Microcosmic God

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “You’re going to get in touch with The Fang?”

  “I’m doing that right now,” said Eric. “You are The Fang.”

  “I’m what?”

  For once in his life Eric Arnik actually laughed. “Certainly. The incendiary explosion of the tankship was done by time bombs.”

  “But—that voice?”

  “No trouble. It was recorded and transmitted from little sets set adrift in space. Any signal transmitted simultaneously from three sources widely separated makes a direction indicator run around in circles.” He chuckled. “One transmitter was dropped from the ship a day before she blew up. Another was in my office. The third was in an orbit around Eros. They were timed to transmit The Fang’s message twenty days after the explosion, just about when it would be discovered. I told you you could have figured it out for yourself. All I had to do was to give my hypothetical criminal a name like ‘The Fang’ so that the feature writers would pick it up and plaster it around. That’s what you’re doing now, dope. Just follow the course that’s in the co-ordinator over there. The automatic releases will take care of everything for you. You’ll drop atomic bombs in the path of Pallas, so that the asteroid will strike them just when its rotation will put the mines on the point of impact. The message is already recorded. Your course takes you within the gravitic field of Jupiter; one of the transmitters will swing around behind the old boy. One will be here, and one will be attached to the bombs.

  Budd was aghast. “So that’s—Holy Kitt! And I was the guy who said you had no imagination!” He looked at his brother as if he had never seen him before, and then something of his cockiness returned to him. “May I ask the master some questions?”

  Eric looked at the chronometer. “Fire away. You have twelve minutes.”

  “How did the signal blank out all others in every ultraradio set in the System?”

  “I can’t tell you exactly, because I’m not a radio man. One of my boys fixed it up. The general idea is that every wave frequency has a corresponding negating frequency—another wave that vibrates node to trough with the original, and cancels it out. My signals were transmitted in every frequency; they sounded above and below the ones that were canceled.”

  “How about the time lag between all those transmitters? They were an awful long way apart.”

  “A silly question, son. You know ultraradio. Those vibrations think the speed of light is a minus quantity!”

  Budd rubbed his neck. “So I’m The Fang. I can’t get over it. By the way, chum, I wouldn’t try killing two birds with one stone on this trip. You’re liable to be the other bird. I’m talking to a buddy of mine every twelve hours, until I come back. If I miss a single call, those cans of film will get to the Feds.”

  “Damn it,” said Eric mildly. He walked to the bulkhead, pressed a panel. A section slid open; he lifted out a compact little piece of destruction in the form of an atomic bomb. “I was hoping you wouldn’t think of anything like that,” he said. “This was for you. Oh, well.”

  Budd grinned. “Better luck next time. So long, pal. See you anon!”

  When the air-lock gates had hissed to a close, he threw a master switch set into the chronometer housing, lit a cigarette and sat down to read and look at visirecordings until he had something to do. The chronometer clicked softly, and the ship hurtled away. It was only then that a certain detail occurred to Budd—namely, that whether or not the miners of Pallas and their paymasters agreed to The Fang’s terms, they were doomed, for the eggs would be laid. Their planetoid would strike the hovering nest of bombs when, in all probability, they would be looking for some sort of an attacking ship. Now, what was the good of that?

  He reflected a moment, and then laughed aloud. This was all that the System needed to learn that The Fang was a force to be reckoned with! Budd had the bright ideas, but it took a brain like Eric’s to really stretch them out. After this, The Fang could dictate to the Universe!

  “My own brother,” Budd chortled. “But, oh Lord, what a man!”

  He had changed; he knew that. The tearing radiations that had thrust his new being into the System had left him memories of puffed green flesh, bony joints, and a bald, rough skull. The transition was complete now. Blue-white hair covered the obese body. It was a good three feet long and beautifully silky. It fell down on each side of his scarlet eyes, down from his cheeks, his chin. It mantled his whole frame, ending in a great puff at his knees. The erstwhile chitinous structure of his fingernails was now flexible, sentient flesh, so that, from the tip of each finger and thumb a dexterous tentacle about four inches long extended.

