Ahead of Time

by Henry Kuttner

  I hardly heard it. His voice was a dying whisper.

  The air was curdling like milk, running like the running colors in the balcony Safety.

  I could almost hear a new voice speaking.

  "Consider," Mr. Field whispered. "You grow up conditioned to expect impossibilities. But here we can give you the impossible. Here is happiness. Our fee is very small indeed compared to the great goal within your reach. Here, my friend, you can live perfectly. This is Paradise."

  Niobe Gai stood there in the curdled air, smiling at me.

  She is the most beautiful woman in the world. She is equated with all desirable things. She is wealth, fame, happiness, health, fortune. For many years I have been conditioned to desire all these impossible goals, and to know that Niobe Gai is the epitome of them all. But I never saw her before like this, standing here in the same room, firm and real, breathing and warm, holding out her arms. . . .

  It was a projection, of course. But complete. All tactile and sensory elements perfect. I could smell her perfume. I could feel her arms clasping me and the light brushing of her hair over my hand, and the shape of her lips. I could feel all this exactly as thousands of other men in the underground apartments would feel her lips as they kissed her.

  It was that thought, and not any sense of lost realities, that made me push her away and step back. It didn't make any difference to Niobe Gai. She went right on making love to the air.

  Then I knew that the last test of sanity had failed me, for it was no longer possible to tell the unreal from the real. The last test fails when the illusion moves into life itself and you can touch and feel and handle the commercial vision as if she were the real woman. There was no defense any more.

  I looked at Niobe Gai clasping the empty air. The vision of all beauty and all desirable things in life, making love to nothingness as if it were a real human creature.

  Then I opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Mr. Field was waiting, studying a little note pad in his hand. He looked up at me, and probably he'd had plenty of experience, for he simply shrugged and nodded.

  "Well, if you ever should be interested, here's my card," he said. "Lots of them do come back, you know. After they've thought it over awhile."

  "Not all," I said.

  "Well, no." His face was serious. "Some people seem to have a natural resistance. Maybe you're one of them. If you are I'm sorry for you. Things are a mess outside. Nobody's fault, really. We've got to keep alive the only ways we know. You think it over. Maybe later on——"

  I said, "Where's my wife?"

  "In there," he said. "Excuse me for not waiting. I'm rather busy. You can find the lift."

  I heard his footsteps going away. I moved forward and knocked at the door. I waited. There wasn't any answer.

  I knocked again, harder and louder. But it had a flat, muffled sound, as if it didn't penetrate the panels at all. The client is protected in Paradise.

  I could see now that there was one of the round metal seals attached to the panel, and I was close enough to read the printing. It said, "Sealed until June 30, 1998. Cash received."

  I did a little sum in my head. Yes, she'd used it all, every one of the eighty-four thousand dollars. Her lease wouldn't run out again for quite a few years.

  I wondered what she'd do next time.

  I didn't knock again. I followed Mr. Field, found the lift, rose to street level. I got on a fast slideway and let it carry me around Manhattan. The advertising blazed and screamed. I found my earplugs in my pocket and stopped my ears. But that only shut out the sound. Visual commercials whirled and glared and glided across the buildings, slipping around corners, embracing the solid walls. And everywhere I looked was Freddi Lester's face.

  Even when I shut my eyes, his after-image burned against my closed lids.

  Ghost

  THE PRESIDENT OF INTEGRATION almost fell out of his chair. His ruddy cheeks turned sallow, his jaw dropped, and the hard blue eyes, behind their flexo-lenses, lost their look of keen inquiry and became merely stupefied. Ben Halliday slowly swiveled around and stared out at the skyscrapers of New York, as though to assure himself that he was living in the Twenty-first Century and the golden age of science.

  No witches, riding on broomsticks, were visible outside the window.

  Only slightly reassured, Halliday turned back to the prim, gray, tight-mouthed figure across the desk. Dr. Elton Ford did not look like Cagliostro. He resembled what he was: the greatest living psychologist.

  "What did you say?" Halliday asked weakly.

