“I have explained a little of what we have done, but I can hardly get through the high semantic noise level. I want to think in Synthesized terms while speaking in English. Let’s go back to our isolation. I feel I can’t endure this chaos of thought.”
“You are more sensitive than before,” said David. “You are on a bridge between paradise and hell. In either one, with no knowledge of the other, you could be content. Understanding both is a special hell of its own. Those whose entropy is never reduced to the low levels we know will not experience it.
“But I’m coming to join you. Ask Vixen if he’ll stay and follow through with the same treatment for me.”
“He has already agreed.”
* * * *
David awoke to nightmare. The chaos was like some great machine gone wrong, every part working against all others yet inexplicably still moving. Chaotic sounds, shrill and wild, rang in his ears and ten thousand unbidden visions marched before his eyes.
He remembered Marianne’s cry of despair and understood it fully. He was aware of her by his side clutching his hand tightly in both of hers.
“It gets better after a little while,” she murmured.
“I hope so.” He managed a grin. “It’s pretty bad at first, isn’t it?”
Vixen was there, anxiously. “Are you all right, David? Can you understand me now? Can you tell me what went wrong?”
David had the continued impression of birdlike fluttering. He wondered if all men would seem to be of such reduced stature as Vixen—and knew it was so.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Order breakfast for all of us sent to my office, and we’ll determine what needs to be done next.”
* * * *
Dr. Dodge, President of the Institute of Bio-Sciences, was a small, pudgy man. His thick hands could scarcely manipulate a scalpel or the focusing dials of a microscope. That was a major reason why he was a research executive instead of a practicing scientist, David thought.
David had heard all of the doctor’s weary arguments. They had been over the same ground again and again in the past months—but he had not had Marianne on previous visits. Dodge had not yet learned that David himself was a Synthesized.
“I want to present Marianne Carter,” David said. “She is the first direct proof of the success of the Mantell Synthesis. The most recent case, she required eighty percent replacement and is willing to submit to any test required to demonstrate the success of Synthesis.”
Dodge glanced at Marianne somewhat as if she were a specimen under glass. He pursed his lips in displeasure, then turned angry eyes towards David.
“Have you disobeyed the memorandum I issued to your department? This girl was as much a failure as the rest! If you have experimented further, you have disobeyed my order.”
“She is proof of the success of Synthesis.”
“After my order was given!”
“Is that important in the face of success?”
“Extremely important.” He patted a stack of documents on his desk.
“Here are the accumulated protests that have come from every humanitarian society in the country. Every public affairs observer has broadcast disapproval of your continued experiments with human beings. Now we have a threat in Congress to stop the flow of funds while a long investigation of the entire Institute is conducted. You have threatened the very existence of our organization!
“I have pacified the opposition by publication of my memorandum which I issued your laboratory. If I should now announce a resumption of Synthesis they’d have my hide. If I uttered the very word in public, our funds would be dried up.”
“Are we to be dictated to and be directed in our research by news propagandists and politicians?”
“We are to serve the public interest,” said Dodge as if he spoke an infallible maxim. “We exist by public acclaim and to serve those who support us.”
“All right. Let’s give them proof that Synthesis can rebuild a human mind. Let me show Marianne to the whole world.”
Dodge glanced at her distastefully. “Eighty percent replacement. Who could ever be sure if he were speaking with a human being or a mechanical robot? I have never favored your attempts to reclaim the dead, and I will not support your fantasies now in the face of the threat you have brought to the Institute.
“No. Your refusal to obey orders shows you are unfit to direct the tremendous facilities of the laboratory entrusted to you. From this moment they are closed to you. You are dismissed. You may have time to remove your personal effects. Your further appearance will constitute illegal trespass.”
“That’s not fair!” cried Marianne. “What of the others like me? What is to become of them?”
“There will be no more tampering with those poor specimens of humanity. They will be permitted to live out their lives in adequate custody, but we want no more like them.”
David was about to speak in reckless fury now, but Marianne stopped him with a single sharp word in their new tongue, which Dodge scarcely noticed, thinking it only an exclamation.
But it conveyed to David all that he understood he should have perceived by himself. Dodge deluded even himself as to his real reasons for opposing Synthesis. He was a miserable little monarch, greedy and fearful of his empire. There was bitter hate for one such as David who had ranged so far beyond in the vast plains of research that the short-winded capacities of Dr. Dodge could scarcely keep him in sight.
It was the envy and hate of a little man for a big one. He would never attempt to understand, but he would wield all the power of his governmental authority to destroy that which he could not comprehend.
David rose. “We may return,” he said, “with a better argument.”
They returned to the laboratory. During their absence, John and Martin had been treated for increased entropy under Vixen’s direction. They were in a state of despair.
