Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics

by Raymond F. Jones

  “Pathological, type 72-B-4,” said the technician. “We can’t possibly let that series go through! That woman’s sick.”

  “What area are you working with now?”

  “It’s in her formulation of her relationship with Dr. Mantell.”

  Dr. Vixen gazed at the image forming before his eyes. Here was proof of just how sick Alice really was. Ordinarily, he would have nodded without hesitation. Such a malformation should never be allowed to reproduce. But this was different. This was David, who knew more about the Mantell Synthesis than any other man alive. Dr. Vixen hesitated to deliberately modify a single factor that might alter the life and personality of his friend.

  “Let it get as far as the selector banks and see what happens,” he said.

  The technician opened his mouth to protest, then shut it without a sound. He dared not utter what he thought.

  But Dr. Vixen understood perfectly well what the man was thinking. They were in an uncharted field with only a few hard-won rules to guide them. It was foolhardy to abandon a single one that had been found to be empirically correct.

  For centuries men had stood in yearning awe before the mystery of the human brain. Decades of skilled medicine passed before the smallest clue to its functioning was uncovered. That came in the discovery that the brain is mechanically analogous to a great punched-card machine—all the endless data that compose memory, emotion, intellect, reason—these are arrayed as on stacks of punched cards.

  It was Von Foerster whose work suggested this analogy, who showed the possible nature of the punched cards in use within the brain. He demonstrated them as punched molecules, immense and intricate protein structures in which the atoms were stacked and arranged and tied together in a precise pattern, which pattern represented an item of intelligence.

  Later, every control function of the human brain and body was found to originate with these figurate molecules. Some were trigger devices controlling circulating, delay-line types of storage for definite but transitory periods. Others, formed at birth, perpetuated themselves throughout the life of the individual and controlled the involuntary functions. The bulk of them, however, were proven to be occupied with storage of data.

  Von Foerster’s work produced a tremendous impetus in brain research, but it raised more problems than it solved, and it was centuries again before these were answered.

  With a library of molecules numbering 10*21 power it seemed an impossible task for the brain to select and read off the data represented by any single one. Utterly impossible time intervals were implied if the process of selection went on by examining every molecule one by one.

  This was obviously not the means.

  * * * *

  Carstairs broke the impasse by the demonstrated application of the principle of molecular resonance. He showed that not only was each figurate molecule a punched card carrying data, it was also a tuned, resonant, circuit unique among the endless numbers in the human brain.

  He uncovered the mechanism which Von Foerster had overlooked, the comparatively insignificant number of molecules which formed a selector bank. These, Carstairs showed, were tuned by stimuli and aroused responses in the distant banks of punched molecules, which were sent along the neuron chains to cancel the punching in the selector banks and present themselves as required data. Multiple resonance provided the cross-indexing necessary.

  David Mantell had been a student of Dr. Carstairs. The great scientist had been a very old man then, but he had bestowed upon young Mantell the frustrated yearning to know all the secrets of the human mind.

  The student, David Mantell, became Dr. Mantell, and in so doing provided the medical world with its most brilliant technique in thirty centuries of its history. He developed the Mantell Analysis, by which it was possible to probe the human brain and determine the exact molecule bearing any given piece of information.

  That alone would have given him an immortal name, but he was not content with only half a step. The full pace consisted of being able to duplicate or repair such a molecule and insert it into the vast mechanism of the mind if need be.

  With one sweep he eliminated the centuries-old butchery of lobotomy and topectomy which had maimed hundreds of thousands in its long fad.

  Or would have —To date, his experiments had resulted only in intensifying the very conditions they were designed to heal.

  In a hundred cases of extensive brain damage, his process had restored life, but only in varying degrees of hopeless aphasia.

  At first the public hailed the magnitude of his stride, then, revolted by the horror of his failures, they had turned against him with a mighty clamor. Fed by the public affairs observers who shaped opinion, the clay of rumor and prejudice, the clamor had forced the politically fed Institute to ban the Synthesis.

  And now David Mantell himself lay with a bare speck of life possessing his body. The back of his skull had been crushed and sixty percent of his brain stuff destroyed. He lay with a probe in his spinal column conducting mechanically generated, “wired-in” pulses to the organs of his body that the chemistry and mechanics of his corpse might still go on.

  Alice Mantell could not have known by any means, Dr. Vixen thought, that she was providing the very next step that David had planned—though hardly in this degree.

  He had planned to submit himself to Synthesis surgery to learn, if he might, the answer to the failures that he had produced. But it would have been gently and slowly, molecule by molecule, with constant checking, describing, and analyzing. Now, more than half his brain would have to be rebuilt, and of all his associates there were none who doubted that he would become a schizophrenic horror.

  If one single spark of the old intelligence that was Dick Mantell should succeed in breaking through and giving just one clue to the failures, they knew that he would have been willing that the Synthesis be done. And it was worth the risk of their professional lives.

  But Alice wanted him dead because he had chained her in a prison from which she wanted to flee. She wanted to be free of him forever, and to have been chained to an idiot would have tripled the horror of her prison.

