The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “You will do nothing rash?” pleaded Hackworth. “The Unidum is quick to punish, and any trouble with them might eventually involve Lila through you.”

  But Williams was suddenly lost in reverie. Quite as suddenly a few minutes later he bade them good night and left the room.

  Hackworth turned a grave face to young Spath.

  “I’m afraid Dan has taken the news to heart. There was a dose bond between himself and his sister. He is a man of sudden, though not always wise, decisions. Perhaps it would be wise for you, Terry, to accompany him to Boston tomorrow. He might try something rash that you could prevent.”

  “Certainly,” agreed the young chemist. “I can get the day off from work.”

  “Good. You will sleep here tonight. As for that servant of his, M’bopo, I’m going to keep him here with me tomorrow. In his present mood, Dan is very liable to get violent. If M’bopo is along, one word in dialect will start him fighting, and between the two of them they would make plenty of trouble. Perhaps after Dan sees the Brain-control in Boston and realizes his helplessness, he will gradually calm down over it.”

  They went to bed then.

  Up in his room, Williams carefully unwrapped the layers of hide in the soft light of a shaded lamp and looked at the contents of his bundle. There were several things he had taken along with him from Africa: a tiger’s tooth of odd shape reputed to be a potent charm, several other trinkets with a personal history behind them, and a soft giraffe skin pouch which he reflected would make a nice gift for Lila. He set them all down except the tiger’s tooth. This he put into his pocket with a sheepish grin. Africa had left in him a faint vestige of native superstition.

  He fingered the other articles for an hour, exchanging short comments with M’bopo on them, living in a dream of the visions they aroused of the past. Then he heaped them together on the dresser-top.

  Undressing, he looked through the window and saw the small bustle of suburban New York. It had started raining, a warm September rain. It blurred the scenery. He saw a sweeping jungle. . . . a shadowed desert. . . . moving forms that might be gnus grazing in the brush. . . .

  He started. No; it was a street of New York. It was 1973. This was not Africa; it was Unitaria. It was a new world with many strange things: hyp-marines, Sansrun aircraft, spanned cities, a new government, and a multitude of blessings to mankind. But then there was the inhuman Eugenics Law. . . . and the hideous Brain-control. . . .

  Even in his sleep, he clenched his fists and creased his brow.

  M’bopo had quietly undressed and stretched out on the rug beside the bed. His master had hardly noticed him in the past few days, but it was enough to satisfy his simple soul. During the times they were separated, the black man had either sat languidly in some corner of the house, dreaming of Africa, or had tuned the television set and watched the queer succession of pictures from all over the world. His master had asked him several times if he tired of this new life and wished to return to Africa. Each time the black man had denied nostalgia and insisted he must stay by the side of the Omo Akku. Each night he slept on the rug of his bed. One might wonder just how important his existence was in the events that followed.

  CHAPTER VII

  Disaster

  l As the giant six-motored passenger plane hurtled high above New York on its way to Boston, William took a last look at the city below, rapidly rolling backward under them. Like a geometrician’s paradise it spread, back from the ocean, bizarrely unreal in the gloom of a cloudy day, He could faintly make out the Unidum Capitol far to the right. Then the city faded into the murkiness. Below was farmland, ribboned with broad highways along which tiny dots moved incessantly.

  Williams was in a blank mood. The revelations of the evening before had seemed grotesque after a night’s sleep. Brains in machines! How impossible! Brains, officially dead, with an after-life! Running machinery. Doing work. Thinking; sending out nervous impulses; feeling! Sarto! could such a thing be? Could a dead brain feel? Or was Terry wrong after all? Could the spirit or consciousness that had once been Helen Williams be actually captured in a glass globe and forced to do endless relay-manipulations? Could the brain of that sweet young girl of long ago be in a state where the poignant memories of happy life tortured it while some diabolical influence kept its nerve centers throbbing messages along silver wires?

  Williams broke his spell and turned his face to Terry beside him, who had kept a respectful silence. He must clear his mind of the blankness of whirling conjecture.