  Ford put his finger tips together precisely and nodded. "You heard me. The answer is ghosts. Your Antarctic Integration Station is haunted."

  "You're joking." Halliday sounded hopeful.

  "I'm giving you my theory in the simplest possible terms. Naturally, I can't verify it without field work."

  "Ghosts!"

  The trace of a smile showed on Ford's thin lips. "Without sheets or clanking chains. This is a singularly logical sort of ghost, Mr. Halliday. It has nothing to do with superstition. It could have existed only in this scientific age. In the Castle of Otranto it would have been absurd. Today—with your integrators—you have paved the way for hauntings. I suspect that this is the first of many, unless you take certain precautions. I believe I can solve this problem—and future ones. But the only possible method is an empirical one. I must lay the ghost, not with bell, book and candle, but through application of psychology.'"

  Halliday was still dazed. "You believe in ghosts?"

  "Since yesterday, I believe in a certain peculiar type of haunting. Basically, this business has nothing in common with the apparitions of folklore. But as a result of new factors, the equation equals exactly the same as . . . well, the Horla, Blackwood's yarns, or even Bulwer-Lytton's 'Haunters and the Haunted.' The manifestations are the same."

  "I don't get it."

  "In witchcraft days a hag stirred herbs in a cauldron, added a few toads and bats, and cured someone of heart disease. Today we leave out the fauna and use digitalis."

  Halliday shook his head in a baffled way. "Dr. Ford, I don't quite know what to say. You must know what you're talking about——"

  "I assure you that I do."

  "But——"

  "Listen," Ford said carefully. "Since Bronson died, you can't keep an operator at your Antarctic Station. This man—Larry Crockett—has even stayed longer than most, but he feels the phenomena, too. A dull, hopeless depression, completely passive and overpowering."

  "But that station is one of the science centers of the world! Ghosts in that place?"

  "It's a new sort of ghost," Ford said. "It also happens to be one of the oldest. Dangerous, too. Modern science, my dear man, has finally gone full circle and created a haunting. Now I'm going down to Antarctica and try exorcism."

  "Oh, Lord," Halliday said.

  The Station's raison d'être was the huge underground chamber known irreverently as the Brainpan. It was something out of classic history, Karnak or Babylon or Ur—high-ceilinged and completely bare except for the double row of giant pillars that flanked the walls.

  These were of white plastic and insulated, and each was twenty feet high, six feet in diameter, and featureless. They contained the new radioatom brains perfected by Integration. They were the integrators.

  Not colloids, they consisted of mind machines, units reacting at light-velocity speeds. They were not, strictly speaking, robots. Nor were they free brains, capable of ego-consciousness. Scientists had broken down the factors that make up the intelligent brain, created supercharged equivalents, and achieved delicate, well-functioning organisms with a fantastically high I.Q. They could be operated either singly or in circuit. The capability increased proportionately.

  The integrators' chief function was that of efficiency. They could answer questions. They could solve complicated problems. They could compute a meteorite's orbit within minutes or seconds, where a trained astrophysicist would have taken weeks to g
et the same answer. In the swift, well-oiled world of 2030, time was invaluable. In five years the integrators had also proved themselves invaluable.

  They were superbrains—but limited. They were incapable of self-adjustment, for they were without ego.

  Thirty white pillars towered in the Brainpan, their radioatom brains functioning with alarming efficiency. They never made a mistake.

  They were—minds! And they were delicate, sensitive, powerful.

  Larry Crockett was a big red-faced Irishman with blue-black hair and a fiery temper. Seated at dinner across from Dr. Ford, he watched dessert come out of the automat slot and didn't care a great deal. The psychologist's keen eyes were watchful.

  "Did you hear me, Mr. Crockett?"

  "What? Oh, yeah. But there's nothing wrong. I just feel lousy."

  "Since Bronson's death there have been six men at this post. They have all felt lousy."

  "Well, living here alone, cooped up under the ice——"

  "They had lived alone before at other stations. So had you."

  Crockett's shrug was infinitely weary. "I dunno. Maybe I should quit, too."