With Vixen, the four of them met in David’s office once again. David felt sorry for Vixen. Not only so seemingly incompetent in their midst, he was now a bewildered little man. It was as if they were simply taller than he and could look over a high wall into a garden that was hidden from his vision even as he talked with them.
“Dodge refused to remove the ban on the operation,” said David. For Vixen’s benefit he spoke in English.
“I don’t understand your urgency,” said Vixen slowly. “There is something new in all of you. It makes me afraid. Perhaps it made Dodge afraid, too. Tell me what it is that is different, and what it is that you are so urgent about. There is more involved than mere continuance of the Synthesis operations.”
“Much more. It involves the whole race. We have in our hands the capacities for development that might have been learned or evolved in the next million years—if we hadn’t killed ourselves off by then.”
Swiftly, and in crude terms that Vixen could understand, David explained the thing that had happened to their brains through the manipulation of the semantic selector. “Any mind, then, can pass beneath the selector,” he concluded, “and become ordered and rational—just as ours have done, and become aware of the new language as well as the old.”
Vixen was staring at him and breathing heavily when David finished.
“And you suppose that you can entice the whole world to change themselves over?” he demanded.
“The thousands in the mental hospitals will be our first opportunity,” said David. “We’ll take the most demented and raise them to heights of genius that cannot be imagined—or ignored. Who will be able to resist our offer then?”
“Ninety-nine percent of the population,” said Vixen. “_I_ would resist if I were one of them — “
“You!” David’s voice was filled with sudden contempt, and then he recognized his error. Vixen was not the stupid creature he seemed. It was the Synthesized who had changed and Vixen was still in the intellectual vanguard of his race.
“Why?” David spoke more gently.
“I am fifty years old. I have a wife and
children. I like things the way they are. I like myself the way I am, if you please. I am content. And I, who understand very well the inconstancy of our established interpretations of the laws of nature, am far more pliable than the mass of men. You will find few takers if you try to sell your new world literally as such.”
“But you will join us?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know, David. I’ll have to think about it very much for a long time.”
The four of them stood looking at him incredulously. It was no longer within their power to comprehend the workings of neurons that could lead to such a response as his. It represented only illness.
Yet Dr. Vixen was an independent being with his own right to choose or reject—and so were the billions who were even less than he.
“You have not shown me this world which you see,” Vixen went on as if trying to soften a blow whose impact he fully sensed. “You cannot show it, perhaps, but tell it only in words which you have said are feeble things to convey that which you have experienced.
“Perhaps you will find enough clients among the young and adventurous, but neither quality is strong in me any longer.”
“How can a blind man be told the color of the sky?” asked Marianne.
“How can a frightened child be made to understand what it’s like to be free? Only by experience can it be known.”
“You have a viewpoint we had not dreamed of,” said David, “but one that we must consider.”
In their new language he said, “Vixen may be right. In the end we may have to ram this down humanity’s throat, but we can’t even put the rest of the hundred in communicable condition unless we change Dodge’s mind. Tomorrow at the latest they’ll be here with a dismantling order.”
“How can we change Dodge except by force?” said Martin.
“We can’t. You get Dodge here tonight,” he said to John and Martin.
“I’m going to get one other at the same time—my wife, Alice.”
Marianne gasped incredulously. “You don’t want her!”
Watching, David saw her face crumple momentarily as she lost control. Then she murmured, “I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. Forgive me.”
He understood how it must have seemed to her. They were the first to cross back over the bridge to contact with fellow humans. There had seemed for a time a companionship and a narrow unity between them. Of it she had fashioned a dream.
He touched her arm. “She’s my wife, Marianne. I’ve loved her for a long time—loved and neglected and hurt her. I’m going to make it up. You’ve dreamed a lovely and a foolish thing. You could almost have been our daughter.”
“That would have been something,” she said almost bitterly.
He smiled with tenderness and lifted her chin. At least no one need fear that Synthesis would make the race an emotionally sterile group of creatures intent only on intellectual forms of tick-tack-toe.
“Please, Marianne. I’m going to need your help.”
“Of course. Forgive me.”
* * * *
His own house looked strange to him as if he had been gone a very long time and had forgotten the details of its lines. Yet he remembered well the last night he had been here, the night that Alice plotted murder.
He could see lights and hoped she was alone. He was not prepared for murder, but the urge would be great if Exter were there.
She was alone. He let himself in quietly and was suddenly before her in the same living room they had shared for so many long and empty years.
She uttered a scream that he thought would never die. White-faced, she cowered in the depths of the sofa on which she sat.