  “While we have the chance, Terry, suppose you tell me something more about 1973, of which I know only too little as yet. Tell me about motive power today, what fuels and energies you use.”

  Terry willingly launched into the subject, glad that the older man’s obvious brooding had finally evaporated. By placing his lips close to the other’s ear, he was able to speak above the engine noise without strain.

  “In 1933,” he began, “coal and natural oil furnished the bulk of power in Europe and America. Today in 1973, half of Unitaria’s power output is from a dream of your time come true—namely, tide-machines. All the sea-coast cities, and those a few hundred miles inland, are supplied with cheap electrical power. Up and down every important coast are several large tide-stations, as they are called, which convert the tide movements into hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of energy. From these it is wired via beryllium cables to the various cities. Much of this power is then transmitted for use through ether broadcast. For instance, in New York the electro-cars run around without overhead trolleys or third rails. They get their power from the ether. I won’t begin to describe—in fact, I couldn’t—the complex system of automatic units which attach beams of radio energy between the central power station and the many electro-cars. Many inland cities as far west as Pittsburgh are supplied with ether energy from the Long Island tide-station.

  “The other half of Unitaria’s power still comes from natural deposits of coal and oil. But oil is fast petering out and supplies but a small part. Today in 1973 coal is never burned as such. The gases and tars are extracted for the chemical industries, as in your time, and only the coke is used for power. Yet neither is the coke burned! By what is called ‘hydrogenation’ it is converted into oils and gasolines at will, which burn much more efficiently than the coke itself.

  “This liquid fuel runs our railroad trains, our aircraft, our automobiles, and our ocean craft. Diesel engines have gone far in replacing light fuel engines. In fact, all railroad trains and ocean craft are equipped with Diesels that burn coke-oil. In the cities unable to use tide-power by being too far inland, internal combustion engines make electricity which is used directly, without ether broadcast. In central Europe, in what used to be Germany, rocket-turbines are used with fair success. Places that produce water power are still in operation, as Niagara, and a certain amount of wind power is also produced.

  “With the advent of cheap oil from coal, the aircraft immediately began replacing surface transportation methods, and that replacing process is still going on. Perhaps in another forty years, everything will go through the air. The hyp-marines which carry half the ocean commerce are really aircraft more than anything else.

  “And just as in 1933 they dreamed of tide-engines and rocket motive power and stratosphere flights (which are accomplished today), so do inventors today dream and labor toward sunpower engines, earth-heat motors, and even gravity-nullifying apparatus. Probably the next forty years will see those things come to pass.”

  Boston revealed itself dimly in fog wisps as a smaller edition of New York City. Spider spans and threads knitted its business section so heavily that Williams abstractedly wondered if all the buildings would arise if a Cyclops were to pick up one with a suitably large tweezers. Like an artificial whale, a hyp-marine was coming over the horizon, skimming the water.

  Their ship began to descend and veer till it was in the right lane; then it bored to a position over the tall buildings and swooped gently. It landed like an a
ngry dragon on the immense flat roof of the main air terminal.

  “Do you know which Brain-control w€ want to see?” asked Williams as they walked away from the ship along the pedestrian path.

  “There is only one in Boston,” answered Terry, “as in all large cities except New York and London, which have two each. As yet the use of Brain-controls is little better than experimental.”

  “An experiment that should never have taken place,” muttered Williams to himself, thinking of his sister.

  Escalators took them upward to one of the hanging platform stations of the public transportation system. Williams looked with new interest at the electrocar that slid to a noiseless stop. He found it hard to believe that it derived its power from an ether beam. Ten minutes of blurring speed and side-pressing curves brought them to Branch G of Boston food products. Both inside and out it was very similar to Branch E in New York. On the ground floor were the machines and analytical laboratories; on the second floor were store-rooms and the all-important Brain-control, and the less spacious top floor contained only offices.

  Williams approached the Brain-control room with a thumping heart. His sister’s. . . . how gruesome a thought!

