“It’s been offered that they were exterminated,” objected Jimmy, “by another race that hated them.”
Howell shook his head.
“The exterminators would have left a boast if they’d hated them,” he said drily. “Mere destruction wouldn’t have been enough. Genghis Khan built a pyramid of skulls, after his enemies were destroyed, to make a boast. Maybe they just got fed up with themselves.”
Jimmy abruptly told him of Danton’s message to his wife Jane. Howell said evenly:
“What of it? I’d like to do something for Jane, but that doesn’t necessarily mean doing something to Danton. After all, he’s doing that pretty thoroughly himself. I couldn’t possibly avenge myself as thoroughly as he’s doing for me. And if he does kill me, he’ll pay for it, and I don’t particularly care.
Jimmy had a queer conviction that Howell meant it. But he didn’t feel at ease. The voyage was beginning to have its effect upon him, too. The first month or so always fixes the pattern for the rest. Danton had an occupation in his morbid suspicion of his wife and—this voyage—his hatred of Howell. It was not a healthy occupation, to be sure. Howell speculated on the Lost Race. Other members of the crew carved plastic or wrote poetry or did anything at all to keep from being bored to insanity. Something had to be done.
The Carilya hurtled on in overdrive. Days passed. Weeks passed. One month. Six weeks. Then—
They came out of overdrive and gazed fascinatedly through the ship’s ports at the stars. There were no longer any familiar constellations, but there was a yellow sun off to port with at least three planets. The Carilya, headed toward the sun, its meteor-detectors weaving restlessly through space. The Space-Guard was undermanned and short of ships, so the licensing of a voyage usually stipulated a landing or two for first-contact reports. The Guard was feverishly expanding its explorations in hopes of finding a Lost Race city that wasn’t completely smashed and in the effort was hopping from one star-cluster to another without exhaustive exploration anywhere. So commercial ships were called on to do surveys the Guard couldn’t at the moment attempt. It was safe enough, certainly. The Lost Race had left behind no other race that might be inimical to man. First-landings were still so commonplace that at least a dozen times a year a freighter turned up with news of an Earth-type planet that could be colonized, and her skipper hopefully applied for full property rights in a world as large and perhaps as rich as the home of the human race.
A fourth and fifth planet turned up as the Carilya neared the yellow sun. But Number Two had seas and cloud-banks and a polar ice-cap. The Carilya swung up to it, matched velocity, and prepared to descend.
Then it checked. An infra-red scanner had found a huge area barren of all vegetation. The Carilya swung round the world’s bulge to descend beside that place, which could be nothing but another blasted city of the Lost Race.
A mile up, Jimmy Briggs saw an oddity. It was a stretch of unshattered highway with a round, unpulverized area at its end. He called the control-room and pointed it out, but the Carilya did not adjust again. She went on down and down, slowly and gingerly, and at last grounded with a barely perceptible bump. Then a pause. Gravity, magnetic, and barometric readings. Air-analysis. Needless, this last, because Lost Race ruins were found only on oxygen-type planets. A bacteria-type test. Then—
“All clear to land, if you wish,” said the skipper’s voice over the speaker-system.
Jimmy Briggs got ready to go outside and breathe fresh air. He was sticking a blaster in his pocket when Howell came to their joint cabin.
“I heard your report on that funny business astern,” he said. He looked animated. “I got a squint at it myself. It looks like there was a rise of ground between it and the city proper, and the blasts that smashed the city missed it. It won’t be true, of course, but we might look!”
“Sure!” said Jimmy. “My idea exactly!”
Danton came out of the engine-room as they went by. It occurred to Jimmy that he hadn’t seen Danton in days. There were only eight men on the ship, but once in the absolute eventlessness of overdrive, it was possible to miss seeing any one of them. Danton locked the engine-room door behind him. His eyes glittered as he looked at Howell. Jimmy realized that he’d had nearly two months of brooding, with a pathological case of jealousy to start with. He nodded briefly and hurried out of the air-lock.
