“From the first, they adopted a policy of noninterference, but they found living standards hardly suitable and built secret colonies where their own life and science could develop apart from that of Earthmen.
“It was one of these colonies which the drugged mind of your poet, Coleridge, was able to see in his unconsciousness, and which he began to describe in ‘Kubla Khan.’ My people had detected the presence of his perceptions and one of them was sent immediately to interrupt the work of recollection because they didn’t want their colony revealed with such accurate description as Coleridge could make. The Person from Porlock was this disturbing emissary.”
Spence smiled for the first time, briefly. “So you see, your designation of all of us as Persons from Porlock was not far from the truth.”
“But why have you interfered with me? Why don’t you make yourselves known and offer your advanced science to the world?”
“Surely you are sufficiently familiar with the reaction of your own people to the new and the unknown to make that last question unnecessary. We aren’t concerned with advancing your science. It is progressing rapidly enough, too rapidly for your social relationships, which would benefit by some of the energy you expend on mechanical inquiries.
“In our own science we have great fields of knowledge which do not exist in yours. One is a highly specialized field of what we term prognostication logics. Your symbolic logic sciences are a brief step in that direction—very brief. We are enabled to predict the cumulative effect of events and discoveries in your culture. We take a hand in those which indicate a potential destructive to the race. We interfere to the point of preventing their development.”
Reg stared at Spence. “How could my teleportation development imperil the race? Surely that was no excuse for your interference!”
“It was. It isn’t obvious to you yet because you haven’t come to the discovery that teleportation can be quite readily accomplished from the transmitting end without the use of terminal equipment. Further along, you would have found no receivers necessary. Everything could be done from the transmission end.”
“That would have made it a thousand times more valuable!”
“Yes? Suppose the cargo to be transported was the most destructive atomic bomb your science is capable of building.”
The impact of that concept burst upon Reg. “I see,” he said at last, quietly. “Why did you let us produce the bomb at all?”
“We were rather divided on that question. Our computations show a high probability that you will be able to survive it, but only if a number of auxiliary implements are withheld, teleportation among others. There were some of us who were in favor of preventing the bomb’s construction even with the assurance our computations give but their influence was less than that of us who know what benefits atomic energy can bring if properly utilized. As a group, we decided to let the bomb be produced.”
“But the BW effect can never be utilized?”
“Not for some centuries.”
Spence seemed to have said all that he was going to say, but Millen moved uneasily.
“I can never tell you how glad I am that you uncovered my math,” he said. “You know the alternative if you hadn’t?”
“Alternative—?” Reg looked across the desk. Then he remembered, that night, sitting in the park, seeing the shadows against the distant lights, the ghastly pursuit of imagined terrors.
“The alternative was—insanity?”
Millen nodded.
“Why? Couldn’t it have been done some other way?”
Millen avoided the question. “You will never attempt to develop the EW effect now, will you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“It wouldn’t have been that way if Spence or some other had come to you and warned you that it wasn’t to be done. You’d have laughed at him as a crackpot. Now there’s no doubt in your mind.”
Reg nodded slowly and cold sickness lodged in his vitals at the thought of what he had so narrowly escaped. “Yes, I see. And now I suppose I shall go back and eat crow for Borge. That is, if you will put in a good word for me with your man.” He smiled wryly towards Spence.
“We have a bigger job for you,” said Millen. “I still want you here.”
“Doing nail puzzles and answering riddles for customers too stingy to run their own development labs? Not me!”
“Not that, exactly. We need you to take over my job. I’ve got something else lined up to take care of.”
“What are you talking about? Take over as head of Carl Millen & Associates? That would be worse than the puzzles—desk arthritis.”
“No. Who’s the best man in the world today on interference with the utilization of the BW effect?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You’re that man. We need somebody to take charge of the whole project of BW interference. Spence has another assignment for me, but Bots-Wellton himself still needs to be worked on. Carruthers and Majestic haven’t stopped their projects yet. That was only a blind to fool your company. They’ve got to be stopped yet. A couple of universities are working on it. It’s a big job, and you’re the best-equipped man in the world to handle it—under Spence’s direction, of course. You see, his people won’t do the detail work after some of us once become trained in it. It’s up to us to fry our own fish. Will you take it?”
Reg stood up and went to the window, looking down upon the street crawling with ever hopeful life. He turned back to Spence and Millen.
“How could I do anything else in the face of the drastic indoctrination and persuasion course you’ve given me. Sure I’ll take it!”
Then he laughed softly. “Reg Stone: Person from Porlock!”
DISCONTINUITY
CHAPTER I
The middle-aged blond woman was like a sleek and expensive cat. Now, she was afraid. Her bruised face swathed in healing bandages, she sat in the big chair by the window of her husband’s office and watched his desk and the circle of his associates who were ringed about her.
She could feel hate like a hot radiance emitted by each of them. Their eyes stared as if she were some animal not of their species.
