by Fritz Leiber
He picked up the top tracing and handed it to Kesserik, indicating a misty, humped curve.
The assistant scanned it intently, then shook his head and broke into a smile, letting the tracing slip to his knee. “No, Mr. Blacklaw, you must be mistaken. This trace could never have puzzled Harborford for a moment. Why, even I can interpret it, and without any reference material.” He picked up the tracing.
“It’s simply—”
“Wait a minute,” said Blacklaw. “If my idea is right, it is a trace whose meaning would be very obvious to any thought-research man—except Harborford.”
He took a few steps. “I know I’m just a layman,” he said, “and what I’m going to say is not at all original, but it’s something you fellows probably lost sight of at times, because you’re so close to your work.
“Thought is different from every other object of man’s research. Stars, atoms, amoebas, even body cells—they’re all outside the mind. But in analyzing his thoughts, and is analyzing his own analyzing apparatus. So it always stays one jump ahead of him.
“Let’s suppose there was a scientist who knew everything, who understood the whole universe perfectly. Well and good. But then who would understand the scientist? He couldn’t, because his own understandings of himself would constitute new data requiring analysis. He couldn’t ever get ahead of the game.”
Madderlee and Kesserik were obviously interested, though they still looked skeptical.
“When Harborford claimed to be able to catch any thought, he was putting himself in the place of that hypothetical scientist—and without understanding the whole universe by a long shot. He claimed to be able to keep ahead of the game. He thought he had his thoughts all neatly taped and docketed, and for that affront his thoughts took a revenge—a rather nasty one, because it was so simple.
“He found the trace of a thought springing from his research. It was a master-thought—his mind’s final comment on his life’s work. There was no evidence of illogic or inconsistency in its pattern—he couldn’t get rid of it that way. So because it was a thought which knocked all his arrogant claims into a cocked hat, he tried to suppress it from his consciousness. He refused to recognize its meaning—and as a result it became an obsessive shadow which terrified and eventually overwhelmed him.”
An odd thing happened. Madderlee still looked skeptical but Kesserik’s attitude had changed completely. He was nodding excitedly.
Blacklaw said, “It was a simple thought. You and I wouldn’t have found it in the least unusual or frightening. But I want you to put yourselves in Harborford’s position. A man with an almost frantic hatred of any dark corners in the mind, a man who had spent two years in a sanitarium and had an overpowering fear of anything abnormal or hidden in his thought processes, a man who had staked everything on his ability to lay his mind completely bare… and then for that man to find in his mind, springing logically from its experiences, this thought of all thoughts.”
He paused. “You interpret it, Kesserik.”
Kesserik looked at the trace and read: “There are thoughts in your mind that you will never catch.”
CRYSTAL PRISON
“My great Granny will trade three balls of gray string, big as grapefruit,” Jack said to the girl. He was an 18-year-old boy—in Oldlands you didn’t become a young man or woman until 30, or a voter until 65. The new antibiotics, carcinophages and cell-restorers had upped life expectancy to 350 years. Jack had a narrow sunny face and brown crew-cut hair, but he looked plump because he was wearing a suit lined with thick foam rubber, so he wouldn’t break a bone or a priceless chair if he bumped anything, and colored white, so any dirt he got on it would show. A month ago he had discovered in the 3-foot-deep swimming pool that it floated beautifully, but Great Granny had given him the treatment of “You’re worrying me into a heart attack before I’m 200.” Around his neck was a silver dollar with a glistening listen-whisper jutting up by his jaw.
“My Great Great Aunt will trade her two string-balls, one red, one green, for them,” Candy replied. “They’re big as the Temple oranges of Holy Florida and the green has a gold thread in it.” At 17, Candace had long black hair and a slim face like amused moonlight, but you could hardly see it because of the black burnoose her Great Great Aunt made her wear against sunburn and to assure she’d reach 30 properly modest. She had once tried to give up wearing it indoors, outside her bedroom. But only once. “Little girls of 17 are not to be seen, especially their legs.” You could, however, see the gleam of her silver dollar.