“I never thought to ask you,” he said curtly. “Do you run into Danton often?”
Howell said without emotion:
“I’ve no need to, and I avoid him when I can. He’s played dirty tricks and he’s going crazy, in his own way. I think his suspicion of Jane is a result, and not a cause. I worked out something about the Lost Race that might apply to him.”
He enlarged on his theory as they left the ship and started walking. Jimmy smelled green stuff and growing things. He barely glanced at the desolate square miles of rubble that had been a city. To land on a planet which was not Earth was no longer a novelty, and surely Lost Race ruins were not oddities any longer. The two men from the Carilya pushed through knee-high stuff like moss, looking for the highway Jimmy thought he’d glimpsed from the air. A hundred-foot hummock with giant canes clothing its near side was the clue. A quarter of a mile, and they found shattered stone road surface underfoot.
“It comes out of the fact that there is precognition,” said Howell, tramping along beside Jimmy. “There is foreknowledge of things to come. It’s been proved. It’s a function of the subconscious mind. Besides the demonstrable cases, we have hunches we can’t account for, and fairly often they work out.”
Jimmy nodded, sniffing pleasurably and looking about him as he moved on.
“Surely! Hunches are precognition—except when they’re wishful thinking,” he agreed.
“And we have consciences,” Howell went on. “They’re functions of the subconscious, too. It’s not far-fetched to guess that a bad conscience is a leak from the subconscious, which sees some bad breaks coming as a result of some dirty trick we’ve played. On that basis, Danton has a bad time because his subconscious is warning him of something unpleasant in the offing. He can’t read the warning clearly. He’s got precognition of disaster, but he can’t or won’t recognize its cause. So he’s scared. Jealousy is a form of fear. If conscience doth make cowards of us all—because it’s precognition—then it’ll make some of us insanely jealous.”
“Let’s not think about Danton just now,” said Jimmy. “Look!”
A horned beast stared at them, and broke into headlong flight, then spread giant wings and flapped over a nearby forest-edge and vanished. Jimmy blinked.
“What I really worked out,” said Howell, dismissing the beast with oblique comment, “—you’ve got a blaster in case of need, haven’t you? So have I—what I really worked out was that maybe the Lost Race died of finding out the future. We humans have courage to go on because we don’t know the future. But if our fathers had foreseen all they were going to have to endure in the Third World War, for instance, they probably couldn’t have taken it. Not knowing, they only had to meet it moment by moment and day by day. So they lived through it and stayed sane.”
“Mmmmmmm” said Jimmy, agreeing.
“Suppose the Lost Race saw the future in its entirety? Suppose they saw the inevitable result of something they’d done? It was in the future. They couldn’t avoid it if they lived on into that future. Suppose they saw—oh—that the atomic power they had been using had altered their germ-plasm and that their race was destined to turn into a race of monsters which they considered horrible and obscene. What would they do?”
Jimmy looked startled.
“I suppose they’d commit suicide.” Then he said blankly, “They did!”
“Right,” said Howell. “There’s a new theory of what could have happened to the Lost Race. It may be nonsense, but it explains everything, even to the smashing of their cities so that no race which followed them could duplicate their civilization and share their fate.”
Suddenly the highway underfoot ceased to be rubble. It was behind the hundred-foot hillock. And it was absolutely unbroken. Crawling green things grew over it, but they had not cracked it. And ahead there was a roofless structure, not shattered or smashed or damaged save by creeping vines which grew over it.
The two of them fell silent. Jimmy drew a quick breath. They had come upon an artificial amphitheatre built by the Lost Race, unharmed unless by time. It faced a metal hood not unlike a bandstand-shell both in size and form. Before the hood there was a small object like a podium. They gazed.
“This,” said Jimmy, “is It! A thing the Lost Race didn’t smash! We must take photos and get them to the Space Guard. They will go happily insane. What is it, do you suppose?”
