Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "Oh, I died," said Roy Pierce. "But they revived me," he added.

  "Good! I'm glad to hear that!" said Donahue more cheerfully, wondering suddenly just how extensively he was being kidded. "For a moment there you had me worried. Now explain about this treatment."

  "It's called soul eating," explained the dark-skinned, straight-haired boy, "I don't think you could do it."

  Donahue thought that information over carefully. "Maybe not. How's it done?"

  "In the tribes of my people the soul is supposed to be an invisible double who walks at your side, protecting you and speaking silently to your mind. Its face is the face that looks out of mirrors and up from pools at you, and the shadow that walks on the ground beside you. Evildoers, after they had spoken to a Manoba, would say that their reflections were gone. Our family was called The Eaters of Souls, and all the tribes were afraid of us for nine hundred miles around."

  "So am I," said Donahue compactly. "As my Yiddish grandmother on my mother's side would say, it sounds from werewolves."

  "I can explain it."

  "No magic?"

  "Look," said the youth tersely, "Do I want to get kicked out of the FNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears with herbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me, and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in time looking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing with his ghost. Do you think I would say so?"

  "No," Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.

  The youth spoke gloomily. "Rapport and intensified empathy is something you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique is published, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of them just don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a level of skill. It originated with my family." The youth spoke even more gloomily. "What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simply prior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, and express approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little before he does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me to tell him what he thinks and how he feels.

  "I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressive underplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separate and unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the inside emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. This can cause considerable mental confusion."

  "It should!" Donahue agreed fervently.

  "I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I was sure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the lead and mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other the reflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight it subconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead and led him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never had before, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, one that I wanted him to have. I hadn't been hired for that, but I had time to pass before I could untangle that UT problem, and I wanted to do it for him. The mirror link was complete the first day, but I'm afraid the extra days made it indelible. He'll always be me in his mind, and mirrors will never look right to him."

  * * * * *

  "It's so simple, it's obvious," said Donahue with disappointment. "It doesn't sound like magic to me."

  The youth was thoughtful, frowning. "Sometimes it doesn't to me either. I wonder if the ghost of my grandfather was telling me the right--"

  "Forget the ghost of your grandfather," Donahue interrupted hastily. On his few space trips he could never get used to this business of floating eerily around in the air, and it seemed a poor time to talk about ghosts. "What about Bryce Carter. What became of him? You know," he said defiantly, "I like his plans for organizing the Belt and breaking UT. And, come to think of it, if I had been there when you were interfering with that, I think I would have shot you myself."

  "UT had only hired me to find the organizer of the smuggling ring and persuade him to disband his organization in UT. I had done that. So the third day, when I could walk, I left the hospital and went back to Earth, and collected my fee for a job done. Many people had vanished suddenly from their payrolls, and the crime statistics in some cities had shown a startling lull. They knew I had done it, and so they paid and were grateful." The dark youth shrugged. "I didn't feel I had to tell them about Orillo. He tipped the police and started a rumor, and there was evidence enough in the crime statistics of the months before, when they were correlated with the distribution of branches of Union Transport, though there was nothing to point at anyone in particular except the ones who had disappeared."

  Donahue remembered. "Sure that's that investigation of transportation monopolies that raised such a stink last year. I saw part of it in Congress."

  Pierce handed him a travel folder. Gaudily illustrated, it advertised the advantages of the C&O lines for space tourists. "Carter and Orillo."

  Donahue looked up, puzzled, "But this is the next step in what he planned. I thought you changed him."

  "Mahatma Gandhi would have followed out those plans," Pierce said with a touch of grimness. "As you pointed out, they are attractive. But I changed him. I won't give you personality dynamics, but if you want a list of changes--He's married to Sheila Wesley, that's one change. And instead of going home nights he roisters around in bars and restaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking them all and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That's another change. He doesn't look into mirrors because they make him feel cross-eyed. That's because he unconsciously expects to see me in the mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as he planned. I won't stop him in that. The difference will be that he won't want the power he'll get." Pierce said grimly, "A power-lusting man can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carter was already halfway there. But he's safe from that now. He's going to be given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and not want it. That's the only safe kind of man to have in a powerful position."

  "That--" said Donahue with great earnestness, "--is like sending a poor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologists are all complete sadists," he said lifting his drink. "I suppose you've put something in my drink?"

  "Absolutely nothing," Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. "Funny thing was, when I got back to Earth that time, I kept feeling cross-eyed when I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. If I was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things had seemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimes backfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on the televiewer--he's the head of the family, and he lives in an estate in the jungle--and he--"

  Donahue was fascinated again.

