Muzzi was quick, but not quick enough. He was not quite out of the wheelchair when it passed the point of no return.
Marcus ran to the rail and stared down, and there was Muzzi in his bandoliers and steel-ribbed jacket, plummeting toward the maglev strips, beginning to move even before he hit, bouncing up, hitting again, and all the time moving with gathering speed until he flashed out of sight, no longer alive, no longer a threat to anyone.
TO SEE ANOTHER MOUNTAIN
Genius is a subject that comes up in various science fiction tales. Since Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John and probably before, writers have been fascinated by the potential of human intelligence, its limits, and the possibility that it may have aspects we have not yet discovered.
Unfortunately, too many stories about really brilliant people become dull. Thankfully, “To See Another Mountain,” first published in 1958, isn’t one of those. Frederik Pohl is far too keen not to mention the oft-noticed proximity of genius and madness. Where that boundary lies and the exact implications of the two are what make this story cook.
And cook it does!
Trucks were coming up the side of the mountain again. The electric motors were quiet enough, but these were heavy-duty trucks and the reduction gears could be heard a mile off. A mile by air; that was eighteen miles by the blacktop road that snaked up the side of the mountain, all hairpin curves with banks that fell away to sheer cliffs.
The old man didn’t mind the noise. The trucks woke him up when he was dozing, as he so often was these days.
“You didn’t drink your orange juice, doctor.”
The old man wheeled himself around in his chair. He liked the nurse. There were three who took care of him, on shifts, but Maureen Wrather was his personal favorite. She always seemed to be around when he needed her. He protested: “I drank most of it.” The nurse waited. “All right.” He drank it, noting that the flavor had changed again. What was it this time? Stimulants, tranquilizers, sedatives, euphoriacs. They played him up and down like a yo-yo. “Do I get coffee this morning, Maureen?”
“Cocoa.” She put the mug and a plate with two arrowroot cookies down on the table, avoiding the central space where he laid out his endless hands of solitaire; that was one of the things the old man liked about her. “I have to get you dressed in half an hour,” she announced, “because you’ve got company coming.”
“Company? Who would be coming to see me?” But he could see from the look in her light, cheerful eyes, even before she spoke, that it was a surprise. Well, thought the old man with dutiful pleasure, that was progress, only a few weeks ago they wouldn’t have permitted him any surprises at all. Weeks? He frowned. Maybe months. All the days were like all the other days. He could count one, yesterday; two, the day before; three, last week—he could count a few simple intervals with confidence, but the ancient era of a month ago was a wash of gray confusion. He sighed. That was the price you paid for being crazy, he thought with amusement. They made it that way on purpose, to help him “get well.” But it had all been gray and bland enough anyhow. Back very far ago there had been a time of terror, but then it was bland for a long, long time.
“Drink your cocoa, young fellow,” the nurse winked, cheerfully flirting. “Do you want any music?”
That was a good game. “I want a lot of music,” he said immediately. “Stravinsky—that Sac thing, I think. And Alban Berg. And—I know. Do you have that old one, The Three Itta Fishies?” He had been very pleased with the completeness of the tape library in the house on the hill, until he found out that there was something in that orange juice too. Every request of his was carefully noted and analyzed. Like the tiny microphones taped to throat and heart at night, his tastes in music were data in building up a picture of his condition. Well, that took some of the joy out of it, so the old man had added some other joy of his own.
The nurse turned solemnly to the tape player. There was a pause, a faint marking beep and then the quick running opening bars of the wonderful Mendelssohn concerto, which he had always loved. He looked at the nurse. “You shouldn’t tease us, doctor,” she said lightly as she left.
Dr. Adam Sidorenko had changed the world. His Hypothesis of Congruent Values, later expanded to his Theory of General Congruences, was the basis for a technology fully as complex and even more important than the nucleonics that had come from Einstein’s Energy-mass equation. This morning the brain that had enunciated the principle of congruence was occupied in a harder problem: What were the noises from the courtyard?