“It looks,” said Howell humorously, “like a lecture platform. Maybe they listened to lectures until they all went mad. But that thing yonder puzzles me.”
They climbed over lush vegetation to the “thing” some three and a half feet high. It was of metal, and it looked rather like a seat, but no human could have comfortably sat in it. It slanted sharply, and there was a carved-out slot as if for a tail. Howell climbed up and sat awkwardly in it, his legs dangling over. Then he gasped.
The hollow part of the bandstand-shell was no longer hollow. A thick mistiness filled it, swirling strangely here and there. Howell leaped out of the queer seat. The mistiness vanished instantly. Howell looked at Jimmy—and then looked back. They poked around, wordless and not quite believing. Then Jimmy said abruptly, “I’ll try it!” He climbed into the seat.
Mists swirled. They were vaguely colored and there were traces of form, here and there. Jimmy said, “The Skipper’ll have to see this! I wish he were here now.”
Then the mists cleared—and the Skipper was there! The mists had coalesced into his form. He stood outside the airlock of the Carilya—also plainly in view—inside the metal hood. He was full size and in three dimensions. He was talking to Danton. Jimmy gaped, and slid off the seat. The Skipper and Danton and the visible part of the space ship vanished together. Instantly. “Television?” Howell queried. “Still working after a hundred thousand years?”
Jimmy gulped. He blinked. He’d thought of the Skipper and wished to see him. And he’d seen him.
“I—thought of the Skipper—” He swallowed. “I—tuned him in by thinking of him … Wait a minute!”
He climbed into the seat again. Mists. He stared with all his might. Then, in this queer hood on the unnamed planet of a merely numbered sun, he saw the signing-on office in the space-port back on Earth. He recognized the man administering the psycho test to somebody wearing the psycho mask. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head. He opened them again.
The space-port office was wiped out. He was looking into the living-room of Sally’s home. Sally came in the door. While he watched hungrily, she went to the little viewer Jimmy had given her and flicked the lever. Jimmy saw his own image on the viewer-screen, some hundreds of light-years distant, moving in the vision-recording he’d made for Sally to remember him by. He slipped off.
“Sally! It—went all the way back to Earth!” he said thickly. “You try it!”
Howell said oddly: “I saw. One creature could show thousands of others what he tuned in on. One person or creature had to control it.” He paused. “Go back and tell the Skipper, Jimmy.”
Jimmy was dazed. He turned and plunged back toward the ship. Television! Across light-centuries! He’d seen Sally as she was at that instant. The marvel of the vision overwhelmed the greater marvel of the working of such a technical device after a thousand centuries. He was like a sleepwalker when he arrived at the ship and told the Skipper what he’d found.
The whole crew followed him back. Howell stood aside as they arrived. The Skipper tried it first. He perched in the awkward, uncomfortable seat. The mists formed and cleared, and he looked—and the others looked with him—at the office of the space line which owned the Carilya. Men the others did not know moved and spoke to each other in the three-dimensional scene. The Skipper gaped at them. The scene dissolved abruptly into another. A fat woman—the Skipper’s wife—cooked on an induction-heating stove. He gaped again and the scene flickered, and a child on fat, wobbly legs waddled before them, clutching a toy.
The Skipper got off the seat. He blew his nose loudly.
“It works. That last was my grandson. Fat little beggar! Now, how the devil—”
But the others were clamoring crazily over the seat. It was extraordinary how every man ignored the technical aspects of the discovery in their hunger to make use of its human side. They had been seven weeks in space without news from home. They had expected to be forty-odd weeks more without communication. They ignored the wonder of the device and the greater wonder that it still functioned. They clamored to see their homes and their families, as men hopelessly imprisoned might have clamored to look in an actually working crystal ball.
All but Danton. And Howell. Howell stood back very quietly, watching the others, Danton hung back, biting his lips, his eyes like coals. Suddenly Howell went back to the ship.
