He could have taken a solenoid car out to Eric’s place and saved twenty minutes, but he was too tickled at having got his car back. He swept out of the city, lulled by the whispering speedometer; and when he had the highway to himself, he leaned over to the conventional radio switch and then pulled back on the arms. The car soared up effortlessly. He put it down again and raced to his brother’s place.
Eric was waiting fretfully at the door. “Dammit, why didn’t you take the solenoid?”
“Brother,” said Budd easily, “when you’ve spent as many weeks as I have being toted around by a machine that did your thinking for you, you’ll be glad of the chance to be the boss for a change.”
Eric stared over his shoulder at the house, shrugged nervously and climbed into the car. “Place gives me the jitters,” he complained. “Go ahead then—drive. I want to talk to you.”
Budd wheeled the Carrington around in its own length and rolled onto the highway. Drifting along at a hundred and eighty, he turned to Eric. “What’s this about jitters? Something new for you, isn’t it?”
Eric looked sheepish. “Yes. No.” He swore fluently. “Budd, you’re a phony. You’re in this up to your neck.” He sent a glance Buddward from the corners of his eyes. “And I don’t know that that isn’t the silver lining they told me about in school, come to think of it. If I get it, you’ll get it, too. Anyway, you’re a phony. You’re up against something you can’t laugh off, this trip.”
“You’re talking a lot of nonsense,” said Budd. “You’re all shot, man. I’ve never heard you go on like this. What’s under your skin?”
Eric began in a low voice that got increasingly higher and hoarser, until he wound up in a piping whisper. “We create, for our own ends, one master criminal. Said master criminal consists in ultraradio transmitters set adrift in space and in time bombs. We do one little job with our hypothetical criminal’s aid. We start another one. Our make-believe monster promptly goes on strike because he doesn’t like our greed. And you ask what’s under my skin!” He gasped for breath, then went on, in a crazed monotone, “And I’ve been having dreams. Dreaming with my ears and my eyes while I’m wide awake. I hear that … that thing laughing. I keep seeing that face. That’s what’s going to happen to us, you damn fool; don’t you see?”
Budd went right on grinning; then Eric suddenly realized that the grin was frozen there. Budd said hoarsely, “Yeah. I know. I heard things, too. Merciful heavens!” he burst out. “We can’t let it get us! Shut up about it!”
Eric’s gaze dropped between his feet. He clamped them nervously, held it there. “If it was anything we could understand, we’d know what to do … but you can’t tell about those things. It might hit you one way, me another, and yet we’re brothers. You just can’t tell. Anything might happen—” Eric, due to his morbid attention to his feet, and to the artificial gravity in the car, did not notice Budd’s turning on the radio, or the swift leap of the machine off the road. “Who can tell what it did to that ugly Biddiver fellow? How can we know what he is now? You can’t predict anything, you can’t even guess—”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Budd.
“Biddiver—the guy that swiped your fancy car by mistake. Biddiver—The Fang.”
Budd’s face turned a sick gray. “Biddiver is—The Fang?”
“Certainly. That was easy enough to find out. He’s altered—God, yes; but it’s him all right. Didn’t I tell you? I guess I forgot. I’m shot to hell.” He shook his head, and sweat flung from his forehead. “The card-selector—you know, the one we used on that barkeep. It gave us a portrait and a description. With The Fang I reversed the process. He’s slightly changed, but underneath all that … that fur—he has the same bone structure. It clicks … it couldn’t be anyone else. Somewhere he’s cruising around in that damned automobile. Sooner or later, he’ll get us.”
“Not ‘that’ damned automobile,” said Budd, and laughed hysterically. “ ‘This’ damned automobile. I tried to tell you about it when I was out there in space. I thought I picked it up and brought it back. I see now—it brought me.”
Eric raised his head, stared out of the side window, and screamed. The Carrington was a thousand kilometers up and going higher. Budd forced the control arms downward violently; the nose of the car tipped up instead. He sat like a statue, blood pouring from where he had bitten through his lip. Eric dove for his gun, snatched it out, put it to his temple.
A white-furred arm reached almost casually from behind them, lifted the gun out of Eric’s hand. “Don’t do that,” said The Fang gently. “Not at this stage. I want you changed. I want you made like me. That,” he added, “is what I am for.”
They turned slowly and faced the creature. “Do not be frightened,” droned The Fang. He was regal, magnificent as he stood there, in front of the door to the power compartment where he had been hiding. His luminous eyes were separately articulated, and one fixed on each of the men, held them. His long face hair was swept away on each side from his chrome-yellow mouth, baring the great tusks.
He held them there while the machine swept up and outward, the whine of air outside growing fainter as the air thinned. Stratosphere—ionosphere—and the Heaviside. The Fang watched with puzzlement growing in his eyes as Eric shrieked and died, as Budd groveled in pain and then hung limply on the back of his seat. The Fang picked him up carefully and laid him on the deck. Something was happening to the man. He tried to scream, and his legs kicked out. He tried to strike out with an arm, and his head whipped back against the floor. His eyes widened, the flesh between them thinning, the eyeballs beginning to fuse. He died, then, for no human being can live when his medial division starts to go to pieces. Humans are built to operate with two sets of limbs, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils—the radiations found that the path of least resistance in Budd Arnik was to do away with that medial line, and it couldn’t work.
