Two years would be eighteen months too late. And the Elpis was carrying supplies only for the shorter voyage. By the time she reached Pluto, everybody on board her would be dead.
The projector must be destroyed. So he had thought. But it would be equally effective to shut off the projector's fuel supply. Would it be any easier?
The projector was powered, or at least activated, by human thought. Tharg suspected that solar energy might be involved, too, even though Pluto was so far distant from the sun. How could he interfere with either of these sources of power? He couldn't prevent the sun from shining or people from thinking.
Wait, though. Eons ago, when he had discovered for himself the process he needed to augment and manifest himself, he had realized that this psi function was capable of other uses than the one he was making of it. Could he use the psi function—or, more accurately, the gamma function of the psi factor—to eliminate human psychic activity temporarily?
It might work. If he could promulgate a thought pattern from the remote past, before there were any human beings on the third planet, the effect ought to be one of the transient mass unconsciousness. For about ten minutes, everybody on the globe would experience a psychological blackout. And in ten minutes, if he picked them properly, the guidebook could get through.
It wasn't impossible, it was even fairly probable, that he could do it. Ten minutes of universal unconsciousness—yes, he thought he could manage it.
What would be the state of affairs, though, when people came back to themselves? Well, for one thing, anybody who had been in any sort of vehicle at the start of the ten minutes would pretty certainly be dead or badly injured. Imagine a ten minute mass blackout on a freeway! Most aircraft would have crashed, trains would have piled up, ships in harbor would have collided. The possibilities for destruction were endless. Even the housewife, getting dinner, or the patient on the operating table, would not be safe. About the only people who could be sure of getting through the ten minutes of blackout unscathed would be people who were asleep in bed in locations remote from airlines or highways.
It would be like a mass epileptic fit. At the end of the ten minutes, the guidebook would be through the barrier and on its way to Earth. But a truly ghastly number of human beings would be dead. Mass unconsciousness, in the Stone Age, would have meant only that a hunter or two would be clawed up by a cave bear. In the mechanized world of the present, using the psi function was unthinkable.
But eliminating the projector's power supply might not be the only possible way of disrupting it. A gasoline engine stops when the gas tank is empty, or when the fuel line from the tank to the engine breaks, or when somebody puts sugar in the gasoline tank. If Tharg didn't dare to eliminate the power supply, could he interfere with the transmission of it to the mechanisms that projected the barrier?
Tharg did not think about this very long before deciding that he could not. There remained the final expedient, of supplying the projector with improper fuel. If Tharg couldn't stop people from thinking, or their thoughts from being transmitted, could he somehow impair the quality of their thought?
And here he saw a tiny gleam of hope. When the Vaeaa had built their barrier-projector, they hadn't known, of course, what sort of beings would eventually evolve on Earth. They had meant it to be activated by any sort of rational thought. But for thousands of years the projector had been responding to human thought impulses. It was reasonable to assume that, by now, it would have become accustomed to this particular fuel, as a gasoline engine becomes accustomed to a particular grade of gasoline. If the grade could be abruptly changed—
Tharg himself was a sort of sentient thought. He wasn't a human thought; he wasn't human in his origins. A couple of centuries ago he had discovered how to augment himself psychologically. He had already decided against trying to use the psi function here. But if he could dissolve himself, his essence, his basic identity, in human thought, he might be able to tinct and change its very nature for a short space of time. He might, in fine, be able to act like sugar in gasoline.
He didn't know whether or not it would work, and he could only try it once. Whether or not it succeeded, the attempt would mean his annihilation. Tharg, who had persisted for so incredibly long, would cease to exist.
Now that it had come to that, he found he didn't much care. This was not so much altruism as weariness. His extraordinary existence was nothing to cling to. Yes, he would try it. The important thing was that the new guidebook should get through.
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Chapter Sixteen
Captain Ambarzumian took the thermometer out of his mouth and regarded it distrustfully. Normal. Well, he hadn't really thought he was running a high fever. The Elpis was only a few days out from Earth, and he'd been in perfect shape, mentally and physically, at the takeoff. Indeed, since his responsibilities were heavy and continuous, mental and physical stability had been prime conditions of his employment. Yet just in the last few minutes he'd begun to feel feverish, languid and headachey.
And the physical symptoms were only part of the trouble. In the chart room, a little while ago, he'd been unable to attend to what Parker, his first officer, was telling him. He'd suffered from a sort of obsessive distraction, an inability to apply his mind to what was directly under his nose, while he'd had to contemplate an unwanted and irrelevant mental picture fixedly. All the time Parker had been talking, Ambarzumian had seen a bumblebee, drunk with nectar, bumbling and trembling in the depths of a dark red rose. When Parker had saluted and turned to go, the picture had been replaced by a range of mountains, extraordinarily rugged and bristling, rising out of a dense sea of mist.
Could his symptoms be the result of exposure to ionizing radiation from some undetected source? No, the ship's Geiger counters were silent, and the ship herself was heavily shielded. Ambarzumian rubbed his hand over his bluish jowls uneasily. Perhaps he was getting some new sort of virus infection. If the symptoms persisted, he'd go see the ship's M.O. He couldn't think what was the matter with him.