He was going to have his picture taken, he guessed, taking his evidence from the white soft shirt the nurse had laid out for him, the gray jacket and, above all, from the tie. He almost never wore a tie. (The nurse seldom gave him one. He didn’t like to speculate about the reasons for this.) While he was dressing, the trucks ground into the courtyard and stopped, and men’s voices came clearly.
“I don’t know who they are,” he said aloud, abandoning the attempt to figure it out.
“They’re the television crew,” said the nurse from the next mom. “Hush. Don’t spoil your surprise.”
He dressed quickly then, with excitement; why, it was a big surprise. There had never been a television crew on the mountain before. When he came out of the dressing room the nurse frowned and reached for his tie. “Sloppy! Why can’t you large-domes learn how to do a simple knot?” She was a very sweet girl, the old man thought, lifting his chin to help. She could have been his daughter—even his granddaughter. She was hardly twenty-five; yes, that would have been about right. His granddaughter would have been about that now—
The old man frowned and turned his head away. That was very wrong. He didn’t have a grandchild. He had had one son, no more, and the boy had died, so they had told the old man, in the implosion of the Haaroldsen Free Trawl in the Mindanao Deep. The boy had been nineteen years old, and certainly without children; and there had been something about his death, something that the old man didn’t like to remember. He squinted. Worse than that, he thought, something he couldn’t remember anymore.
The nurse said: “Doctor, this is for you. It isn’t much, but happy birthday.”
She took a small pink-ribboned box out of the pocket of her uniform and handed it to him. He was touched. He saw his fingers trembling as he unwrapped the little package. That distracted him for a moment but then he dismissed it. It was honest emotion, that was all—well, and age too, of course. He was ninety-five. But it wasn’t the worrying intention tremor that had disfigured the few episodes he could remember clearly, in his first days here on the Hill. It was only gratitude and sentiment.
And that was what the box held for him, sentiment. “Thank you, Maureen. You’re good to an old man.” His eyes stung. It was only a little plastic picture-globe, with Maureen’s young face captured smiling inside it, but it was for him.
She patted his shoulder and said firmly: “You’re a good man. And a beautiful one, too, so come on and let’s show you off to your company.”
She helped him into the wheelchair. It had its motors, but he liked to have her push him and she humored him. They went out the door, down the long sunlit corridors that divided the guest rooms in the front of the building from the broad high terrace behind. Sam Krabbe, Ernest Atkinson and a couple of the others from the Group came to the doors of their rooms to nod, and to wish the old man a happy birthday. Sidorenko nodded back, tired and pleased. He listened critically to the thumping of his heart—excitement was a risk, he knew—and then grinned. He was getting as bad as the doctors.
Maureen wheeled the old man onto the little open elevator platform. They dropped, quickly and smoothly on magnetic cushions, to the lower floor. The old man leaned far over the side of his chair, studying what he could see of the elevator, because he had a direct and personal interest in it. Somebody had told him that the application of magnetic fields to nonferrous substances was a trick that had been learned from his General Congruences. Well, there was this much to it: Congruence showed that a
ll fields were related and interchangeable, and there was, of course, no reason why what was possible should not be made what is so. But the old man laughed silently inside himself. He was thinking of Albert Einstein confronted with a photo of Enola Gay. Or himself trying to build the communications equipment that Congruence had made possible.
The nurse wheeled him out into the garden.
And there before him was the explanation of the morning’s trucks.
A whole mobile television unit had trundled up those terrible roads. And a fleet of cars and, yes, that other noise was explained too, there was a helicopter perched on the tennis court, its vanes twisting like blown leaves in the breeze that came up the mountain. The helicopter had a definite meaning, the old man knew. Someone very important must have come up in it. The air space over the institute was closed off, by government order.
And reasoning the thing through, there was a logical conclusion; government orders can be set aside only by government executives, and—yes. There was the answer.