“David! Don’t come nearer—leave me alone! Vixen promised … I gave you back your life!”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Alice. Please don’t be afraid, and don’t try to explain. Listen to what I have to say.”
She watched his approach as if hypnotized in terror by a creeping cobra. He sat down and put his arm along the back of the sofa, but she shrank from it.
“Something very wonderful has come out of this thing that has happened to us. We have learned how to control Synthesis, how to reorder the human mind so that life can be lived as it should be. The hates and fears can be cleaned out of our minds to make a fresh start in complete understanding and trust.
“You and I can make a fresh start. I want you to come to the laboratory with me and submit to the selector. Things can be again the way they were fifteen years ago—except better.”
Her fear-wide eyes had not blinked once. “No … I won’t let you do anything to me, David. You can’t make me. Go away and let me alone!”
He tried to tell her again in other words, and she remained hidden still behind her wall of terror. He felt suddenly very tired.
“Alice, you loved me once. I did nothing to let you know how much it meant to me or make it grow. But, if I thought there was nothing left of it, I’d never have come back tonight. I love you and I want you back the way we were so long ago, and it can be that way. I’m telling you the truth, Alice.”
“The day after we were married you disappeared into your laboratory, and I’ve scarcely seen you since.”
It was then that he was sure, for her eyes became soft with the fleeting memory of a time beyond their troubled years.
“I’ll make it up, every day of neglect. I promise you I will, darling.”
He hit her then sharply and carefully on the point of the chin. She uttered a brief, low cry and sagged back against the sofa.
* * * *
They had Dr. Dodge already in the operating room when he carried Alice’s moaning, half-limp form into the laboratory.
Vixen helped them. His face was white and he moved like a man in a nightmare. He had gone too far now to do anything but go the whole way.
He needed sleep badly, but the rest of them seemed unaware that they were starting their second twenty-four hours without rest. Vixen watched David’s sure hands, beside which his own were clumsy paws. David had always possessed great skill in the laboratory, but his fingers seemed inspired now.
He was baffled and half angered by David’s tenderness towards his wife. Vixen had known them over the years and had watched Alice grow from a vibrant, beautiful girl into a harsh, treacherous creature who could look upon murder.
Vixen tried to allow for the neglect that David had shown her, but then he thought of his own wife. She had been patient. No, Alice would have been discarded as a worthless human by all but David who still saw in her the dreams he had held long ago.
For good or for evil, the Synthesis had produced a mighty upheaval in those upon whom it was performed.
With difficulty, Vixen performed the work of driving the probes into the brain of Dodge with precision. He would have enjoyed much more smashing that shining pate with a hammer, he thought. And his life would be no more forfeit than for what he was already doing. For assault and kidnapping they were already dead men.
He sat down when his work was through and watched David switch on the simultaneous channels of the selector that fed pulses to the brains of Dodge and of Alice. The room was silent and there was nothing to be done during the long hours ahead.
He must have slept, dozing in the uncomfortable chair by the wall. He was roused at last by the excited babbling of voices and recognized the speech of the Synthesized in their wild new tongue.
They were around the two tables, and the helmets and probes had been removed from the two figures. Dodge had been turned over and was struggling to sit up, his face suffused with the red blush of rage. He looked like a pudgy Buddha squatting on the table in the shapeless gown that covered him. Vixen felt a chill of dread.
But a slow change spread over the face of Dodge. He reminded Vixen suddenly of a man blind for many years who was seeing again the dawn. His face lighted, and he looked around.
After a moment, his head bowed, and he wept quietly.
David was not watching. He was beside Alice. She had no
t yet seen him, and Vixen could glimpse only the side of her face, but ugly lines of strain and dark intent seemed to have vanished. A quality of rightful youth had taken possession of her.
She turned then, and caught sight of David. Her arms went out to him, and he crushed her close to him. Vixen could see the tears rising in her eyes and spinning down her cheeks and heard her murmuring over and over, “My darling — “
Marianne sat beside Vixen, her face wistful but not bitter, and Vixen’s eyes continued to shift from the face of Dodge to Alice and back.
“If those two could be changed,” he whispered half to himself, “the whole world could be made over.”
“I’m next. You’ll let me be next?” he demanded urgently. “And after me, the whole world!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away copyright for Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1950, renewed.
Discontinuity copyright for Astounding Science Fiction, October 1950, renewed.
Alarm Reaction copyright for Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1951, renewed.
The Farthest Horizon copyright for Astounding Science Fiction, April 1952, renewed.
The Unlearned copyright for Worlds of If August 1954.
The Person from Porlock copyright for Astounding Science Fiction, August 1947, renewed.
The Cat and the King copyright for Astounding Science Fiction, August 1946, renewed.
Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 29