Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  “Will I…see him?” she asked.

  “No, that will not be necessary. We require what is termed a neural analogue so that those factors of David’s life involving you may be reconstructed. Some patterns are inevitably lost, of course, but for the most part he will remember you and all that has passed between you.”

  “I should think you—and he’d be satisfied to have that forgotten.”

  “No. It is important that every possible element of his life be reconstructed and re-evaluated. Loss can be kept at a minimum that way. Your analogue, for example, will restore all that he has ever done or thought in connection with you, every opinion or feeling he has expressed to you or which has been colored by your presence. Then we will call others who will contribute their share, but yours is among the most important.”

  She shuddered in revulsion. “No—you can do without me. I don’t understand what you are talking about, but you can get along without me.”

  “We can’t! Your mind holds the greatest part of the pattern we need. David’s life is within the cells of your brain.”

  “I can’t do it—I won’t. I’m afraid of all this.” Her eyes scanned the far ceiling where the webbed cables looped in ritualistic patterns. “You can’t make me—”

  “The accident—remember?”

  “Some day I’ll kill you,” she sobbed.

  A nurse assisted her in the preparations. Sick with fear, she permitted her clothing to be exchanged for a plain smock, and then lay upon the padded couch while the score of electrodes were carefully oriented and pasted to her skull. The paste had a thick, nauseating smell that made her stomach contract violently.

  She was given then a gentle anaesthetic to control her voluntary thoughts and movements and was left alone in the faintly lighted room.

  While Alice was being made ready, Dr. Vixen told the technicians of the Institute’s ban on Synthesis, offering each of them the chance to leave. None did. He wished he hadn’t had to tell them, but he had no right to make the decision for them though he felt sure of what each of them would do.

  All of them were nervous and tense. As a group they were acting on their own in a move in which David had always been there to lead. The tension was multiplied by the fact that it was he upon whom they were operating. So great was this tension they held almost reckless disregard for the ban of the Institute. Yet each knew that he was gambling his whole future life and career in this illegal step.

  Dr. Vixen, watching them, sensed the nervousness that threatened the very success they wanted so badly, but he could do nothing now to help them. David had trained them well. They would have to rely on the excellence of that training.

  He gave the signal for the beginning of the exacting, laborious process of transcribing the data from the mind of Alice Mantell to master molecules which would, in turn, be used to recreate large areas of the shattered brain of David Mantell.

  From his glass observation window Dr. Vixen watched the inert form of the woman. Even in the drugged sleep her face held the cast of bitter lines. It was hard to remember, he thought, that she was only a sick child, a bewildered woman who had never understood the shadow of greatness in which she stood. It was hard to forget that she had broken the heart of David Mantell, and in the end had tried to kill him.

  Somewhere, in her youth, there must have been a tone of gentleness, a graciousness and sweetness that David had loved. He would not have married her if she had been so wholly without charm. What had happened to it in the years between? Dr. Vixen did not know. He had heard David’s story in snatches of unbearable bitterness that David had sometimes found impossible to contain. But he wondered if Alice might not have her side to the story, too.

  A hurried call from one of the technicians brought an end to these considerations. He hurried to the post from which the man called. On the screen of the electron microscope there he saw the image of the pattern molecule that was building, being shaped by the impulses from the mind of Alice Mantell. It was a hundred thousand times the size of the one that would ultimately take its place in the reconstructed brain of her husband.

  “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, delayline 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 1021 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. Mutiple 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 n
ame, 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.

  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 became 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 in
stant, 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 passersby. 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.