“Are you sure you’re warm enough?” the nurse whispered. But Sidorenko hardly heard. He recognized the stocky blue-eyed man who stood chatting with one of the television crew. Sidorenko’s contacts with the world around him were censored and small, but everyone would recognize that man. His name was Shawn O’Connor; he was the president of the United States.
The president was shaking his hand.
“Dear man,” said President O’Connor warmly, “I can’t tell you how great a pleasure this is for me. Oh, no. You wouldn’t remember me. But I sat in on two of your Roose lectures. Ninety-eight, it must have been. And after the second I went up and got your autograph.”
The old man shook hands and let go. 1998? Good lord, that was close to fifty years ago. True, he thought, cudgeling his memory, not very many persons had ever asked for the autograph of a mathematical physicist, but that was an endless time past. He had no recollection whatever of the event. Still, he remembered the lectures well enough. “Oh, of course,” he said. “In Leeds Hall. Well, Mr. President, I’m not certain but—”
“Dear man,” the president said cheerfully, “don’t pretend. Whatever later honors I have attained, as an engineering sophomore I was an utterly forgettable boy. You must have met a thousand like me. But,” he said, standing straighter, “you, Dr. Sidorenko, are another matter entirely. Oh, yes. You are probably the greatest man our country has produced in this century, and it is only the smallest measure of the esteem in which we hold you that I have come here today. However,” he added briskly, “we don’t want to spoil things for the cameramen, who will undoubtedly want to get all this on tape. So come over here, like a good fellow.”
The old man blinked and allowed the cameramen to bully the president and himself into the best camera angles. One of them was whistling through his teeth, one was flirting with the nurse, but they were very efficient. The old man was trembling. All right, I’m ninety-five, I’m entitled to a little senility, he thought; but was it that? Something was worrying him, nagging at his mind.
“Go ahead, Mr. President,” called the director at last, and Shawn O’Connor took from the hand of one of his alert, well-tailored men a blue and silver ribbon.
The camera purred faintly, adjusting itself to light and distance, and the president began to speak. “Dr. Sidorenko, today’s investiture is one of the most joyous occasions that has been my fortune—” Talk, talk, thought the old man, trying to listen, to identify the tune the cameraman had been whistling and to track down the thing that was bothering him all at once. He caught the president’s merry blue eyes, now shadowed slightly as they looked at him, and realized he was trembling visibly.
Well, he couldn’t help it, he thought resentfully. The body was shaking; the conscious mind had no control over it. He was ashamed and embarrassed, but even shame was a luxury he could only doubtfully afford. Something worse was very close and threatening to drown out mere shame, a touch of the crawling fear he had hoped never to feel again and had prayed not even to remember. He assumed a stiff smile.
“—of America’s great men, who have received the honors due them. For this reason the Congress, by unanimous resolution of both Houses, has authorized me—”
The old man, chilled and shaking, remembered the name of the tune at last.
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain.
The bear went over the mountain—
And what do you think he saw?
It worried him, though he could not say why.
“—not only your scientific achievements which are honored, Dr. Sidorenko, great though these are. The truths you have discovered have brought us close to the very heart of the universe. The great inventions of our day rest in large part on the brilliant insight you have given our scientific workers. But more than that—”
Oh, stop, whispered the old man silently to himself, and he could feel his body vibrating uncontrollably. The president faltered, smiled, shrugged and began again: “More than that, your humanitarian love for all mankind is a priceless—”
Stop, whispered the old man again, and realized with horror that he was not whispering at all. He was screaming. “Stop!” he bawled, and found himself trying with withered muscles to stand erect on his useless feet. “Stop!”The cameras deserted the president and swung in to stare, with three great glassy eyes, at the old man; and for old Sidorenko terror struck in and fastened on him. Something erupted. Something exploding and bursting, like a crash of autombiles in flame; someone shouted near him with a voice that made him cringe. He saw the nurse run in with a hypodermic, and he felt its bite.