At sundown the others trailed back to the Carilya, babbling to each other. Danton remained behind. An hour after sunset, the Skipper sent for him. The absence of dangerous intelligent beings was certain. The lack of deadly carnivores was not so Sure. Two oilers went after Danton, armed and with lights.
They came back with Danton, and he had all the look of a madman. He was hoarse, as if he had been screaming curses. His eyes were bloodshot and glittering. There was foam on his lips. When the two oilers released him, he bolted into his cabin and locked himself in, muttering incoherencies in a rage-thickened voice.
Jimmy found Howell staring at the ceiling of the cabin. His expression was distinctly queer. Jimmy said breathlessly:
“I still can’t believe it! Television without a transmitter! And above light-speed! It’s impossible! But it’s true!”
“Maybe not,” said Howell detachedly. “Maybe it’s not impossible, that is. It certainly isn’t true!”
“What?” Jimmy could not believe his ears. “Not true? Did you try it?”
Howell nodded abstractedly.
“That’s why I say it isn’t true. I thought of a sister I’ve got, and there she was in that hollow space, going about her regular affairs in a perfectly normal fashion, in a room I remember to the last detail.”
“Then-”
“The house she lived in,” said Howell briefly, “was to be torn down, last time I visited her. In fact, it was torn down before we lifted from Earth. But I’ve no idea what her new home looks like. So subconsciously I imagined her in a room I did know, and that’s what I saw.”
Jimmy’s mouth dropped open.
“You mean—that thing simply took pictures out of our heads and made them visible up in that shell space?”
“Yes,” said Howell. “I tried. I thought of the World President, and there he was. But there wasn’t any background. I don’t know of any background for him. I’ve only seen him on vision-screens. There’s no doubt about it. The thing simply takes pictures out of your head and makes them real and visible for others to see. They can probably be photographed, for that matter. But they wouldn’t mean anything unless the person in the seat was—say—clairvoyant. Or unless he had precognition. Then they’d mean plenty!”
He lifted his head to look at Jimmy.
“A man with proved precognition—foresight—a gift of seeing the future … That gadget would make his powers available to his fellows. Once you proved someone reliably capable of seeing the future—which can be done—you’d have something. Maybe the Lost Race got that. Checks and counterchecks of course, until they were sure they saw what was coming…
Jimmy sat down. When you thought, though, it was better not to have actual vision at a distance. There’d be no privacy.
“Even if you’re right, the Space Guard will go crazy! An artifact of the Lost Race—not only intact but working.”
�
��The Space Guard?” said Howell without intonation. “What do you think’s happening to Danton? He stayed behind to look at images all by himself. He doesn’t know that what he saw was his own imaginings only. He is insanely jealous. I think he saw his most abominable fears realized to the very last atom of horror. What’ll happen to him?”
It was not pleasant to think of. Jimmy lay awake for a long time. He did not like Danton. Sally had told him convincingly of the trick he’d used to get Jane to marry him. She had been a fool to be taken in, perhaps, but she’d surely suffered enough for her folly! While Danton must be literally in hell. Everything he feared and that he tormented himself by suspecting, must have taken form under the metal hood—in color, in three dimensions, and in life size. He must have seen himself mocked intolerably… .
When morning came there was simply no question about what the crew of the Carihja would do. A first-landing had been required by the Space Guard, and it was highly desirable as a break in the awful monotony of overdrive travel. But the discovery of a Lost Race artifact justified anything in the way of delay. The entire crew—all eight men—struggled back to the amphitheatre, carrying the equipment the Skipper had decided on. They set up a camera to photograph the images formed. Other cameras to photograph every possible detail of the amphitheatre. Grubbing-tools to clear away the vines.
It was an extraordinary scene. The weird, unearthlike vegetation; the curiously alien shell of deeply tarnished metal, with the queer-shaped seat before it, and eight men in spacecraft uniform staring at the image of the Skipper’s grandchild waddling about and playing with blocks. He was actually on Earth, multiple millions of billions of miles away. But the camera purred, taking his picture.
My Best Science Fiction Story Page 31