  It was a new and glorious world that this creature regarded. To him, radiant heat was a color, and electricity was a color, and every vibration between them on the electromagnetic spectrum was a shade. Thought itself was a visible, physical thing to him. Thought strikes the average telepath like a hand on the arm of a paralyzed deaf-mute, but to the creature in the Carrington it was as easy to sense as the handshake of a friend.

  His interest in the interior of the car was soon exhausted, and he spent many days drinking in the immensities of space. He looked with understanding and the truest kind of appreciation on mighty Jupiter and the speckled Belt. His eyes sensed rather than saw Neptune and frozen Pluto. Then, having had his fill of infinity, he turned again to his small world and himself.

  He regarded the car and its workings not with the eye of science, but with that of the most superb logic. The ape regards three turns of rope around a beam as a Gordian knot. A lay human being regards an atomic power plant as a hopelessly involved technical jumble. Not the silver-silk being in the Carrington, however. He crawled into the power compartment, and with the joy of a man who has just found a book he loved in his childhood, he followed leads, inspected coils and bars and casings. In a locker he found tools of every kind, spare parts of every description, and with them he went to work.

  The powerful and delicate tentacles at his fingertips worked with a speed and precision impossible to a human hand. Here he found a busbar a few millimeters too thick for the light load it carried; there he saw a mechanical task which could be performed electrically with less drain on the power source. He looked carefully at the wheel-driving mechanism, and after an hour’s work on it, went forward to the control chair and re-calibrated the throttle indicator; for now the machine could not be operated safely on the ground unless it drew less fuel, due to its new efficiency. He regarded the antigrav apparatus with some amusement, for it seemed primitive to him. Hooking his leg around the wheel driveshaft, he drew a set of tools equipped with spring clips toward him, shut off the unit, and rebuilt it.

  The car kept him busy for some days, and then there was little else he could do to it; and so he turned his brilliant eyes inward on himself. He was a creature without precedent. Of the human basic urges, he had none. He could not know hunger, for the car supplied him with food tablets as they were needed. Fear did not exist. Wealth, power, shelter—these things were impossible conceptions, for he had been born with them all.

  He remembered little or nothing about Biddiver. He sent his metrical mind back along the past few days, searching for clues as to his origin and that of the automobile. Almost all of it had been blanked out. There was, however, a recent experience—a voice had spoken to him, and he had thought it authoritative. He knew himself to be talented and superior, for had he not improved on the work of a people who manifested a high degree of scientific knowledge? Then the words he had heard from that source must be the thought-image of a Power past even his understanding. If he could only remember when—and where—

  That voice had said, “Guys that don’t want to do nothin’ to nobody most generally don’t amount to nothin’. Big shots—every one of them walked up to the top on other guys’ faces. The Fang—at the top now.” There were details about The Fang; the creature suddenly found it difficult to remember whether he had heard of or been The Fang. “Arnik … Arnik brothers—” That was a recurring thought-pattern
that brought with it a wondering distaste. There was more, but it was these things that were most significant. Why?

  He opened his eyes and stared through the windshield. All of it had something to do with the third planet, the green one. There was a message for him in that voice from the past. He set about the problem as if it were put together with nuts and bolts.

  Arnik—big shots—these, and the things about them, were somehow unpleasant thoughts. There was pleasure, however, in improvement. Unpleasant things were made pleasant by improvement. The Arniks, then—

  He paused. Everything about him—the car, the stars and planets, the food he ate and the air he breathed, each of them had a purpose. But he himself—why was he there? The speedometer was there because it had something to do—a function. Had he a function? He must have, he reasoned, or he would not be there. He regarded the green planet thoughtfully, running his pointed yellow tongue over his lips. Where it parted the long hair, two great white tusks showed. He laid his hands on the arms of his chair, and the tentacled tips curled over the ends, lightly touching the controls. He knew what he had to do.

  And that is how the philosophy of a bitter bartender became a space dweller’s driving creed.