-
Tharg, meanwhile, was finding his heroic intention of self-annihilation unexpectedly difficult to carry out. It was partly a matter of timing: Tharg calculated that there was a space of not more than half an hour, all told, when interference with the projector's fuel supply would be efficacious, and he could of course be annihilated only once. He would get no second chance.
But his main difficulty was that dissolving himself was something easier said than done. At first he had feared losing his identity. He had clung to it as a timid swimmer clings to the side of the pool. But when, growing desperate with the passing moments, he had tried to abandon it entirely, to acquire momentum to let himself slide into the great current of human thought, nothing had happened. He had willed himself to dissolve, no longer to be. He still was.
It occurred to Tharg that he might have more success if he could merge himself preliminarily in one human personality. He had already experienced something like this with Denise. It would be like dissolving the dyestuff in a small amount of hot water before adding the coloring matter to the dye bath.
Who should it be? The time was getting short. His first choice had to be right.
The ideal person would be somebody who could help him with the problem of timing his dissolution accurately. And when the question was put in this way, there could be little doubt who the ideal person was: Captain Ambarzumian of the Elpis. The Elpis was well out from Earth, in interplanetary space where the guidebook's phenomena-of-approach would be particularly evident. Captain Ambarzumian was an immediate and competent observer. Ambarzumian would be simultaneously a personality for Tharg's preliminary dissolution, and an observatory from which he could look out for the guidebook's nearest approach.
He must hurry. The margin of choice was so small! He hoped Ambarzumian wouldn't prove a recalcitrant personality.
Tharg caught the captain just at the moment when he was going into the chart room. The captain was relaxed and off guard. In an insta
nt Tharg was a part of his thinking. He did not "possess" the captain even as much as he had "possessed" Denise. That was not what Tharg was trying to do. But he was interior to him. He could not help having a certain effect on him.
Actually, Tharg himself was more affected by his half-dissolution into Ambarzumian's personality than the captain was. Tharg felt his sense of identity leaving him. It was thinned out, watered down, to the point where he hardly knew who he was any more. Yet at the same time he must cling to enough awareness of himself to be able to act when the time came. Dissolved in Ambarzumian as he was, seeing through his eyes, sharing his thoughts, he must yet manage to be Tharg.
This was a difficulty he had more or less anticipated. But he had not realized that, once he was interior to the captain, he would be tempted to let the dissolution be final and complete. The captain's body was not like the one Tharg had had to part with forcibly, so long ago, but it was a body: to be in contact with flesh again, even passively, even with alien flesh, made him painfully aware of how unhappy his disembodied state had been. Would he be able to part with Ambarzumian when the time came, even to let the guidebook through? It would be like leaving a bright fire to go out into the darkness again. And the darkness, this time, would be the darkness of final annihilation, of complete nothingness.
He must overcome the temptation. He would not let it divert him from his purpose. Meantime, he must wait and watch.
-
Ambarzumian had taken some anti-histamine and was feeling, or thought he was feeling, rather better. He got a cup of coffee from the galley and took it into the chart room, where Parker already was. He was checking over the latest course data from the computers when the lights in the room began to go out.
They did not stay extinguished, but flicked off and on fitfully. Three red alarm lights, meantime, had begun to glow in the same erratic fashion as the chart room lights.
An alarm bell sounded. Its pitch kept changing as it went on and off. A recorded voice said, "All hands to emergency stations," and another recorded voice repeated, "Abandon ship, all hands abandon ship," stopping occasionally as if for breath and then beginning again.
These mechanical communications of distress were interspersed with other, more reassuring ones—a voice that said, "Fire extinguished," several times, and another that informed the Elpis' crew that normal air pressure had been restored. Finally, underlying all the auditory confusion, came the deep reassuring gong note that meant, "All clear."
Ambarzumian, pale with alarm, had started to his feet at the first red flicker from the alarm lamps. But as the medley of signals continued, he realized that the ship's servo-mechanisms were reacting abnormally to something.
He clicked on the closed-circuit TV that gave him a view of the Elpis' interior, and went over the ship carefully, section by section. Nothing seemed amiss. Then he got Vladimir, the chief engineer, on the intercom.
"Nothing's wrong mechanically, sir," the engineer reported. His voice was a series of squawks and beeps. "But the solenoid relays keep popping off and on, and our gauge needles are whirling all around the dials."
"Send Tufts to me." Tufts was the ship's electrician, and had a Ph. D. in physics besides.
"The ship's passing through a strong, a very strong magnetic field, sir," he said when he came in. "It's extraordinary. I don't see any reason for it."
Ambarzumian was silent. He had read the report of the First Joint Venus Expedition carefully, and knew that no magnetic field, of any strength whatever, had been reported in this part of space.
"Is it ... dangerous?" he asked at last.
"No, sir, not in itself. It won't have any effect on our motion. It's just annoying. The Elpis will be back to normal as soon as she gets out of it. I don't think any of our equipment will stay magnetized. But meantime, our relays and so on keep popping off."