“That’s trading 300 yards for about 70,” Jack objected, prompted by his listen-whisper.
“How many knots have your string-balls got hidden in them?” Candy demanded, prompted by hers.
“1,327,” Jack admitted. “Granny had me count.”
While their mouths were saying these things, their eyes were saying something else. It was strange.
“Mine have only 19,” Candy sneered. “No deal, unless you throw in the broken birdcage… or some tea bags.”
“My knots are all square knots—” Jack began, but then his listen-whisper blatted audibly.
“You’re possessions-mad, Grace! That would violate senior citizens’ fair-trading laws.”
“You and your dirty string, all knots!” Candy’s blatted back.
The teen-agers faced each other across a road wide enough for two oldsters’ electric wheelchairs to pass. Behind each of them was a large handcart piled high with choice oldster treasures arranged very neatly. From their collars silver wires trailed back past de-thorned bushes up de-insected tidy green hills to two sweet cottages, smothered in artificial flowers, which smiled at each other like camouflaged tanks across the narrow road. Behind each cottage stood a larger storage barn.
Some progressive oldsters let their youngsters play and run errands and record diet-and-health gossip and do trading deals on collars only radio-linked to home. But wired collars seemed wisest to most, including Jack’s and Candy’s guardians. True, a girl had recently been strangled when her wire snagged in a tree she was climbing and she slipped. But she shouldn’t have been climbing the tree. You always had to pay a price for safety and freedom from worry.
Besides, although the Oldlands police snagged 99 of 100 runaway youngsters headed for Freeshore, there was always that risk too.
The close-clipped vacuumed landscape was dotted at 100-yard intervals with 125-foot gray pillars like the trunks of giant pines identically lightning-blasted.
Although the sun shone brightly and the blue sky was gay with cirrus clouds, the air was somewhat stuffy, very still, and smelled just a touch of old newspapers, sour milk and soap. This was because of the invisible glasstic roof which was supported by the pillars and kept out of Oldlands all dangerous weather, including draughts.
“Don’t gape and dawdle, Jack,” his listen-whisper prompted.
He said to Candy, “I’ve got all 2,396 back issues of Garbage Art and Junk Beautiful”
“I’ve got them too,” she retorted. “Your Gran just wants more storage space.”
“Liar,” Jack said. His hand held at his side, he crooked a finger at the girl. They pulled their carts closer together and knelt down in front of them, so they were hidden from the cottages.
“What are you doing, Candace?” her listen-whisper demanded. “Don’t block the road, boy,” was Great Granny’s contribution.
“About those tea bags,” the girl said quickly toward Jack. “I have 57 copies of the Geriatric Observer and Daily Diet to trade—just the sort of newspaper to spread over plastic tablecloth covers to keep them from getting dull.”
“Well,” Jack replied loudly, “I have 63 tea bags—used, of course, but dried out nicely.” He wasn’t looking at Candy, he was letting down a large hinged door in the bottom of his cart.
“Those might be acceptable,” Candy bargained. “My Great Great Aunt seldom uses fresh tea bags. The used ones make her feel more saving.” She said this reverently, but her lips were laugh
ing, especially when she saw the wrinkled gray tea bags neatly lined up on a shelf of Jack’s cart, like mummified mice. Then her eyes became wild with excitement as Jack drew a life-size figure out of the false bottom of his cart and sat it beside him. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from exclaiming and she wagged the other hand and her eyes implored.
Jack snatched an antique aluminum coughdrop box from a pocket in his bump-proof white suit. From it he quickly took a bumblebee on a two-inch thread with a square of Stick-Tite tape at the other end, which he rapidly stuck to his collar just by the whisper-listen. The bee buzzed madly and its wings rattled against the silver metal.
“Oh, a bee!” Candy squealed in terror, leaning forward so that her listen-whisper was close to Jack’s.
“It must have got in from the Freeshore through the Killing Wall,” Jack shrilled frightenedly. Both of them were grinning. “Lovely bee,” Candy said with her lips as it buzzed close to them.
From the cottages up the hills came faintly the sound of windows being slammed shut.