  Budd Arnik found time a little heavy on his hands until his ship approached the Belt, and then he spent most of his time at the forward port. He dared not touch the controls, for his course was timed and plotted and automatically steered, and a fraction of a degree one way or the other would defeat the whole plan.

  Power off, the little ship swung into the Belt and into the orbit of Pallas. Then a few gentle nudges this way and that, to brake her and steady her in that untenable position, stasis in space. The most advanced of calculating machinery had been employed to check this one tiny dot on the astro chart. She hung there for twenty-two hours, awaiting just the right split second to drop her deadly load. Budd only felt the infinitesimal lurch because he had waited so long for it—that tiny swaying as automatic grapples let the bombs go, repelled them a few feet so they would be clear of the mass of the ship. Then the artificial gravity and momentum neutralizer cut in, a relay clicked, and the ship looped over and fled back toward Earth.

  Budd slipped into the pilot’s chair with a sigh. This leg of the trip would be a little more exciting. Although the automatic pilot would take him unerringly back to his starting point, the explosion on Pallas would occur long before he got there, and space would be crawling with Tri-planet Patrol ships. He knew he could outmaneuver and outrun any of the ships, but he knew he wouldn’t have a chance against an ultraradio torpedo or a sleep-destroying field. Particularly the latter, for the range of the field was tremendous, and the penalty of being snared in one was agonizing death from lack of sleep. He had to rely on his detector beams to warn him of any approaching ship.

  He slept frequently for lack of anything else to do, woke for a few minutes, checked over his gauges, and dozed off again. And in one of these periods he dreamed.

  He dreamed that a hollow, insistent voice, just like that of The Fang on Eric’s recordings, was calling him insistently. “Arnik! Arnik! Arnik!” He was conscious of his own effort to rouse himself, and found he could not. “Arnik!” said the voice. “Answer! What are you doing? What was the meaning of those bombs dropped in the path of Pallas?”

  And he dreamed that he was bound down by gentle but irresistible forces, so that he could only cry out against them; but the only cry he could make was the truth. “We are bombing the mines.”

  “Why?” The voice was a glittering steel probe, picking away at his brain.

  “To create fear of The Fang. To make The Fang’s commands law.”

  Question by remorseless question he was forced to tell the whole story. And then, suddenly, he found himself free to awaken. He sat bolt upright, streaming sweat, sputtering profanity, and carrying the most terrific headache in the memory of man.

  “I’m gettin’ the crawlin’ willies,” he muttered, and then realized that the detector alarm signal was shrilling. He glanced at the dial. It had been ringing for two hours and twenty-seven minutes. He shook his head, nearly shrieked at the pain, and snapped the switch. The signal cut itself off. From another dial he read the bearing and distance. He swiveled about, unlimbered a short-range visiscope, and turned it on. Sharp and clear, the image of the offending vessel showed up on the screen.

  Only it wasn’t a vessel. It was an automobile—an iridescent blue Carrington ’78.

  Budd Arnik grunted, looked again and grinned. “Well, well,” he chuckled. “Imagine meeting you here!” It was a one-in-a-quadrillion chance, he thought. That ugly-looking lug who had accidentally swiped his car had probably gone nuts and died when he broke through the Layer. By some fluke the car had quit with a corpse at the controls and must now be caught in somebody’s orbit—probably old Jupiter. And of all people in the Universe, he, Budd Arnik, had to be the one to find it!

  He cut off the automatic pilot and took over, swerving toward the car. It was traveling in the same direction but in a slightly different plane. He focused the visiscope and read off the range from the gauge. The car was nineteen kilometers ahead. He put on a burst of speed, overtook and circled the automobile. As far as he could see, it was totally unharmed. He grinned happily, edged closer, and reached for the magnetic grapple control. But before he could touch it, the car suddenly faded away from the screen. Budd swore and fiddled with the controls, bringing it quickly back into focus. It had jumped four kilometers when he came close. He crept in again, watching carefully. When the range closed to one kilometer, the car jumped again. Budd frowned. Was that dope still alive in there?