Tufts, though a competent physicist, was wrong for once. There were a few more moments of popping relays and auditory confusion. Then the Elpis swerved sharply to the right. One of her rockets had been touched off.
The shock almost threw Ambarzumian off his feet. He clutched at a cabinet for support. Momentarily, he saw the bee bumbling in the heart of the flower extremely vividly. The Elpis' change of motion had astonished him—the intensity of the magnetic field must be really remarkable, to cause one of the rockets to fire.
Tharg felt Ambarzumian stagger and almost fall. The shock roused him from his absorption in the luxury of having a body again. Ambarzumian was astonished at the strength of a magnetic field where he had expected no field at all: the field, Tharg thought, must be part of the guidebook's phenomena-of-approach, and the great question was where, in relation to the barrier-projector, the guidebook currently was.
It was impossible to give an accurate answer. But Tharg thought that the moment had come.
He hesitated, clinging for a nanosecond longer to the captain's personality. It was going to be so cold outside! Then he let himself dissolve completely. He was no longer clinging to the captain, interior to him: he was Ambarzumian.
Whatever happened from now on, he had no control over it. He felt his identity streaming away from him. He wished it weren't going. He was Ambarzumian? No, he wasn't anybody. He hoped he'd picked the right time. He'd never know it if he hadn't. The guidebook should be almost at the barrier.
Captain Ambarzumian pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. How odd he felt! Lightheaded—he could almost see his thoughts issuing from between his eyes in a pale pink spiral, rolling and coiling out to be merged in the thoughts of the other human beings on the ship. And the outflux from the ship would become a tiny part of the great river of human thought that swept out from Earth.
What was the matter with him? It must be the magnetic field.
-
Ambarzumian had got the Elpis back on her course without much difficulty. Since she carried plenty of reserve rocket fuel, the extra expenditure was not serious. Now she was out of the magnetic field; conditions on board were back to normal; and the captain, in the lounge, was relaxing over a glass of tea.
His symptoms had ceased with Tharg's removal, and by now Ambarzumian had decided that they had been caused by an over-consumption of coffee. Henceforward, he would stick to freshly-brewed tea.
He was fated to be interrupted. The glass of tea was still more than half full when the signal bell on the ship's radar system rang.
More magnetism? But the bell was ringing in a perfectly normal fashion; it ought to mean that the radar beam had picked up an object within significant range of the ship. Glass of tea in hand, Ambarzumian hurried to the chart room.
Parker was bending intently over the radar screen, a three-dimensional square box. Far off to the left, just at the edge of the screen, a tiny, slowly moving dot was visible.
"It ought to miss us by a good kilometer," Parker observed. "I mean, a kilometer in all directions. It's out of our level entirely."
Ambarzumian nodded. He sipped from the glass of tea. "Mighty slow for a meteor," he said.
He and Parker watched as the red wedge that indicated the Elpis and the tiny spot drew nearer to each other. The captain began to frown. Parker licked his lips nervously. "Sir, isn't it ... isn't it changing direction?" he asked.
Ambarzumian said nothing for a moment. But the slow-moving dot's change of direction was undeniable. It was curving toward them now, and moving upward into their plane in a slow arc.
"I want direct view," Ambarzumian told the first officer abruptly.
Parker nodded. Direct view, since it involved considerable expenditure of power, was usually not called upon except at landing. He gave an order to the engineer.
Slowly the plates at the Elpis' bow slid back. Ambarzumian had got his field glasses out of the rack and was focusing them.
The object was quite near now, and since it was to the left of the Elpis while the sun was to the right, it was brilliantly illuminated. Ambarzumian studied it carefully through his field glasses.<
br />
He saw a small brownish ellipsoid, perfectly smooth and not at all like a meteor, coming slowly toward the ship. Even as he watched, it changed direction again and began to move forward in a course that was exactly parallel to the Elpis' line of motion.
Parker had got his own glasses and was looking at the object too. "Sir, do you think it ... might be a space mine or a shell?"
Ambarzumian shook his head. "No," he said with a conviction that may have been Tharg's legacy to him. "No, it's nothing like that."
-
Chapter Seventeen
It had been a long sleep. Tharg yawned and stretched luxuriously. Yes, it seemed to him he had been asleep a very long time. His muscles felt stiff and unused, strange to him.
He was suddenly wide awake, shocked into full consciousness by wonder. A long sleep? How could that be? The last thought he remembered having was a regret for his own annihilation, as his identity had dissolved into the great stream of human thought; and for untold eons before that he had been a mere dimensionless awareness, with no muscles to stretch, no body to be asleep or wakeful. Had he somehow acquired a body again?
He looked down at himself: His feet, his legs, his knees, his thighs, his hands, his arms, his chest, even his valued sex—all were there. Even the pouch between his shoulders, as he discovered by feeling, was present. He had a body again.
A body, but not entirely identical with the body he had had when he had lived on Earth billions of years ago. Though he felt perfectly real and solid to his own touch, his flesh was golden and faintly luminous, and his limbs had an unaccustomed lightness and buoyancy. The flesh and blood he had once had had meant limitation; this new body meant freedom. In short, it was his second body that he had.
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