  There was a different approach for each case, Pierce had found. It was not ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew with great surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he was being told. The only reason there wasn't something extra in his current drink was because there had been something in the last drink.

  This was case five.

  * * *

  Contents

  BLESSED ARE THE MEEK

  By G. C. Edmondson

  The strangers landed just before dawn, incinerating a good li of bottom land in the process. Their machines were already busily digging up the topsoil. The Old One watched, squinting into the morning sun. He sighed, hitched up his saffron robes and started walking down toward the strangers.

  Griffin turned, not trying to conceal his excitement. "You're th
e linguist, see what you can get out of him."

  "I might," Kung Su ventured sourly, "if you'd go weed the air machine or something. This is going to be hard enough without a lot of kibitzers cramping my style and scaring Old Pruneface here half to death."

  "I see your point," Griffin answered. He turned and started back toward the diggings. "Let me know it you make any progress with the local language." He stopped whistling and strove to control the jauntiness of his gait. Must be the lower gravity and extra oxygen, he thought. I haven't bounced along like this for thirty years. Nice place to settle down if some promoter doesn't turn it into an old folks home. He sighed and glanced over the diggings. The rammed earth walls were nearly obliterated by now. Nothing lost, he reflected. It's all on tape and they're no different from a thousand others at any rate.

  Griffin opened a door in the transparent bubble from which Albañez was operating the diggers. "Anything?" he inquired.

  "Nothing so far," Albañez reported. "What's the score on this job? I missed the briefing."

  "How'd you make out on III, by the way?"

  "Same old stuff, pottery shards and the usual junk. See it once and you've seen it all."

  "Well," Griffin began, "it looks like the same thing here again. We've pretty well covered this system and you know how it is. Rammed earth walls here and there, pottery shards, flint, bronze and iron artifacts and that's it. They got to the iron age on every planet and then blooey."

  "Artifacts all made for humanoid hands I suppose. I wonder if they were close enough to have crossbred with humans."

  "I couldn't say," Griffin observed dryly. "From the looks of Old Pruneface I doubt if we'll ever find a human female with sufficiently detached attitude to find out."

  "Who's Pruneface?"

  "He came ambling down out of the hills this morning and walked into camp."

  "You mean you've actually found a live humanoid?"

  "There's got to be a first time for everything." Griffin opened the door and started climbing the hill toward Kung Su and Pruneface.

  "Well, have you gotten beyond the 'me, Charlie' stage yet?" Griffin inquired at breakfast two days later.

  Kung Su gave an inscrutable East Los Angeles smile. "As a matter of fact, I'm a little farther along. Joe is amazingly coöperative."

  "Joe?"

  "Spell it Chou if you want to be exotic. It's still pronounced Joe and that's his name. The language is monosyllabic and tonal. I happen to know a similar language."

  "You mean this humanoid speaks Chinese?" Griffin was never sure whether Kung was ribbing him or not.

  "Not Chinese. The vocabulary is different but the syntax and phonemes are nearly identical. I'll speak it perfectly in a week. It's just a question of memorizing two or three thousand new words. Incidentally, Joe wants to know why you're digging up his bottom land. He was all set to flood it today."

  "Don't tell me he plants rice!" Griffin exclaimed.

  "I don't imagine it's rice, but it needs flooding whatever it is."

  "Ask him how many humanoids there are on this planet."

  "I'm way ahead of you, Griffin. He says there are only a few thousand left. The rest were all destroyed in a war with the barbarians."

  "Barbarians?"

  "They're extinct."

  "How many races were there?"

  "I'll get to that if you'll stop interrupting," Kung rejoined testily. "Joe says there are only two kinds of people, his own dark, straight-haired kind and the barbarians. They have curly hair, white skin and round eyes. You'd pass for a barbarian, according to Joe, only you don't have a faceful of hair. He wants to know how things are going on the other planets."

  "I suppose that's my cue to break into a cold sweat and feel a premonition of disaster." Griffin tried to smile and almost made it.

  "Not necessarily, but it seems our iron-age man is fairly well informed in extraplanetary affairs."

  "I guess I'd better start learning the language."

  Thanks to the spade work Kung Su had done in preparing hypno-recordings, Griffin had a working knowledge of the Rational People's language eleven days later when he sat down to drink herb infused hot water with Joe and other Old Ones in the low-roofed wooden building around which clustered a village of two hundred humanoids. He fidgeted through interminable ritualistic cups of hot water. Eventually Joe hid his hands in the sleeves of his robe and turned with an air of polite inquiry. Now we get down to business, Griffin thought.