  He lifted his ship above the car and began to settle down toward it. And again the car jumped away. “What the hell,” growled Budd. “If he don’t like me, why don’t he turn tail and run?”

  He tried it again, and only then did he think of a repellor field. He hadn’t known that the car possessed one, but then there were probably half a hundred gadgets on that wagon that he knew nothing about. Most big spacecraft carried such fields in case of emergency repairs in space, to guard the hull against small meteorites when the ship was not able to navigate clear of them.

  Budd shrugged. “There’s more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it in a knee boot,” he growled. He took some sights, punched cards with the results, and fed them into the co-ordinator. When he had his position, he lined his ship up with the car on his course, and moved forward. The car leaped away, and Budd followed grimly, the car preceding him exactly a kilometer ahead. The two crafts soon attained their terminal velocity, and Budd turned the controls over to the mike.

  He walked over to the ultraradio, noticing that he was an hour or so late for his usual communiqué to Eric. That gentleman’s face flashed furiously on the screen. Budd smiled back at it.

  “Well?” roared Eric. “What the hell have you got to be so happy about? Why you double-crossing rat!”

  “Easy, pal,” soothed Budd. “I been busy. I’ve got a present for you.”

  “Take your present and ram it up—”

  “Tsk, tsk,” tsked Budd. “All this excitement over a little tardiness! Listen, goon. Remember that car we had swiped from us at the Purple Pileus?”

  “Yes, I remember and I don’t give a damn about it.”

  “No? Well, give a look!” Budd walked away from the radio, switched on the visiscope. “Can you see what I’ve got in tow?”

  “No, I can’t. Now stop your hogwash and tell me what sort of monkey business you’re up to!”

  Budd sobered. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play innocent,” snarled Eric. “What was the idea of blanketing my signal?”

  “When? What signal?”

  “The F—” Eric stopped apoplectically, remembering that he was on the air and that the System was full of ears. “The signals we arranged,” he said, as if talking to a four-year-old. “Remember?”

  “Yeah—”

  “They were blanked!
The one in my office, I—Hey! You don’t really mean to tell me that you actually don’t know what happened?” He peered out of the screen at Budd’s amazed face, rubbed his ear, and went on with a desperate sort of patience. “O.K. then. My transmitter was blanked, and so were the others, apparently. Instead of that, I got this!” His face disappeared, and a recording screen was shoved up against the transmitter. “Now watch!” said his voice, and the recorder glowed. It showed a typical radio show, a dancing chorus, a vapid female singing dourly. Suddenly the scene disappeared and a truly terrible voice rasped forth.

  “I am The Fang,” it said melodramatically. “I have come again to warn the world. But not, as was expected, to warn you of myself, but of my masters.”

  There was a long, significant pause. Budd’s throat felt very dry.

  “I was ordered to destroy the mines on Pallas. I have disobeyed, for my masters want power they cannot control. I also warn my masters that I will not rest until they are as I am!” With the last two words, the screen came alive with a picture.

  “God!” said Budd, his eyes bulging.

  The screen went dead and was moved away. Eric’s face reappeared. “There’s something for you to look forward to,” he said snidely. “Hurry home, babe.” He signed off.

  “The son,” growled Budd. “He looks almost happy about it. Great sweet sidesway what a face!” He slumped into a fearful heap in the pilot’s chair.

  As Budd expected, the car’s repellors cut out when it had been shoved well within Earth’s gravitic field. He grappled it to his ship’s side and landed neatly on the stage in front of the Arnik Shipping Co. His first act on alighting was to release the car and try the door. It opened readily. He recoiled a little at the heap of rags that littered the stained control seat, and then he shrugged and climbed in, kicking them out the rags, and the odd bones they covered. Budd Arnik wasn’t picky. As the ground crew disposed of the spaceship, Budd tested the controls. They seemed to be all right. He waved to the foreman and the car slid smoothly down the ramp.