Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  But there was no one who would think him anything but a fool.

  He moved on again in the dusk, remembering locations of streets, but the signposts he could not read. Everywhere, the signs, the advertisements were as mystic symbols of some order into which all this vast throng had been initiated. Of them all, only he stood in naked ostracism. As darkness increased, there was a lull in the crowd between going home from work and the return to the streets for pleasure. In this time he sensed the beginnings of real hunger, but he had no solution. He recalled vaguely the need of money, but the symbols were less than shadows of memory. There was no money in his pockets. He could not beg enough for a meal. He dared not open his mouth.

  There was his own home, of course, but the police would be watching for him there. Alice would certainly report him—provided she didn’t make another blundering attempt to kill him.

  He could not go home.

  Through the evening hours he ranged among the pleasure crowds watching the faces of the dull, contented men and the pretty, flirtatious women. With increasing wonder he scanned as if for something lost. He knew not what it was, but these among whom he searched seemed imperceptibly decreased in stature, and his panic grew.

  With furious haste he almost ran among them peering at the face of each to whom he came, as if for a lost and forgotten image of himself. But these were not of himself—they were more than strangers; they were like foreign beings he had never known.

  With each minute and each hour all that he looked upon became more alien and he more lost. While the beckoning urge to unite with them had not ceased, the gap across which he watched steadily widened. As if it were a spreading chasm in the Earth with him on one side and all mankind on the other, he saw himself hurled back and away while those for whom he yearned dwindled and diminished and were wholly unaware of any gap.

  As darkness settled down for its long haul through the night the streets became increasingly deserted. Lights went out on signs and store fronts and he grew in conspicuousness as he moved in solitude about the city.

  Almost alone, he ranged the streets with swifter pace and growing rage like some great animal clawing and thundering at the darkness of his loneliness. He paced before the perforated cliffsides of man’s own making and watched the shadows against the little square flames, each marking the place of a man, side by side, row on row, until they seemed to reach the stars.

  He raged through the city and into the hills above town where he sat at last upon a granite rock, suddenly motionless and still as if straining to unite with the Earth itself. Only his eyes were alive watching and dreading the coming of day and the awakening of the city.

  He dreaded the blinking traffic beacons and suppressed a cry of fury at the neon lights with their beckoning invitation to a world he could not enter.

  He slept at last there on the hillside, lying against the granite boulder that was still warm from the day’s heat. He was later aware only of lying huddled on the ground and the Earth was full of chill. The sun was slow in its warming of the face of the hill and he was depressed with hunger.

  Below lay the city. He felt like a traveler who had arrived at a destination in the darkness of night. It was not merely the old transformed now. It was wholly new—and incredibly ugly. Yet it gave a sense of perspective that his hasty night flight had denied him.

  Surely the situation was not as impossible as it seemed. Somehow he could prevent them from locking him up as aphasic or schizophrenic. It was unthinkable that there should be a complete barrier to communication between him and the world.

  If only there were another of his kind with whom he might talk to diminish the unbearable loneliness of being the single member of his species in a strange and savage world.

  Another—there were others, he thought. A hundred others! His throat caught in a sudden agony of relief as he wondered how he had forgotten in the night.

  But the relief was short lived. How could two aphasics talk with each other? No solace or assistance could be offered by another of his kind if they were both in individual prisons. The barrier was doubled instead of broken.

  He sat upon the rock again, knowing that in the hours to come he’d have to go down the hill to—somewhere. But for the duration of this instant he could remain.

  His thoughts went back to Alice. He was aware of a sympathetic and lucid understanding of her that made him appalled at the thoughts of the blindness with which he had walked through the years of their marriage. They had started out with something fine and lovely between them, and he knew what had become of it now, he thought with startling clarity.

  Alice had been sick even then. Her love for him had been genuine, but she could not come to marriage prepared to give the companionship it demanded—either to him or to anyone else she might have married. Her aspirations were chaotic and turned in upon herself.

  And he had never helped her.

  He had to get back to the world of men if for no other reason than to make amends to his wife and heal her soul of the bitter distortions that had made her life a hell.

  It could be done. And then he thought for the first time of the Institute’s ban on Synthesis. Vixen and the staff had defied the ban!

  Frustration boiled into fury, and he rose and clenched fists in the face of the burning sun. He cursed his prison and damned the intolerable error that had been the mason of its stout walls. But he continued to stand—helpless.

  He watched the sun revealing the city of dreadful ugliness. Structures of four different centuries stood side by side, and scarcely a single one revealed a line of imagination or beauty. The city was barren and full of discord to the senses. He hated it—and longed to re-enter it.

  But the longing was becoming dim, even as the prolonged fast had diminished hunger. He felt a curious freedom from all that the city represented, and that itself was warning, he thought, of the deteriorating facilities of his mind.