  "Joe, you know by now why we're digging up your bottom land. We'll recompense you in one way or another. Meanwhile, could you give me a little local history?"

  Joe smiled like a well nourished bodhisattva. "Approximately how far back would you like me to begin?"

  "At the beginning."

  "How long is a year on your planet?" Joe inquired.

  "Your year is eight and a half days longer. Our day is three hundred heartbeats longer than yours."

  Joe nodded his thanks. "More water?"

  Griffin declined, suppressing a shudder.

  "Five million years ago we were limited to one planet," Joe began. "The court astronomer had a vision of our planet in flames. I imagine you'd say our sun was about to nova. The empress was disturbed and ordered a convocation of seers. One fasted overlong and saw an answer. As the dying seer predicted the Son of Heaven came with fire-breathing dragons. The fairest of maidens and the strongest of our young men were taken to serve his warriors. We served them honestly and faithfully. A thousand years later their empire collapsed leaving us scattered across the universe. Three thousand years later a new race of barbarians conquered our planets. We surrendered naturally and soon were serving our new masters. Five hundred years passed and they destroyed themselves. This has been the pattern of our existence from that day to this."

  "You mean you've been slaves for five million years?" Griffin was incredulous.

  "Servitude has ever been a refuge for the scholar and the philosopher."

  "But what point is there in such a life? Why do you continue living this way?"

  "What is the point in any way of life? Continued existence. Personal immortality is neither desirable nor possible. We settled for perpetuation of the race."

  "But what about self-determination? You know enough astronomy to understand novae. Surely you realize it could happen again. What would you do without a technology to build spaceships?"

  "Many stars have gone nova during our history. Usually the barbarians came in time. When they didn't—"

  "You mean you don't really care?"

  "All barbarians ask that sooner or later," Joe smiled. "Sometimes toward the end they even accuse us of destroying them. We don't. Every technology bears the seeds of its own destruction. The stars are older than the machinery that explores them."

  "You used technology to get from one system to another."

  "We used it, but we were never part of it. When machines fail, their people die. We have no machines."

  "What would you do if this sun were to nova?"

  "We can serve you. We are not unintelligent."

  "Willing to work your way around the galaxy, eh? But what if we refused to take you?"

  "The race would go on. Kung Su tells me there is no life on planets of this system, but there are other systems."

  "You're whistling in the dark," Griffin scoffed. "How do you know if any of the Rational People survive?"

  "How far back does your history go?" Joe inquired.

  "It's hard to say exactly," Griffin replied. "Our earliest written records date back some seven thousand years."

  "You are all of one race?"

  "No, you may have noticed Kung Su is slightly different from the rest of us."

  "Yes, Griffin, I have noticed. When you return ask Kung Su for the legend of creation. More hot water?" Joe stirred and Griffin guessed the interview was over. He drank another ritual cup, made his farewells and walked thoughtfully back to camp.

  "Kung," Griffin asked over coffee next afternoon, "h
ow well up are you on Chinese mythology?"

  "Oh, fair, I guess. It isn't my field but I remember some of the stories my grandfather used to tell me."

  "What is your legend of creation?" Griffin persisted.

  "It's pretty well garbled but I remember something about the Son of Heaven bringing the early settlers from a land of two moons on the back of his fire-breathing dragon. The dragon got sick and died so they couldn't ever get back to heaven again. There's a lot of stuff about devils, too."

  "What about devils?"

  "I don't remember too well, but they were supposed to do terrible things to you and even to your unborn children if they ever caught you. They must have been pretty stupid though; they couldn't turn corners. My grandfather's store had devil screens at all the doors so you had to turn a corner to get in. The first time I saw the lead baffles at the pile chamber doors on this ship it reminded me of home sweet home. By the way, some young men from the village were around today. They want to work passage to the next planet. What do you think?"

  Griffin was silent for a long time.

  "Well, what do you say? We can use some hand labor for the delicate digging. Want to put them on?"

  "Might as well." Griffin answered. "There's a streetcar every millennium anyway."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "You wouldn't understand. You sold your birthright to the barbarians."

  * * *

  Contents

  OUT OF THE EARTH

  By George Edrich

  Offences against the State meant elimination in the Black Passage. Death. And these people were to die!

  First Awake, 2 Juli, 2207

  We have walked much this awake and have stopped now for sleep. Last City is far behind us. Except for the two lamps we keep lighted to frighten away the Groles, there is nothing but blackness in the passage. The others are sleeping, and close beside me, Nina sleeps also. The sound of her breathing is all I have in the darkness.