  "You're—afraid to stay here?"

  "No. There's nothing to be afraid of."

  "Not even ghosts?" Ford said.

  "Ghosts? A few of those might pep up the atmosphere."

  "Before you were stationed here, you were ambitious. You planned on marrying, you were working for a promotion——"

  "Yeah."

  "What's the matter? Lost interest?"

  "You might call it that," Crockett acknowledged. "I don't see much point in . . . in anything."

  "Yet you're healthy. The tests I gave you show that. There's a black, profound depression in this place; I feel it myself." Ford paused. The dull weariness, lurking at the back of his mind, crept slowly forward like a gelid, languid tide. He stared around. The station was bright, modern and cheerful. Yet it did not seem so.

  He went on.

  "I've been studying the integrators, and find them most interesting."

  Crockett didn't answer. He was looking absently at his coffee.

  "Most interesting," Ford repeated. "By the way, do you know what happened to Bronson?"

  "Sure. He went crazy and killed himself."

  "Here."

  "Right. What about it?"

  "His ghost remains," Ford said.

  Crockett looked up. He pushed back his chair, hesitating between a laugh and blank astonishment. Finally he decided on the laugh. It didn't sound very amused.

  "Then Bronson wasn't the only crazy one," he remarked.

  Ford grinned. "Let's go down and see the integrators."

  Crockett met the psychologist's eyes, a faint, worried frown appearing on his face. He tapped his fingers nervously on the table.

  "Down there? Why?"

  "Do you mind?"

  "Hell, no," Crockett said after a pause. "It's just——"

  "The influence is stronger there," Ford suggested. "You feel more depressed when you are near the integrators. Am I right?"

  "O.K.," Crockett muttered. "So what?"

  "The trouble comes from there. Obviously."

  "They're running all right. We feed in the questions and we get the right answers."

  "I'm not talking about intellect," Ford pointed out. "I'm discussing emotions."

  Crockett laughed shortly. "Those damn machines haven't got any emotions."

  "None of their own. They can't create. All their potentialities were built into them. But listen, Crockett—you take a supercomplicated thinking machine, a radioatom brain, and it's necessarily very sensitive and receptive. It's got to be. That's why you can have a thirty-unit hookup here—you're at the balancing point of the magnetic currents."

  "Well?"

  "Bring a magnet near a compass and what happens? The compass works on magnetism. The integrators work on—something else. And they're delicately balanced—beautifully poised."

  "Are you trying to tell me they've gone mad?" Crockett demanded.

  "That's too simple," Ford told him. "Madness implies flux. There are variable periods. The brains in the integrators are—well, poised, frozen within their fixed limits, irrevocably in their orbits. But they are sensitive to one thing, because they have to be. Their strength is their weakness."

  "So?"

  "Did you ever live with a lunatic?" Ford asked. "I'm sure you didn't. There's a certain—effect—on sensitive people. The integrators are a damn sight more mentally suggestible than a human being."

  "You're talking about induced madness," Crockett said, and Ford nodded in a pleased fashion.

  "An induced phase of madness, rather. The integrators can't follow the madness pattern; they're not capable of it. They're simply radioatom brains. But they're receptive. Take a blank phonograph record and play a tune—cut the wax and you'll have a disk that will repeat the same thing over and over. Certain parts of the integrators were like blank records. Intangible parts that were the corollary of a finely tuned thinking apparatus. No free will is involved. The abnormally sensitive integrators recorded a mental pattern and are reproducing. Bronson's pattern."

  "So," Crockett said, "the machines have gone nuts."

  "No. Lunacy implies consciousness of self. The integrators record and repeat. Which is why six operators had to leave this station."

  "Well," Crockett said, "so am I. Before I go crazy, too. It's—rather nasty."

  "What's it like?"

  "I'd kill myself if it weren't too much trouble," the Irishman said succinctly.

  Ford took out a celoflex notebook and spun the wheel. "I've a case history of Bronson here. D'you know anything about types of insanity?"

  "Not much. Bronson—I used to know him. Sometimes he'd be way down in the dumps, and then again he'd be the life of the party."

