“The Omega serum will never be used again,” Hammond said. “I’ll show you why . . .”
Hammond turned, went to the control box on the desk. The rose haze faded before him, appeared behind him again. He threw a switch and the haze vanished. He turned away from the controls. “The energy fields that kept you out of that room are being shut off,” he said. “In a moment, the door will open. So see for yourself—the barriers are off.”
Except for the blazing blue of the eyes, her face was a cold mask. Hammond thought she must already know what was there. But she turned, went to the open door, and stood looking into the room. Hammond moved to the side of the desk where he could look past her . . .
The energy trap enclosing the couch in the room had vanished. The dark thing on the couch was just sitting up. It shook its head dazedly, rolled over and came up on all fours.
Its huge, dull-black eyes stared at them for an instant; then it straightened, rose to its full height . . .
To a full height of twenty-two inches! It swayed unsteadily on the couch—a hairy little figure with a wide-mouthed, huge-eyed goblin head.
Its eyes blinked in vague recognition. The mouth opened. It cried in a thin, bleating voice:
“Bar-ba-ra!”
XV
The woman wheeled, turning away. She did not look back at the grotesque little figure. Bid: a faint smile touched her lips as she gazed at Hammond. “All right,” she said, “there goes my last tie with earth. I accept what you said. I gather that the Omega serum is a unique development and that it hasn’t shown up elsewhere in the galaxy.”
“That is not a literal truth,” said Hammond.
She nodded toward the adjoining room. “Then perhaps you can tell me what went wrong.”
Hammond told her Gloge’s twofold theory: that at this stage of man’s evolution many possibilities remained for evolvement, and that apparently the serum stimulated one of these and thereafter was bound by natural law to follow that line of development.
As he talked, he was watching her, and he was thinking: “This problem isn’t resolved. How are we going to deal with her?”
He sensed an almost incredible strength, an actual, palpable force. It poured from her in a steady stream of power.
He continued tensely: “The Great Galactics, when planting their seed on a new planet, have never interfered with the basic characteristics of the various races that live there. They interject selected bundles of their own genes by grafting into thousands of men and women on every continent. As the generations go by, these bundles intermix by chance with those that are native to the people of the planet. Apparently, the Omega serum stimulates one of these mixtures and carries it forward to whatever it is capable of, which, because of the singularity factor, usually leads to a dead end.”
“The singularity factor—?” Her words were a question.
Men, Hammond explained, were born of the union of a man and a woman. No one person carried more than a portion of mankind’s genes. As time passed, the interaction and interrelation of all the genes occurred; the race progressed because billions of chance intermixings of different bundles took place.
In Vince, one such bundle had been stirred, been whipped up to its ultimate point by repeated Omega Stimulation—but evidently that particular bundle had strictly limited possibilities, as would always be the case when a single person was bred, so to speak, with himself . . . the singularity factor.
And that was what had happened to Vince and herself. They were products of the most fantastic inbreeding ever attempted—life surviving through one line, a kind of incest carried to some ultimate sterility, fantastic, interesting, freakish.
“You are wrong,” said the woman-shape softly. “I am not a freak. So what has happened here is even more improbable than I have realized. In myself, it was the galactic seedling bundle of genes that was stimulated. Now, I understand what it was I contacted out in space. One of them. And he let me. He understood instantly.”
She added, “One more question, John Hammond. Omega is an unusual term. What does it mean?”
“. . . When man becomes one with the ultimate, that is Point Omega.” It seemed to Hammond that, even as he finished speaking, she was growing remote, withdrawing from him. Or was it that it was he who was withdrawing? Not only from her but from everything—drifting away, not in any spatial sense, but, in some curious fashion, away from the reality of the entire universe? The brief thought came that this should be an alarming and disturbing experience. Then the thought itself was forgotten.
“There is something occurring,” her voice was telling him. “In the small thing behind the door, the Omega evolutionary process is completed, in its fashion. In me, it is not completed—not quite.
“But it is being completed now . . .”
He was nowhere and nothing.
New word-impressions, new thought impressions came suddenly and swept through him like the patter of rain.
The impressions took form. It was later in time. He seemed to be standing in the small room next to his office, looking down at the lanky, redheaded young man sitting groggily on the edge of the couch holding his head.
“Coming out of it, Vince?” Hammond asked.
Vincent Strather glanced uncertainly up at him, ran his hand over the jagged rent in the sleeve of his jacket.
“I guess so, Mr. Hammond,” he muttered. “I . . . what happened?”
“You went for a drive tonight,” Hammond told him, “with a girl named Barbara Ellington. You’d both been drinking. She was driving . . . driving too fast. The car went off a highway embankment, turned over several times. Witnesses dragged you to safety minutes before the car burst into flames. The girl was dead. They didn’t attempt to save her body. When the police informed me of the accident, I had you brought here to Research Alpha.” As he spoke, he had the stunning realization that everything he was saying was true. The accident had happened late that evening, in exactly that manner.