Her voice masked to the listen-whispers by the buzzing, Candy whispered, “Oh, she’s beautiful, Jack. I wouldn’t have made her nearly as beautiful.”
She was referring to the robot duplicate of herself sitting by Jack and dressed in pearl-gray sweater, slacks and sandals.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Jack whispered back gruffly. “And you would have been wrong, so that’s why I had to build her.”
“Can I hear her talk?”
“Yes, once, but then you got to work fast,” Jack said curtly. He felt the figure’s side for a button under the sweater, then pressed.
The robot Candy blinked her eyes and smiled—a little sadly, Candy fancied—and nodded her head and softly said, “Yes.”
“That’s about all her vocabulary,” Jack admitted, “except for repeating things people tell her.”
“ ‘Yes’ is the only word she’ll need with G-G Aunty,” Candy said. “Her repeat-talk will let her do trading and diet-gossip.” She was already turned away and letting down a door in the bottom of her cart. Jack reached in his secret compartment for what looked like a thick green rug, rolled up tight. Then he looked at the robot, dressed almost identically to the first, which Candy had produced.
“Hey, I’m not that good-looking,” he objected, his eyes a bit dreamy. At that moment the bumblebee stung him on the chin, but he hardly winced.
“Says you,” Candy replied smugly.
“You remember to steal your key?” Jack growled, holding out his hand.
Candy wrinkled her nose and dropped a silver key in his palm, then turned around.
“I made him look just like you,” she said. “I’ll admit I couldn’t have installed the servo-motors and batteries without your help.”
“I couldn’t have done the cybernetic circuits without yours,” Jack said. By that time her silver collar had been unlocked from her neck and snapped around her robot’s. The robot-Candy looked unhappy at that. Silly, Candy told herself, robots can’t feel.
Then she had Jack’s key and was fitting it into the tiny keyhole in the back of his collar.
In a lull in the bee’s buzzing, Jack’s whisper-listen blatted quaveringly, “Jack, my boy, can you speak?” “Yes,” Jack and his robot replied simultaneously, “Are you dead, son?” the emotional voice went on. “Yes,” the robot-Jack responded, but Jack overrode that with, “No, Great Granny, but that awful bee is still menacing us,” whereupon the bee buzzed madly again as if on cue. “Good boy,” Jack called to it. His collar was around his robot’s neck now.
Candy whipped off her black burnoose while Jack lost time squirming out of his white anti-bump suit. For a moment all four were dressed alike in gray and looked like two pairs of identical twins. Then it was Candy’s robot who was dressed like an Arab girl, black-cloaked and hooded, while with some difficulty they wormed the cumbersome foam-rubber suit onto the Jack robot.
Candy looked at the two silver keys in her hand. Somewhere down the road a siren sounded faintly. She slipped one key each into the pockets of the two robots. Jack frowned and almost said something, but instead captured the bumblebee, still straining for freedom, in the antique coughdrop box. “Not until Freeshore, old boy,” he told the insect.
“Are you holding out, Candace?” G-G Aunty demanded from the whisper-listen and then at the robot’s reply, “Good, just keep your hood shut. It won’t be much longer—we’ve called the police.”
“It can’t sting you through the rubber. Cover your face with your arms, boy, and pray,” Great Granny contributed.
The siren sounded again, much closer now, reverberating against the invisible glasstic sky.
“Come on!” Jack whispered sharply, grabbing up the green cylinder. Together he and Candy wormed their way, like soldiers infiltrating, between the bushes, away from the cottages and the siren, until they had some concealment behind them and a wide long lawn ahead. Then he unrolled the cylinder until it looked exactly like a thick green rug about 6 feet by 4 and the same color as the grass. In one corner was a gray metal square set with two buttons and a joystick.
Jack hit one of the buttons and the carpet stiffened flat and hard.
“It’s a bomb, Candy!” Jack cheered softly. “An electronic cyclone. Crawl aboard.”
As they did that, Jack explained, “Dad smuggled it to me through a friend of his who’s a free trader.”