  She was a poor murderess. Her guilt had screamed from her sick eyes, and they had all interpreted its message. But none of them would talk—not now. The bargain that Dr. Vixen had made would be kept.

  CHAPTER II

  He awoke, and was aware of consciousness. There was thunder in the Earth, rippling sheets of light blinded him. He endured the pains of primal birth and felt suddenly alive as if sprung from the head of Jove.

  The chaos was dying slowly, but it would be a long time before he ordered it, catalogued and tamed it. He waited confidently and with restrained exultation. To be alive was to be a god.

  I am David Mantell, he thought, but more—much more than David Mantell ever was.

  He thought then of Alice, and in this there was pain. He had never understood her—poor, stupid, bewildered little Alice. He had tried to lead her in his direction, and when she had floundered He had abandoned her. He had been stupid, too.

  He remembered the ride in the car. He wondered curiously if he had actually failed to comprehend her intention beforehand. He supposed he had, but such ignorance seemed incomprehensible to him. He thought of Alice lying in the wreckage with torn clothes, and bruises on her body from careful blows by Jerrold.

  He wanted to weep for her suffering, not of her body, but of her mind. He wanted to weep because she had believed she must be beaten and abandoned in the wreckage to be free of him. He wept because he had not known how to lift her to dignity and courage and esteem in her own mind.

  He would make it up, he thought. He would make it all up to his sick Alice and heal her. There was half a lifetime left to them. Surely it was enough to erase the errors of the first half.

  His body was little damaged, but his brain had been subjected to the Synthesis. Fully aware of this, he arranged the known in precise order and shelved the unknown for later consideration, but of it all he becam
e master.

  He was alone, but they were watching him, he knew. The room was dimly but pleasantly lit. Furnishings, books and journals were familiar. That was the way it was always arranged—the way it had been for the hundred failures before him.

  But his Synthesis was no failure!

  For the first time, the tremendous impact of this realization settled upon him. He was alive, aware of himself and his past. He was alive when he might have been dead. And the work of his own hands and brain had made it possible.

  He sat up on the edge of the bed, examining the physical sensations. He felt normal, yet there was a newness that he could not define.

  Then the door opened slowly, and Dr. Vixen stood there, letting himself be recognized.

  David Mantell smiled. “Come in, Vic. Everything’s fine. I feel as if I’d had no more than a slight bump on the head. I imagine you must have had quite a repair job, considering the jolt I got from Exter. Sit down and give me the details of what hap — “

  David stopped smiling. “What’s the matter, Vic? Why are you looking at me like that? Why—?”

  Dr. Vixen was staring, his face reflecting sickness of heart. Then he finally spoke. At least his mouth and lips moved, but his words were sheer gibberish.

  David felt panic, like cold water rising swiftly about his chest. “What’s the matter with you? Talk sense! Give it to me in English!”

  Vixen spoke again, and still no understanding came. David had risen in greeting, but now he edged away until he collided with a desk. He passed a hand over his face and heard the man’s voice again. He barely sensed a connotation of dismay and anxiety.

  Then he thought of the others, the hundred others who had preceded him through the doors of Synthesis to a prison of aphasia that could not be opened. These had spoken gibberish and had understood nothing said to them.

  In sudden desperate horror, he grabbed a pencil and a pad from the desk and scrawled, “Vic, can you read this?”

  Dr. Vixen stared at it with growing pity. He backed towards the door, retreating as if from a phantom. “Sit down, David. I’ll get Dr. Martin and be right back.” And he knew it was silly because David Mantell could not understand a single word.

  David remained motionless for only an instant after he was alone. He knew what his fate would be. Visual, auditory, ataxic aphasia-schizophrenia—they would put a label on him and lock him in a jail. They’d lock him up for the rest of his life because somehow he had become imprisoned behind an incredible wall of communication failure.

  The Synthesis was not a failure. There was only this one terrible defect that put its patients in a prison of noncommunication. He thought of the first one—over five years ago. A young man, an artist of superb abilities whose head was injured by a falling rock on a mountain vacation. Fifteen percent replacement, David recalled, and the fellow had been in solitary hell for that whole five years.

  David did not know how the error had come about, but he had no time to analyze or consider the technical aspects of the problem. He had to get away.

  He opened the door and cautiously scanned the corridor. Sixty feet away was the door to the exterior, but his nakedness prevented escape that way. In the other direction lay the great laboratories. The assistants’ locker rooms always contained miscellaneous spare items of garb.

  He ran swiftly in that direction. Twenty-five feet of corridor, then down a spiral stairway. At the foot of it he could look directly into the selector room. Vixen was there with Martin, a serious young medic. Their faces were bleak with the futility of their arguments as they scanned the files of David’s Synthesis. The technicians were gathered around, listening to Vixen’s story and the discussion they had all heard a hundred times before.

  He had to cross in direct view of anyone looking towards this open exit from the laboratory. He waited impatiently, scanning the shifting positions of the people within the room. Then, for a single instant, he detected—almost predicted—that none of them was watching the hallway.