  "Did he ever mention suicide?"

  "Not that I know of."

  Ford nodded. "If he'd talked about it, he never would have done it. He was that type. A manic-depressive, moods of deep depression alternating with periods of elation. Early in the history of psychiatry, patients were classed in two groups: paranoia or dementia praecox. But that didn't work. There was no line of demarcation; the types overlapped. Nowadays we have manic-depressive and schizophrenic. Schizoids can't be cured; the other can. You, Mr. Crockett, are a manic-depressive type, easily influenced."

  "Yeah? That doesn't mean I'm crazy, though."

  Ford grinned. "Scarcely. Like everyone else, you trend in a certain direction. If you ever became insane, you would be a manic-depressive. While I would be a schizophrenic, for I'm a schizoid type. Some psychologists are; it's the outgrowth of a compensated complex, socially channeled."

  "You mean——"

  The doctor went on; he had a purpose in explaining these matters to Crockett. Complete understanding is part of the therapy.

  "Put it this way. Manic-depressives are fairly simple cases; they swing from elation to depression—a big swing, unlike the steady, quick pulse of a schizoid graph. It covers days, weeks, or months. When a manic-depressive type goes over the border, his worst period is on the descending curve—the downbeat. He sits and does nothing. He's the most acutely miserable person on earth—sometimes so unhappy he even enjoys it. Not till the upcurve is reached does he change from passive to active. That's when he breaks chairs and requires a strait jacket."

  Crockett was interested now. He was applying Ford's words to himself, which was the normal reaction.

  "The schizoid, on the other hand," Ford continued, "has no such simple prognosis. Anything can happen. You get the split personality, the mother fixations, and the complexes—Oedipus, return to childhood, persecution, the king complex—an infinite variety almost. A schizoid is incurable—but, luckily, a manic-depressive isn't. Our ghost here is manic-depressive."

  The Irishman had lost some of his ruddy color. "I'm beginning to get the idea."

  Ford nodded. "Bronson went insane here. The integrators were profoundly recep
tive. He killed himself on the downbeat of his manic-depressive curve, that period of intolerable depression, and the mental explosion—the sheer concentration of Bronson's madness—impressed itself on the radioatom brains of the integrators. The phonograph record, remember. The electrical impulses from those brains keep sending out that pattern—the downbeat. And the integrators are so powerful that anyone in the station can't help receiving the impressions."

  Crockett gulped and drank cold coffee. "My God! That's—horrible!"

  "It's a ghost," Ford said. "A perfectly logical ghost, the inevitable result of supersensitive thinking mechanisms. And you can't use occupational therapy on an integrator."

  "Cigarette? Hm-m-m." Crockett puffed smoke and scowled. "You've convinced me of one thing, doctor. I'm going to get out of here."

  Ford patted the air. "If my theory is correct, there's a possible cure—by induction."

  "Eh?"

  "Bronson could have been cured if he'd had treatment in time. There are therapies. Now"—Ford touched his notebook—"I have built up a complete picture of Bronson's psychology. I have also located a manic-depressive who is almost a duplicate of Bronson—a very similar case history, background and character. A sick magnet can be cured by demagnetization."

  "Meanwhile," Crockett said, with a relapse into morbidity, "we have a ghost."

  Nevertheless he became interested in Ford's curious theories and the man's therapies. This calm acceptance of superstitious legend—and proof!—had a fascination for the big Irishman. In Crockett's blood ran the heritage of his Celtic forebears, a mysticism tempered with a hardened toughness. He had lately found the station's atmosphere almost unendurable. Now——

  The station was a self-contained unit, so that only one operator was necessary. The integrators themselves were like sealed lubrication joints; once built, they were perfect of their type, and required no repairs. Apparently nothing could go wrong with them—except, of course, induced psychic crack-up. And even that did not affect their efficiency. The integrators continued to solve abstruse problems, and the answers were always right. A human brain would have gone completely haywire, but the radioatom brains simply fixed their manic-depressive downbeat pattern and continued to broadcast it—distressingly.