Jack’s widowed father and Candy’s divorced mother had both had, separately, to leave Oldlands for Freeshore many years before. They had tried to take their children with them, but there had been a custody fight and as generally happens in the Oldlands courts, the oldest litigants had won out—especially in this case because neither Jack’s father nor Candy’s mother were yet of voting age; Candy’s mother had been under thirty—a child. And because rich Oldlands almost always won out in the courts against money-poor Freeshore.
When he and Candy were stretched side by side, Jack hit the second button. The green carpet lifted four inches and hovered. Air sucked in at the front end of the carpet hissed down through a million tiny holes. The strange ship rocked a little, not much.
Just then a bullet-snouted blue police car nosed into sight on the road behind them, traveling at least 35 miles an hour. With a final blast of its siren, it carefully braked to a stop between the junk carts. Up from it stood four spry oldsters in blue, their heads hooded with mesh, like beekeepers’. One held in his heavily gauntleted hands an insect spray, the second an insect rifle, the third a pinpoint death-ray. The fourth lifted a bullhorn to his masked mouth. His voice rang from the glasstic sky: “Bee at large! Bee at large! Where’s the person around here reported a bee at large?”
Then he looked down. “Oh, was it you kids?”
Jack and Candy gripped hands and grinned at each other as they heard their robots answer together, “Yes.” This was instantly followed by the listen-whispers on the silver rings blatting, “We’ll tell you all about it, officers. Come home, Candace. Come home, Jack,” and by another two obedient calls of “Yes.”
Then Jack pulled back on the joystick, and the carpet leaned forward, air hissed from the back end too, and it went skimming off across the green lawn. It lifted over the bushes and arrowed between the gray pillars and swung wide of the senior citizens’ dormitories and cottages that kept whipping into view.
He said in her ear, “You know, I’ll miss Great Granny.”
“And I’ll mist G-G Auntie,” she replied. “They weren’t really bad, just terribly scared and lonely.”
He nodded. “And maybe a little possessive, too,” he added, almost doubtfully.
She said, “I’m bothered about our robots. We thought they’d just fool G-G and G-Gran long enough to let us get to Freeshore. But now I think they’ll go on fooling them forever. And then—I know this is foolish—they’ll be as unhappy as we were.”
He said, “If they ever do grow minds, they can escape to Freeshore too. You left them their keys.”
&n
bsp; And then there was only the rushing wind and the flashing pillars and the dizzying lawns and musty cottages as they sped, faster and faster, toward Freelands and wild bees and wild spiders and wild tigers, and firecrackers and loud jazz and the open life and open sky and danger and spaceships and the stars.
BULLET WITH HIS NAME
The invisible being shifted his anchorage a bit in Earth’s gravitational field, which felt like a push rather than a pull to him, and said, “This featherless biped seems to satisfy Galaxy Center’s requirements. I’d say he’s a suitable recipient for the Gifts.”
His Coadjutor, equally invisible and negatively massed, chewed that over. “Mature by his length and mass. Artificial plumage neither overly gaudy nor utterly drab—indicating median social level, which is confirmed by the size of his bachelor nest. Inward maps of his environment not fantastically inaccurate. Feelings reasonably meshed—at least neither volcanic nor frozen. Thoughts and values in reasonable order. Yes, I agree, a satisfactory test subject. Except…”
“Except what?”
“Except we can never be sure of that ‘reasonable’ part.”
“Of course not! Thank your stars that’s beyond the reach of Galaxy Center’s keenest telepathy, or even ours on the spot. Otherwise you and I’d be out of a job.”
“And have to scheme up some other excuse for free-touring the Cosmos with backtracking permitted.”
“Exactly!” The Being and his Coadjutor understood each other very well and were the best of friends. “Well, how many Gifts would you suggest for the test?”
“How about two Little and one Big?” the Coadjutor ventured.
“Umm… statistically adequate but spiritually unsatisfying. Remember, the fate of his race hangs on his reactions to them. I’d be inclined to increase your suggestion by one each and add a Great.”
“No—at least I question the last. After all, the Great Gifts aren’t as important, really, as the Big Gifts. Besides…”