“Well . . .” Vince began. He broke off, sighed, shook his head. “Barbara was an odd girl. A wild one! I was pretty fond of her once, Mr. Hammond. Lately, I’ve been trying to break off with her.”
Hammond received the impression that much more had happened. Automatically, he looked back through the open door as the private telephone in the inner office signaled. “Excuse me,” he said to Vince.
As he flicked on the instrument, Helen Wendell’s face appeared on the phone screen. She gave him a brief smile, asked, “How is Strather?”
Hammond didn’t reply at once. He looked at her, feeling cold, eerie crawlings over his scalp. Helen was seated at her desk in the outer office. She was not in a spaceboat standing off the planet.
He heard himself say, “He’s all right. There is very little emotional shock . . . How about you?”
“I’m disturbed by Barbara’s death,” Helen admitted. “But now I have Dr. Gloge on the phone. He’s quite anxious to talk to you.” Hammond said, “All right. Put him on.”
“Mr. Hammond,” Dr. Gloge’s voice said a moment later, “this is in connection with the Point Omega Stimulation project. I’ve been going over all my notes and conclusions on these experiments, and I’m convinced that once you understand the extraordinary dangers which might result if the details of my experiments became known, you will agree that the project should be closed out and any records referring to it destroyed at once.”
After switching off the phone, he remained for a while at the desk.
So that part of the problem also had been solved! The last traces of the Omega serum were being wiped out, would, soon linger only in his mind.
And for how long there? Perhaps no more than two or three hours, John Hammond decided. The memory pictures were paling; he had a feeling that sections of them already had vanished. And there was an odd, trembling uncertainty about what was left . . . thin, colored mind-canvas being tugged by a wind which presently would carry it off—
He had no objections, Hammond told himsel
f. He had seen one of the Great Ones, and it was not a memory that it was good for a lesser being to have.
Somehow, it hurt to be so much less.
He must have slept. For he awoke suddenly. He felt vaguely bewildered, for no reason that he could imagine.
Helen came in, smiling. “Don’t you think it’s time we closed up for the night. You’re working too long hours again.”
“You’re right,” Hammond nodded. He got up and went into the room next to the office to tell Vincent Strather he was free to go home.
SLEEP NO MORE
What evidence we have on psi talents indicates that psi and intelligence are independent variables. Telzey found there was one very psi-talented, and very carnivorous beast . . . which wasn’t smart, but very alert . . .
I, Telzey Amberdon thought, am sitting up in bed—my bed—in my section of duplex bungalow 18-19, Student Court Ninety-two, at Pehanron College. And something happened just now that woke me up. What was it?
She reached back, touched the light panel at the head of the couch-bed. The silent room appeared in softly glowing color about her. Telzey glanced around it, puzzled. It was still an hour before the time she’d normally be getting up. But something had brought her wide awake out of deep sleep a few seconds ago—so suddenly and completely that she found herself sitting up on the couch in the act of opening her eyes.
And now she made another discovery. The psi screen about her mind was drawn tight—a defensive reaction she hadn’t been conscious of making.
She considered that, frowning.
I was dreaming about Robane again, she remembered suddenly.
She settled back against the pillows, blinked reflectively at the amber-glowing ceiling.
It was, she realized, the second time within a week that she’d come awake out of a dream about Robane, the maimed half-man, the inventive genius and secret murderer of Melna Park, who had entertained himself by hunting down human beings with a savage beast in the park’s forests. Nearly a month had gone by since Telzey had left Robane in his isolated house with part of his mind wiped out—he had made a very bad mistake finally in selecting a psi for his sport. The fact that she had dreamed twice about him indicated simply that she was more preoccupied with Robane at present than she’d been aware . . . but what had there been in this second dream to wake her up so abruptly?
Telzey cast back in her memory, finding fragments of the dream, connecting them, reassembling it. In a minute or two, she seemed to have the pattern. She had planned to go back to Robane’s house when the opportunity came; and in the dream; she had done it and he had been telling her about the psi machines he’d designed for himself.
Then there had been something else. What?
The shadows, Telzey thought suddenly.
As she dreamed she talked with Robane, she’d seemed to sense something approaching and she’d looked around and discovered the shadows. That was all they were, formless scraps of darkness. Two or three of them appeared to be standing off in the distance and she had the impression they were watching her. And there was another shadow not far away which seemed to be moving swiftly towards her—
That was what had startled her into waking up instantly, snapping the screening bubble of psi energy shut about her mind as she did it!
And the screen was still shut tight, she realized. She began to relax it, then hesitated. There was the oddest sort of reluctance to open it again! A feeling of fear . . . of the shadow that had been moving towards her, or of something else? She wasn’t sure.
She waited a moment, then thinned the psi bubble gradually, carefully, finally let it go. And lay there feeling a little foolish for a moment, because nothing at all significant happened. There was only the usual murmur of psi and life energies around, which never became more obtrusive than she wanted it to be far less obtrusive, in any case, than the normal noises of a city. Her recently gained perceptions in that area were like an additional cluster of senses: she’d become so accustomed to using them now that closing the bubble to the point where it screened them out seemed almost like squeezing her eyes shut or putting her fingers in her ears.