  It had been a futile dream to suppose that the human mind could be rebuilt by a machine. A hundred had been sacrificed to that dream, and he was the last. After him there would be no more.

  In their common prison the hundred would be a living monument to the futility of his dream.

  But it wasn’t a common prison, he kept reminding himself. If it only were—!

  He lifted his head sharply at the impact of new thought. For an instant the scene before him seemed suddenly shining and glorious beyond his power to behold. What if it were a common prison!

  He dredged into his mind, stood aside, and examined his own thought processes. He recalled his utterance to Vixen, the utterance to which Vixen had responded as if it were sheer gibberish.

  He recalled the exact words he had spoken then. And they were words—he let them flow through his mind over and over again. They were discrete symbols for exact thought processes. They constituted a language, a real and infinitely precise language, a language given by the semantic selector as it oriented the pre-punched molecules that formed his brain.

  It was the same language spoken by the Synthesized patients, which he had once called gibberish.

  He was never aware of starting to run, only of being actually in flight down the long hillside as if in some fleeting panic. But he knew where he was going.

  He was going to find a human being with whom he could speak.

  III

  Marianne Carter had been a brilliant young selector technician in David’s laboratory. Her brain had been virtually destroyed by electric shock.

  Marianne’s parents in desperate hope had asked David for help, but he had not helped them. He had given them back their daughter alive, but only as a bewildered, gibbering creature who neither spoke sense nor comprehended anything that was said to her.

  She had been his last patient, and she was now the closest. By the roundabout way through the city’s outskirts, which was the only route David dared travel, she was fully ten miles away.

  She was located at one of the small, public sanatoriums that had long
ago replaced the gray prison houses once used for the mentally sick. David knew the place well. Others of his patients had been cared for there at times but Marianne was the only one there now.

  It was well beyond noon when he finally arrived at the rear of the grounds surrounding the place. Through the heavy shrubbery that hid it he could see the faint, pink glow of the barrier field that fenced the grounds. Beyond, numerous patients were out on the lawn. If luck were with him, he might be able to see Marianne. Like some fantastic peeping Tom, he thought, a deep and desperate urge within him would be satisfied by a single glimpse of her and a world that he could understand.

  He crouched down, watching first one side of the big grounds and then the other. Increasingly aware of the weakness and hunger that was returning, he knew that it was not long that he could wait.

  And it was futile, he repeated. In the end he would have to give up and submit to hospitalization—and imprisonment. But first he had to see Marianne. He had to know about the language.

  The afternoon dimmed and took on the quality of night. He watched the patients herded to the buildings by the attendants. There was as yet no sign of Marianne.

  He shifted his cramped position, knowing he had come as far as he could go yet unwilling to cross that final pass between this meager freedom and the captivity he must face.

  As he moved slightly he became aware for the first time of the two men who crouched a little way beyond him on the other side of the shrubs and right next to the barrier fence. He had no idea how long they had been there. They hunched beside a small wire hoop that one of them held against the fence.

  With instinctive caution, David retreated to his former immobile crouch. In a moment he saw a figure moving, swiftly across the lawn beyond. A woman’s skirt fluttered wildly with her running in the half darkness. She ducked down as she neared the barrier. On hands and knees she crawled forward and through.

  He sucked in his breath with sharp intake as she appeared through the hoop that the men held. There was no power on Earth that was known to be capable of breaking through that barrier field—until now.

  Then she stood up and he saw her face in full view. It was Marianne.

  He must have made a movement and a sound. The two men turned and saw him. Almost in the same instant they were upon him. For a brief moment he fought back, but their fury was merciless, and his physical weakness gave them quick and easy victory.

  They held him upright between them and stared in perplexity as if debating his fate in their own minds. David shook his head, his senses foggy from the beating, and felt the blood flowing from a cut lip. Then he saw Marianne standing before him. As his eyes met hers, her face flooded with startled recognition.

  “David Mantell! Dr. Mantell—!”

  Now it was his attackers who were startled. They loosed their grasp and backed in awe. He heard them exclaim beneath their breaths—his name.

  It took a moment to realize that he had heard Marianne’s words for what they were, that he had recognized his own name. In consecutive order he marveled at his understanding of the men’s words.

  And then he was close to crying with the sheer joy of a human voice that he understood. He managed a smile with his bloody lips.

  “Hello, Marianne.”

  “You are one of us!” she breathed.

  “I have a Synthesized brain,” he said. “I escaped the laboratory to avoid imprisonment in a place like this.” He waved a hand towards the building. “I couldn’t talk.”

  “I know. All of us nearly went crazy at first.”

  “What does this mean? Your coming through the fence, and these…friends…of yours? Who are they?”

  “Don’t you remember? This is John Gray. He was your first patient. And this is Martin Everett.”

  The first man held out his hand and took David’s warmly. He was a thin-faced, sensitive man, the artist of whom David had been thinking that very morning.

