simple mugging? If you're a robot, you could do a super-mugging job with a quick twist of the gears."
"It would attract attention. Above all, I require secrecy. As a matter of fact, I am—" The robot paused, searched Kelvin's brain for the right phrase, and said, "—on the lam. In my era, time-travelling is strictly forbidden, even by accident, unless government-sponsored."
There was a fallacy there somewhere, Kelvin thought, but he couldn't quite spot it. He blinked at the robot intently. It looked pretty unconvincing.
"What proof do you need?" the creature asked. "I read your brain the minute you came in, didn't I? You must have felt the temporary amnesia as I drew out the knowledge and then replaced it."
"So that's what happened," Kelvin said. He took a cautious step backward. "Well, I think I'll be getting along."
"Wait," the robot commanded. "I see you have begun to distrust me. Apparently you now regret having suggested a mugging job. You fear I may act on the suggestion. Allow me to reassure you. It is true that I could take your money and assure secrecy by killing you, but I am not permitted to kill humans. The alternative is to engage in the barter system. I can offer you something valuable in return for a small amount of gold. Let me see." The faceted gaze swept around the tent, dwelt piercingly for a moment on Kelvin. "A horoscope," the robot said. "It is supposed to help you achieve health, fame and fortune. Astrology, however, is out of my line. I can merely offer a logical scientific method of attaining the same results."
"Uh-huh," Kelvin said skeptically. "How much? And why haven't you used that method?"
"I have other ambitions," the robot said in a cryptic manner. "Take this." There was a brief clicking. A panel opened in the metallic chest. The robot extracted a small, flat case and handed it to Kelvin, who automatically closed his fingers on the cold metal.
"Be careful. Don't push that button until—"
But Kelvin had pushed it ...
He was driving a figurative car that had got out of control. There was somebody els
e inside his head. There was a schizophrenic, double-tracked locomotive that was running wild and his hand on the throttle couldn't slow it down an instant. His mental steering-wheel had snapped.
Somebody else was thinking for him!
Not quite a human being. Not quite sane, probably, from Kelvin's standards. But awfully sane from his own. Sane enough to have mastered the most intricate principles of non-Euclidean geometry in the nursery.
The senses got synthesized in the brain into a sort of common language, a master-tongue. Part of it was auditory, and there were smells and tastes and tactile sensations that were sometimes familiar and sometimes spiced with the absolutely alien. And it was chaotic.
Something like this, perhaps ...
"—Big Lizards getting too numerous this season—tame threvvars have the same eyes not on Callisto though—vacation soon—preferably galactic—solar system claustrophobic—byanding tomorrow if square rootola and upsliding three—"
But that was merely the word-symbolism. Subjectively, it was far more detailed and very frightening. Luckily, reflex had lifted Kelvin's finger from the button almost instantly, and he stood there motionless, shivering slightly.
He was afraid now.
The robot said, "You should not have begun the rapport until I instructed you. Now there will be danger. Wait." His eye changed color. "Yes ... there is ... Tharn, yes. Beware of Tharn."
"I don't want any part of it," Kelvin said quickly. "Here, take this thing back."
"Then you will be unprotected against Tharn. Keep the device. It will, as I promised, insure your health, fame and fortune, far more effectively than a—a horoscope."
"No, thanks. I don't know how you managed that trick—subsonics, maybe, but I don't—"
"Wait," the robot said. "When you pressed that button, you were in the mind of someone who exists very far in the future. It created a temporal rapport. You can bring about that rapport any time you press the button."