Endless hours later (though it took less than sixty seconds for the blood to pump the drug to his brain) he felt the falling, spiraling falling that he remembered from other needles at other times, and there was the one moment of clearness before sleep. Maureen was staring down at him, the needle still in her hand. “I’m sorry I spoiled the party, dear,” he whispered, his eyes closing, and then he was firmly asleep.
It really wasn’t worth the trouble. Why should they want to waste so much effort on curing him?
The nurse fussed: “There’s nothing to worry about, Doctor. A fine, big man like you. Sure you had a bad spell. What’s that? Do you think the president himself has never had a bad spell?”
“Why don’t they leave me alone, Maureen?” he whispered.
“Leave you alone, is it! And you with twenty good years inside of you.”
“You’re a good girl, Maureen,” he said faintly, hoarding his strength. It was really more than they had a right to expect of him, he thought drowsily. He couldn’t afford many blowups like this morning’s, and it seemed they were always happening. Still, it was nice of the president.
He was a little more alert now, the effects of the needle, and its later measured balancing antidotes, beginning to wear off. This was Wednesday, he remembered. “Do I have to go in with the Group?” he whined.
“Doctor’s orders, Doctor,” she said firmly, “and doctor as you may be, you’re not doctor enough to argue with doctor’s orders.” It was an old joke, limp to begin with, but he owed her a smile for it. He paid her, faintly.
After lunch she wheeled him into the Group meeting room. They were the last to arrive.
Sam Krabbe said, surly as always in the Group though he was pleasant enough in social contacts, outside: “You take a lot of hostility out on us, Sidorenko. Why don’t you try being on time?”
“Sam forgets,” said the Reynolds woman to the air. “It isn’t up to Sidorenko, as long as he and Maureen act out that master-slave thing of having her push his chair. If she doesn’t want to pay us the courtesy of promptness, Sidorenko can’t help it.” Marla Reynolds had murdered her husband and four teen-aged children; she had told the Group so at least fifty times. Sidorenko thought of her as the only legitimate lunatic the Group owned—except himself, of course; the old man kept an open mind about himself.
He struggled to hold
his head up and his eyes open. You didn’t get any benefit out of the Group’s sessions unless you participated. The way to participate started with keeping the appearance of alertness and proceeded through talking (when you didn’t really want to talk at all), to discharging emotion (when you were almost certain you had no emotion left to discharge). This he knew. Dr. Shugart had told him, in private analysis and again before the entire Group.
The old man sighed internally. Sam Krabbe could be relied on to interpret everyone’s Is motives for them; he was doing it now. Short, squat, middle-aged … well, “middle-aged” by the standards of Dr. Sidorenko. Actually Sam Krabbe was close to seventy. Sidorenko glanced up at the attentive, involved face of his nurse and let the conversation wash over him.
Sam: “What about that, Maureen? Do you have to focalize your aggressions on us? I’m getting damned sick and tired of it, for one.”
Nelson Amster took over (thirty-five years old, a bachelor, his life a chain of false steps and embarrassments because he saw his mother in every other female he met): “It’s a stinking female attention-getting device, Sam. Ignore it.”
Marla Reynolds: “That’s fine talk from a pantywaist like you!”
Eddie Atkinson (glancing first at the bland face of Dr. Shugart for a cue): “Come on, you old harpies. Give the girl a break. What do you say, Dr. Shugart? Aren’t they just displacing their own hostilities onto Maureen and the doctor?”
Dr. Shugart, after a moment’s pause: “Mmm. Maureen, do you have a reaction to all this?”
Maureen, her eyes lively but her voice serious: “Oh, I’m sorry if I’ve made trouble. I didn’t think we were late. Honestly. If there was any displacement it was certainly on the subconscious level. I love you all. I think you’re the finest, friendliest Group I ever—and—Well, there just isn’t any ambivalence at all. Honestly.”
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