  A group of sightseers was just leaving the chamber when Terry and Williams came to it. A look of dull amazement was on every face; one could not see the Brain-control without feeling stunned by the wonder of it.

  They entered. Williams swept his eyes around at the multitudinous magnet relays and lighted dials, at the bewildering maze of taut wires above, and then slowly, fearfully turned his face to the luminescent globe high in the center of the room suspended from a ceiling support.

  “Je Bru il Bra!” A sweat broke out on his forehead and he flung his eyes desperately downward, unable to gaze at the globe that held his sister’s brain and think rationally at the same time.

  As he dropped his eyes, he noticed for the first time a man standing before the black box at the base of the cylindrical mirror support. Dark-haired and burly and dressed in conventional clothing with a light cape of blue cloth over his shoulders, he was busy at the black box.

  “A Scientist!” whispered Terry, pointing. “Changing the nutritive supply.”

  Williams looked with renewed interest.

  It was the first of that group of 1973 “Scientists” that he had ever seen. On his cape, in the middle of his back, was a design of a robot and young girl, with a background of intricate machinery under the sun and blue sky, which was the rest of the cape. The man himself was in the prime of life and worked with sure fingers. His back was turned and he blocked their view of the inside of the box whose heavy steel door was open wide, But they saw him move a tall glass jar filled with a thick, colorless fluid from the box and replace it with an exactly similar jar which had stood beside him. Then his hands went inside the box as he proceeded to connect the new jar with the pumping system.

  Leaning against the railing tensely, Williams’ eyes moved along the black box, followed the two tubes upward, and fastened to the round globe. It was all like a dream. There was his sister’s brain! That man—that Scientist—was fixing to the mechanical heart a jar of liquid food that would give semi-life to. . . . to Helen! So that she could continue to be a slave to the machines below! So that she could send continual nerve-impulses along cold silver wires. And perhaps all the while her consciousness, or soul, or whatever it was imprisoned in glass, was recalling a life of far-happier memories! Exquisite torture! “Helen, Helen!” he called in his heart. Perhaps by some super-sense she saw him standing there, knew him as her brother; even now she might be pleading, helplessly entreating him to release her from such horrific bondage. Yes! She was; he could feel it now—waves of sharp and subtle influence that shook his brain like an ultra-sound organ note shakes the ground.

  Terry had kept an anxious eye on Williams, remembering Hackworth’s admonitions. He had seen the strong play of emotion in his face, in his now fiery eyes, in the way he leaned against the rail, and had been perturbed. But what happened after Williams had trembled like a leaf, Terry was powerless to prevent.

  With a hoarse shout, Williams vaulted over the rail. He landed six feet below, cat-like.

  Terry shouted for him to stop but it was too late. Mouthing shrill Bantu maledictions, primitive, African in every move, Williams streaked toward the black box, powerful hands outstretched as though to grapple with some Zulu enemy.

  The Scientist, hearing the shouts, whirled and at the same time banged shut the black box’s panel door. The sight of a brawny, snarling man lunging at him with berserk madness in his face, froze the Scientist with numbing fear. One ponderous swing of Williams’ arm bowled him violently against the relays unconscious.

  Terry by this time had recovered himself and also leaped to the floor level. He darted to his friend and attempted to bring him to reason. Williams brushed him away with a steel-spring arm and continued kicking and battering at the locked door of the black box. Only one thought burned through his brain—to smash the mechanical heart inside. But it was useless. Even his great muscles could not affect inch-thick metal.

  Terry staggered erect from the floor. He looked at the crumpled Scientist with blood all over his face. Then he looked at the man panting and cursing, tearing at the heavy pump-tubes above the box.

  “For God’s sake! We’ve got to get out of here!” shouted Terry, but he knew Williams had not heard. Above, a red light was flashing intermittently. The alarm signal!

  “The guards—they will be here any moment!”