She spoke again. “I cannot give my permission. I would rather have David dead than—than like those others. Far rather!”
It was the third time she had said it and it only increased again the hate that surrounded her. Momentarily, she shrank in the chair. Then, as if she had retreated to a point beyond which she could not go, she sprang at them.
She stood erect in their midst, trembling with a fury that for once forced them back. “Stop staring at me that way! I’m his wife. Do you think I want him dead? You claim to be his friends, but if that were true would you offer him a return to life with an idiot’s mind?”
She turned to one end of the circle, paused, and turned again, glaring at each of them in the maddened, cavernous silence.
There were the young laboratory girls in white smocks. They were all in love with David, she thought. There were the earnest college boys working out research seminars at the Institute laboratories under David’s direction. They had come to plead for David’s life—as an idiot.
At last, from the rear of the circle, the moment of balanced hate was broken. A tall, gray-haired man stepped to her side and took her arm.
“Will the rest of you please leave?” he said. “I would like to speak with Mrs. Mantell alone for a few minutes.
They hesitated, then turned. Silently, she watched them go, but she wanted to cry out for them to remain. Her fear of any one of them alone was greater than that in the presence of all. It doubled as each of the two dozen filed through the doorway. The last one closed it behind him.
Dr. Vixen, who remained, was her husband’s first assistant and co-developer of the Mantell Synthesis. Older than David, he had the serene and confident bearing of a man who is aware that most of his life is behind him, and that he has spent it exactly as he would have wished.
He leaned back against
the desk and placed his hands upon it. Alice Mantell slumped back into the chair as if he had forced her down.
“Now, I will answer the question you asked, Alice. Yes—I do think you want David dead. Regardless of the condition of his mind or his body you want him out of your life.”
“I’ll not listen — “
“Sit down and shut up, please. There are great peculiarities in the accident in which you and David were involved. Not the least of these is your own miraculous escape in comparison with his great brain injury. A suggestion to the police concerning this, along with a report of your own infidelities towards David would certainly result in a lengthy investigation, to say the least.
“This is how they might reconstruct it: Your friend, Jerrold Exter, was hiding in the darkness of the back seat of the car when you and David got in. There was no occasion for David to glance back at him, almost invisible in the darkness.
“It was some sort of compressed air mallet that Jerrold used to crush David’s skull. Then you got out and let the car plunge through the retaining wall at the end of Mayview Drive. You managed to beat yourself up a little so it wouldn’t be too suspicious looking. And if the wreckage hadn’t been spotted within a few minutes you might have succeeded in your plan.”
The thing that she had feared was here, and with its coming the fear dwindled. Her heavy breathing slowed, and her face recovered from its whiteness.
“You mean this for blackmail?” she asked.
For a moment she believed that Dr. Vixen was going to hurl himself upon her, and the rage she incited within him was curiously pleasant to her.
“I want David,” he said evenly, at last. “I want him alive and well. In return, David will certainly be willing to be relieved of your presence for the rest of his life.”
“So he has lied to all of you about me!”
“We’ll let that go,” said Dr. Vixen. “You agree?”
She nodded quickly, again like a cat, striking for what seemed a precious offer of freedom from punishment, and security from the thing that she had loathed. She was going to be free at last of the incredible, alien world in which David Mantell lived, to which she had been bound by fifteen long years of marriage to him. For a time he had dragged her along like a small child at a fair that displayed things beyond her comprehension, and then he had abandoned her because she had failed to understand.
She relaxed in spite of Dr. Vixen’s awareness of her evil, partly, even, because of it. “Do you think I’m _bad?_”she said suddenly.
He shook his head. “There are no bad people. Only sick ones, stupid ones, ignorant ones. David would have told you that. He would have let you go long before now if he had been sure that you wanted to.”
“But I did want to! Surely he has told you that if he has told you anything.”
“He always seemed to think there was a chance. You see, he loved you.”
He was sorry when he had said it, for in the presence of this woman it was as if he had exposed his friend’s nakedness to an obscene gaze.
But Alice Mantell startled him. Her eyes softened and the catlike tension of her body relaxed for just an instant. “I loved him, too,” she said, “once — “
“Perhaps you can remember that, then, in giving the assistance that we need.”
“You have my permission to perform the Synthesis! What more do I have to pay for freedom?”
“You have misunderstood because neither you nor they”—he nodded towards the closed door—“are aware of all the facts. Your permission to perform the Synthesis on your husband is relatively unimportant. Lack of it would be just one more illegality that would not have stood in our way.
“More important, Dr. Dodge, the Institute president, notified David only this morning that the Synthesis was banned, and the operation is now illegal with or without your permission.
“Those youngsters out there don’t know it yet, but our careers and professional freedom are at stake as well as David’s life. I’ll tell them, of course, before we go ahead.”