  He darted across and into the locker room. He would have slugged anyone who appeared now, but he found himself alone.

  Within seconds, he found and donned a pair of baggy brown trousers, a slip-over shirt, and a pair of decrepit shoes that someone kept for rough maintenance work. He collected a bundle of articles and tossed them into the incinerator chute, but he grabbed up someone’s dark coat and kept it, for the evening was cool.

  It was dusk already when he opened the door towards the outside and stepped into the laboratory grounds.

  He walked carefully away from the buildings, slipping from one to another of the shrubbery groups that lined the drive. He abandoned his car. They could easily trail that, but it would take considerable time to make up a description from the things they found missing from the locker room.

  He walked along the street and mixed with passers-by. The laboratory seemed after a little while like a world he had known only in a dream.

  Suddenly, he stopped and stood still, letting the mob flow about him like turbulent waters. Never had he loved the ugly, grotesque, hurrying crowd as he did now. He felt the jostle of bodies with the same sensual joy that a child might experience driving his arms full length into warm sand on the seashore.

  He did not hear the fat man who turned and snarled, “What ya think ye’re doin’ standin’ there in everybody’s way.” Nor the salesgirls who caught sight of the expression on his face, and laughed.

  He heard their muffled words on every side, and there was no meaning whatever. They were like words beyond a thick wall that deadened only the meaning but not the sound. But this was a wall that defied his efforts to tear it down because it could not be seen or felt.

  He saw the smiles and lines of tension and hurry upon the faces, and was wholly a stranger in their midst. It was slowly becoming a physical agony, that urge to speak out and identify himself with the company of men. He wanted to take the hand of someone and say hello and be understood.

  But there was no one who would think him anything but a fool.

  He moved on again in the dusk, remembering locations of streets, but the signposts he could not read. Everywhere, the signs, the advertisements were as mystic symbols of some order into which all this vast throng had been initiated. Of them all, only he stood in naked ostracism. As darkness increased, there was a lull in the crowd between going home from work and the return to the streets for pleasure. In this time he sensed the beginnings of real hunger, but he had no solution. He recalled vaguely the need of money, but the symbols were less than shadows of memory. There was no money in his pockets. He could not beg enough for a meal. He dared not open his mouth.

  There was his own home, of course, but the police would be watching for him there. Alice would certainly report him—provided she didn’t make another blundering attempt to kill him.

  He could not go home.

  Through the evening hours he ranged among the pleasure crowds watching the faces of the dull, contented men and the pretty, flirtatious women. With increasing wonder he scanned as if for something lost. He knew not what it was, but these among whom he searched seemed imperceptibly decreased in stature, and his panic grew.

  With furious haste he almost ran among them peering at the face of each to whom he came, as if for a lost and forgotten image of himself. But these were not of himself—they were more than strangers; they were like foreign beings he had never known.

  With each minute and each hour all that he looked upon became more alien and he more lost. While the beckoning urge to unite with them had not ceased, the gap across which he watched steadily widened. As if it were a spreading chasm in the Earth with him on one side and all mankind on the other, he saw himself hurled back and away while those for whom he yearned dwindled and diminished and were wholly unaware of any gap.

  As darkness settled down for its long haul through the night the streets became increasingly deserted. Lights went out on signs and store fronts and he grew in conspicuousness as he moved in solitud
e about the city.

  Almost alone, he ranged the streets with swifter pace and growing rage like some great animal clawing and thundering at the darkness of his loneliness. He paced before the perforated cliff-sides of man’s own making and watched the shadows against the little square flames, each marking the place of a man, side by side, row on row, until they seemed to reach the stars.

  He raged through the city and into the hills above town where he sat at last upon a granite rock, suddenly motionless and still as if straining to unite with the Earth itself. Only his eyes were alive watching and dreading the coming of day and the awakening of the city.

  He dreaded the blinking traffic beacons and suppressed a cry of fury at the neon lights with their beckoning invitation to a world he could not enter.

  He slept at last there on the hillside, lying against the granite boulder that was still warm from the day’s heat. He was later aware only of lying huddled on the ground and the Earth was full of chill. The sun was slow in its warming of the face of the hill and he was depressed with hunger.

  Below lay the city. He felt like a traveler who had arrived at a destination in the darkness of night. It was not merely the old transformed now. It was wholly new—and incredibly ugly. Yet it gave a sense of perspective that his hasty night flight had denied him.

  Surely the situation was not as impossible as it seemed. Somehow he could prevent them from locking him up as aphasic or schizophrenic. It was unthinkable that there should be a complete barrier to communication between him and the world.

  If only there were another of his kind with whom he might talk to diminish the unbearable loneliness of being the single member of his species in a strange and savage world.

  Another—there were others, he thought. A hundred others! His throat caught in a sudden agony of relief as he wondered how he had forgotten in the night.

  But the relief was short lived. How could two aphasics talk with each other? No solace or assistance could be offered by another of his kind if they were both in individual prisons. The barrier was doubled instead of broken.