  Williams must have heard that and dimly realized its significance, for he suddenly ceased his futile battering at the black box and looked around desperately. His eye caught something lying on the floor. It was a small wrench used by the Scientist to fit the couplings on the necks of the jars.

  With a savage cry of triumph, Williams picked it up, poised it delicately between thumb and forefinger, and hurled it straight up at the brain-globe thirty feet off the floor. Terry watched breathlessly. The tool arched upward, turning over and over like a thrown knife and. . . . glanced off the glass without breaking it!

  In the midst of a shattering sound of fragile mirrors and photo-electric tubes, as the tool fell downward, there came the shouts of men crowding the platforms above. Figures clothed in uniforms of blue and red cloth and shiny leather leaped to the floor level and swarmed toward them, Unidum police.

  Terry found himself fighting, side by side with Williams, with bare fists. Why he was fighting, he did not know, except that some breath of battle had flowed from the angry man at his side and made him forget all except the emotion of the moment. Williams proved to be a cyclone in disguise. Hard fists, powered by muscles that Hercules might have had, plunged piston-like at faces and chests. Sweating and grunting guards could lay no hand on him.

  And Terry himself, in sudden exaltation, threw his full strength into the battle. It was a sensation new to him—pounding at faces. It was exhilarating. For a moment he forget everything except that he and Williams were beset by enemies who must be knocked off their feet. The savage pleasure of it dimmed his reason. Neither he nor Williams saw the man stealthily creeping to the back of them from the other side of the black box, with a pistol-like object in his hand.

  It was over quite suddenly. The two besieged men staggered and then crumpled to the floor, paralyzed by an agonizing shock of livid lightning. But before he sank to unconsciousness, Terry took in with one glance the scene on the floor—a huddled group of guards with tom and blood-spattered uniforms. . . . and he smiled to himself.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry and in a way not sorry,” said Williams through somewhat swollen lips. “I’m sorry that I got you into a mess, Terry. But I’m not sorry that I tried my level best to. . . . to smash the globe.”

  Terry put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I understand,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself; it was beyond your control. Just the same as I would have been driven to knock over Professor Jorgen�
��the Scientist who was to marry Lila—had I ever met him.”

  They were in the prison section of the Boston Science Court of the Unidum, waiting for trial which would be that very evening.

  “Justice moves swiftly in 1973,” said Williams.

  “Yes, especially when the charge is treason against the Unidum!”

  “Treason?” repeated Williams.

  Terry nodded glumly. “The Brain-control is Unidum property. No matter how much we deny it, they will charge us with being connected with some sort of secret organization plotting against the Unidum. The jury, since this case will be tried by the Science Court, will be composed of Scientists. Their verdict will be unalterable and the sentence—” Terry shuddered—“more than we deserve.”

  “Would it help to tell the truth?—about. . . . Helen?”

  Terry rubbed a bruised cheek thoughtfully.

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t,” he said. “And it might involve Hackworth. . . . and Lila. Williams, it’s a hard thing to ask—”

  The young chemist stopped agitated; then: “We’re in a bad predicament, Williams. The verdict is sure to be treason, regardless of what we say. For my part, I am willing to plead guilty to their initial charge, which will be treasonable action against the Unidum. This will cut short the trial and prevent the implication of Hackworth.”

  “In that case,” said Williams, “I will do the same. Only I wish, Terry, that you had never come along with me.”

  Terry shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not myself I’m worried about. But. . . . Lila!” He leaned back in the hard prison chair dejectedly.

  Williams cursed himself inwardly.

  Why had he ever done such a thing so futile and thoughtless there in the Brain-control room? He had lost his head completely. Leaning against the railing, watching the Scientist change the jars, he had metamorphosed into a savage, unthinking jungle creature. It had been like a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. Sarto! Now he remembered—he had actually imagined that his sister’s brain had entreated him to give her soul freedom from the glass globe! It had swept all sane thought from his mind. And now here they were, faced with stern sentence by inexorable law. All their plans were disrupted with Terry imprisoned and Lila out of reach.