  “We’re terribly sorry,” said John Gray. “We couldn’t risk detection. We’ve planned too long to chance a failure now.”

  “I remember…five years ago—” said David.

  He remembered faintly the name of Martin Everett, too. A spaceport engineer, he had been browned with the sun of several planets, but now he was pale from long confinement.

  “Tell me what have you done? What do you know of our condition? What do you plan?”

  “There’s no time for that,” said Martin urgently. “We’ve got to get away from here. We’ll explain later, in our quarters.”

  The other two nodded and David found himself being hurried along between them, his consent being taken for granted. They had parked a large car on the road beyond the shrubbery and no one said anything more as they climbed in. He was too full of wonderment to do anything more than observe.

  In the car Marianne attempted to wipe the blood from his face. His gratitude for that simple attention was beyond all consideration of the act itself. It was a symbol that he was back in the fraternity of mankind. Each of them would be kinder to other men all the days of their lives because they had seen the dark, lonely walls of hell.

  The four rode with little comment, but from each to all the others there seemed a mingling of spirit, almost as if they were become of common substance.

  Marianne was a small, light-haired girl. Sitting beside him she reminded David of Alice when Alice was young and sweet and unembittered. But Marianne had the clarity of mind that Alice had never known.

  The two men in front, the engineer and the artist, seemed aged far more than the gap of years since he had last seen them would account for. They were different men, of stature and humanity. In contrast he thought of the hordes among whom he had walked the previous night searching for a nameless something. Here it was, he thought. In the profile of these men—and in Marianne—was the thing he had sought, the lost and forgotten image of himself.

  In all of them was strange newness that he could not name or define. It was the same new strength he had felt in the first moments of awakening, but it had been overshadowed and strangled in the darkness of that loneliness during those first hours. Now it was back and he began to examine it for what it was.

  They drove to a dilapidated house in the oldest section of town. Cautiously alert for followers, they stopped at the rear, and all of them got out.

  The interior of the house was more pleasant than the outside. It had the atmosphere of an apartment where a couple of highly civilized men had lived for a long time.

  Before she allowed him to question or be questioned, Marianne took David into the bathroom to finish the repairs to his face, and into the kitchen where she prepared a soup for him.

  She sat at the opposite end of the table and watched as he ate. He was aware of her presence like a warming radiance. When he looked up abruptly she smiled at him, her deep brown eyes alive with human qualities, but, as if she read in his eyes that he was reminded of other things, she did not speak.

  How many long, cold years had it been since he had sat thus in communion with Alice, he thought. Which of them had been the first to break the spell? Fault was in them both, but he was willing to assume all blame if the healing powers of Synthesis could answer his yearning for her.

  Finished with the light meal, he allowed Marianne to lead him to the living room where John and Martin were waiting expectantly.

  “For us this is unexpected luck to have you with us,” said John. “For you it may not be the tragedy you have believed if some of the things we have figured out are correct. We hope we can look to look to you for the advice we have long needed and an explanation of just what has happened to us.”

  “I am afraid you know more than I,” said David. “What have you done?”

  “Little more than getting together and communicating with each other. Martin and I were in the same sanatorium cell, and we discovered we could talk to each other. Through the shop they provided for occupational therapy we succeeded in devising a gadget to pass through the fences.
We took it easy at first because we wanted to find out what had happened to cut us off from everyone else. We still don’t know, but we have concluded it’s not wholly bad.

  “We gradually contacted most of the others, about seventy-five so far, and then planned to escape permanently as a group. This is the beginning, and now you have come along. What would you advise?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to wait for an answer to that.”

  He sat down before the group and faced them. He spoke again slowly. “It has only been hours since I believed that I was utterly alone and incapable of communication with any other person in the world. I don’t need to tell you about that hell. Each of you has been in it longer than I.

  “I am beginning to have a faint understanding of what may have caused it.”

  “We thought at first that it might have been deliberate,” said Martin. “We thought it might have been given during Synthesis to replace other faculties that couldn’t be used. But that didn’t make sense in the light of what was done to us afterwards, locking us up.”

  David shook his head. “It was not deliberate—not on our part at least. I think it was entirely accidental in the sense of being unforeseen, but that does not imply a failure of the process. Rather, I think it has worked entirely too well!

  “It would not be the first time that a semantic mechanism has gone on its own and turned up surprising results. You may recall Jamieson’s experiences when he first devised a semantic selector and it turned out Scott’s ‘History of Mankind’. Historians are still trying to show that it is a true forecast of the future, but for some reason he would never reveal during his lifetime Jamieson was positive that it would never happen as the book related. He said the chances of it were mathematically zero and let it go at that.”

  “After I knew that I possessed a language common to the Synthesized,” said Marianne, “it seemed to me that its only possible origin was in the semantic selector.”