And now, Telzey asked herself, what had been the meaning of the dream?
It might have been a suggestion that she felt guilty about what she had done to Robane. The only thing wrong with that was that she hadn’t felt guilty about it for an instant. Robane’s murders had to be stopped, immediately; and she could have stopped them in no other way without either killing him or revealing publicly that she was a psi.
Then was she apprehensive that what she had done had been discovered? Telzey considered the possibility, shook her head. She really could see no way in which it could have been discovered! Robane himself was not aware that anything had happened to him and had no memory of her. He received no visitors in his isolation in Melna Park; the only people coming to his door were from the airtruck services that brought him his supplies and whatever else he ordered from the world outside. And such people would be unable to tell any difference in Robane, even if—which was unlikely—he let them see him personally. The part of his mind she had deleted was the part which had made him a brilliant, ruthless monster. In the ordinary affairs of life, except for his maimed physical condition, he would appear now simply as an ordinary, rather dull man.
No, Telzey thought, she wasn’t worried about discovery. A close acquaintance would know, of course, that Robane had changed; but there was nothing to show how the change had been brought about. She had left no clues. And Robane’s previous acquaintances hadn’t seen him for some years.
However, an unconscious part of her mind plainly was prodding her about Robane. And she had, as a matter of fact, left some unfinished business there. The human game Robane hunted also had been merchandise, delivered secretly for high pay to his house in the park by a smuggling ring. At the time, there had been too much confusion and excitement to let her dig quietly through Robane’s memories for something that would identify that ring. They were criminals who certainly should be brought to justice eventually in some way for what they had been doing.
So she had intended to go back to the house presently—precisely as she had done in her dream—to get that information, among other things, from Robane. But it seemed advisable to wait a few weeks first. The fact that a ferocious wild animal—supposedly extinct in that section of the continent—had appeared in Melna Park, had attacked a visiting girl student and undoubtedly would have killed her if her dog hadn’t killed it first, had given the Park authorities a black eye. Melna Park was supposed to be safe for the public. Everyone had co-operated in playing the matter down; but Telzey’s adventure had been mentioned in the newscasts though her name wasn’t, and there were subsequent reports that armed park rangers and volunteer sportsmen were combing every section of the park to make sure no other murderous creatures lurked unsuspected in its forests. She had decided it would be better to let things simmer down completely again before she paid Robane another visit. She didn’t want to be seen entering his house or to appear connected with him in any way.
There had been an alternate possibility. Telzey wasn’t sure she could do it—it would set up a new situation—but conceivably, since she had established a very direct, complete contact between their minds, she might have continued her investigation of Robane’s thought and memory processes on the far side of the continent without ever leaving Pehanron College.
Again, however, that did not seem a desirable approach, particularly not in this case. She knew there were telepathic eavesdroppers about; and she didn’t know just how they functioned and what their aims were. It seemed best to conclude her business with Robane as cautiously and quietly as possible. Which meant going back to the park.
And there was no reason, she thought, why she shouldn’t fly back there today after she’d got in her last scheduled lecture in the afternoon. She could register at one of the park hotels for the week end, which would give her two full days if necessary to wind up matters at R
obane’s house. Then that unpleasant half-man should no longer be disturbing her dreams.
It was that night, in her room at the park hotel, while she was thinking about Robane after dinner, that a distinct feeling of uneasiness began to develop in Telzey. It was a shapeless thing, an apprehension; she seemed physically uncomfortable, as if touched by an awareness that something here was not as it should be. Telzey shook her head irritably, switched on the window screen, went over to it. She stood there a time, looking out. In the cluster-light, Melna Park sloped away, shadowy, vast and primitive, up towards the northern mountains. Robane’s house was not in view from here; it lay beyond a turn of the mountains and, at the throttled-down pace to which aircars were limited in the park, it would take her a good four hours to get to it from the hotel tomorrow—more than twice the time she had spent crossing half the continent from Pehanron College that afternoon.
The feeling grew in her that behind the mountains Robane was aware of her, knew she was near, was thinking of her with vengeful hatred. Which, Telzey told herself, was impossible. Robane no longer knew she existed. Much less would he have been capable, with what was left of his mind, of remembering what she had done to him. Yet the feeling was difficult to dismiss.
She left the screen finally, dimmed the room’s lights and got into bed, wondering at her reactions. The starblaze filled the far end of the room, pouring from the screen. Normally, Telzey liked the effect; tonight it seemed cold and hostile. She reached out presently, found the screen switch on a tiny room-control console beside the bed and turned it off. The darkened room felt more comfortable. Some time later, she fell asleep . . .
. . . And appeared to come awake again almost instantly, in shaking near-panic. She had been back in the park, with Robane’s beast on her trail at night; and for some seconds now it was difficult to remember she had seen it dead, its cruel eyes staring blindly, brought down by a killer fiercer than itself.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 171