“What are you talking about? Why is the Synthesis forbidden?”
“The others—the first hundred Synthesis patients you mentioned a moment ago. The group who have made the Mantell Synthesis a one hundred percent failure so far. The public and the politicians have decided there are to be no more like them, regardless of possible benefits.”
“Will David’s be a failure, too?”
“We have no reason to believe otherwise.”
“You’re insane!” She rose and backed away as if in sudden fear of his madness. “Why will you persist in a deliberate failure that will turn him into an idiot?”
“Because—he is wholly lost to us otherwise. This way, he will at least be alive. As long as he is alive there is hope. And, finally, because he would have wanted it this way.”
“You’re devils of the same litter.”
He took her from the office into the Synthesis laboratory. There, her fear returned. She had been afraid all her married life of the world in which David walked. He could tear apart the brain of a man, cell by cell, and reconstruct it in the image of a living human being.
But she never had believed it could be anything but dead. David had penetrated to the very core of life—and had found nothing there that she could embrace. Sometimes—long ago—he had tried to tell her of the vast and intricate molecules that were the essence of a man. He told her the long and incomprehensible names of those protein structures that held the memory and intelligence of man. He could show her, he said, the exact cluster of molecules that held his love for her—and that, she thought, was the moment in which she stopped loving him.
The room was full of compact masses of equipment and long panels that ranged the entire length of the laboratory. Overhead, great cables and high-frequency pipes wove in intricate streams to knit the masses together. Like the interior of a great, expanded skull, this would be the kind of creation that David would build, she thought bitterly.
“Will I … see him?” she asked.
“No, that will not be necessary. We require what is termed a neural analogue so that those factors of David’s life involving you may be reconstructed. Some patterns are inevitably lost, of course, but for the most part he will remember you and all that has passed between you.”
“I should think you—and he’d be satisfied to have that forgotten.”
“No. It is important that every possible element of his life be reconstructed and re-evaluated. Loss can be kept at a minimum that way. Your analogue, for example, will restore all that he has ever done or thought in connection with you, every opinion or feeling he has expressed to you or which has been colored by your presence. Then we will call others who will contribute their share, but yours is among the most important.”
She shuddered in revulsion. “No—you can do without me. I don’t understand what you are talking about, but you can get along without me.”
“We can’t! Your mind holds the greatest part of the pattern we need.
David’s life is within the cells of your brain.”
“I can’t do it—I won’t. I’m afraid of all this.” Her eyes scanned the far ceiling where the webbed cables looped in ritualistic patterns. “You can’t make me — “
“The accident—remember?”
“Some day I’ll kill you,” she sobbed.
A nurse assisted her in the preparations. Sick with fear, she permitted her clothing to be exchanged for a plain smock, and then lay upon the padded couch while the score of electrodes were carefully oriented and pasted to her skull. The paste had a thick, nauseating smell that made her stomach contract violently.
She was given then a gentle anaesthetic to control her voluntary thoughts and movements and was left alone in the faintly lighted room.
While Alice was being made ready, Dr. Vixen told the technicians of the Institute’s ban on Synthesis, offering each of them the chance to leave. None did. He wished he hadn’t had to tell them, but he had no right to make
the decision for them though he felt sure of what each of them would do.
All of them were nervous and tense. As a group they were acting on their own in a move in which David had always been there to lead. The tension was multiplied by the fact that it was he upon whom they were operating. So great was this tension they held almost reckless disregard for the ban of the Institute. Yet each knew that he was gambling his whole future life and career in this illegal step.
Dr. Vixen, watching them, sensed the nervousness that threatened the very success they wanted so badly, but he could do nothing now to help them. David had trained them well. They would have to rely on the excellence of that training.
He gave the signal for the beginning of the exacting, laborious process of transcribing the data from the mind of Alice Mantell to master molecules which would, in turn, be used to recreate large areas of the shattered brain of David Mantell.
From his glass observation window Dr. Vixen watched the inert form of the woman. Even in the drugged sleep her face held the cast of bitter lines.
It was hard to remember, he thought, that she was only a sick child, a bewildered woman who had never understood the shadow of greatness in which she stood. It was hard to forget that she had broken the heart of David Mantell, and in the end had tried to kill him.
Somewhere, in her youth, there must have been a tone of gentleness, a graciousness and sweetness that David had loved. He would not have married her if she had been so wholly without charm. What had happened to it in the years between? Dr. Vixen did not know. He had heard David’s story in snatches of unbearable bitterness that David had sometimes found impossible to contain.
But he wondered if Alice might not have her side to the story, too.
A hurried call from one of the technicians brought an end to these considerations. He hurried to the post from which the man called. On the screen of the electron microscope there he saw the image of the pattern molecule that was building, being shaped by the impulses from the mind of Alice Mantell. It was a hundred thousand times the size of the one that would ultimately take its place in the reconstructed brain of her husband.
Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 25