So The Fang was left, keening over the twisted bodies, mourning that he had not done it the right way, horrified because he had been mistaken—for he only wanted to help. Perhaps one day he will find his function.
The Golden Egg
WHEN TIME ITSELF was half its present age, and at an unthinkable distance, and in an unknowable dimension, he was born.
He left his world so long before he came to earth that even he did not know how long he had been in space. He had lived so long on that world that even he could not remember what he had been before his science changed his race.
Though we can never know where his world lay in space, we know that it was in a system of two mighty suns, one blue and one yellow. His planet had an atmosphere and a great civilization and science beyond humanity’s most profound visions. He spoke little of his planet because he hated it.
Too perfect. Their sciences fed them, and controlled the etheric currents that gave them comfort, and carried them from place to place, and taught them, and cared for them in every way. For many aeons there were members set apart to care for the machines, but in time they died out, for they were no longer needed. There was no struggle and no discomfort and no disease. There were therefore no frontiers, no goals, no incentives, and eventually no possible achievements, save one—the race itself, and the changes possible to it.
Step by step the thing was done. Limbs were not needed and wasted away from long-lived, lazy bodies, and were replaced, redesigned, or forgotten. And as the death of an inhabitant became more rare, rarer still became the advent of new life. It was a mighty race, a powerful race, a most highly civilized race, and—a sterile race.
The refinement went on endlessly, as occasional flashes of initiative appeared down through the ages. What was unnecessary was discarded, and what could be conceivably desirable was attained, until all that was left was a few thousand glittering golden ovoids, supermental casings, functionally streamlined, beautiful and bored. The beings could move as and if they wished, through air or time or space. Everything was done for them automatically; each was self-sufficient and u
ncooperative. Brains they were, armored in a substance indestructible by anything less powerful than the heat of the mightiest of suns or by the supercosmic forces each could unleash at will.
But there was no will. There was nothing for them. They hung in small groups conversing of things unimaginable to us, or they lay on the plains of their world and lived within themselves until a few short aeons buried them, all uncaring, in rubble and rock. Some asked to be killed and were killed. Some were murdered by others because of quibblings in remote philosophic discussions. Some hurled themselves into the blue sun, starved for any new sensation, knowing they would find there an instant’s agony. Most simply vegetated. One came away.
He stopped, in a way known to him—stopped in space so that his world and solar system and corner of the cosmos fell away from him and left him free. And then he traveled.
He traveled to many places and in many ways, as his whims dictated. He extended himself at times around the curve of curved space, until the ends of him were diametrically opposite; and then he would contract in a straight line, reforming countless millions of light years from the point of his extension; and his speed then was, of course, the speed of light cubed. And sometimes he dropped from his level in time to the level below, and would then lie poised and thoughtful during one cycle, until he was returned to the higher level again; and it was thus he discovered the nature of time, which is a helical band, ever revolving, never moving in its superspace. And sometimes he would move slowly, drifting from one gravitic pull to another, searching disinterestedly for the unusual. It was in such a period that he came to earth.
A goose found him. He lay in some bushes by a country road, distantly observing the earth and analyzing its elements, and the goose was a conventional one and blindly proud of its traditional silliness. He ignored it when it approached him and when it rapped his shell curiously; but when it turned him over with its beak he felt that it was being discourteous. He seized it with a paralyzing noose of radiations, quickly read its minuscule mind for a way to annoy it, and then began pulling its tail feathers out to see how it would react. It reacted loudly.
Now, it so happened that Christopher Innes was on that country road, bringing the young’un home from Sunday school. Chris was an embittered and cynical mortal, being a normal twelve-year-old who had just learned that increasing age and masculinity made for superiority, and was about to be a teenager and find out differently. The young’un was his five-year-old sister, of whom he was jealous and protective. She had silly ideas. She was saying:
“But they tol’ me in school last week, Chris, so it mus’ be so, so there. The prince came into the palace an’ everyone was asleep, an’ he came to the room where she was, an’ she was asleep, too, but he kissed her an’ she woke up, and then everyone—”
“Aw, shut your fontanel,” said Chris, who had heard that babies shut their fontanels when they started to grow, though he didn’t know what one was. “You believe everything you hear. Ol’ Mr. Becker tol’ me once I could catch a bird by putting salt on its tail, an’ then whaled me for loadin’ up a twelve-gauge shotgun with rock salt and knockin’ off three of his Rhode Island Reds. They tell you that stuff so they’ll have a chance to hit you afterward.”
“I don’t care, so there,” pouted the young’un. “My teacher wouldn’t hit me for b’lieving her.”
“Somebody will,” Chris said darkly. “What’s all that racket, I wonder? Sounds like a duck caught in a fox trap. Let’s go see.”
Chris stopped to pick up a piece of stick in case he had a trap to pry open, and the young’un ran ahead. When he reached her he found her jumping up and down and clapping her hands and gurgling, “I told you so! I told you so!” which is the most annoying thing any woman can say to any man.
“You tol’ me whut?” he asked, and she pointed. He saw a large white goose digging its feet into the ground, straining to get away from its invisible bonds, while behind it lay a glittering ovoid. As they watched, a tail feather detached itself from its anchorage and fell beside two of its prototypes on the ground.
“Chee!” Chris breathed.
“They tol’ me that story, too!” chortled the young’un. “About the goose that laid the golden egg. Oh, Chris, if we take that goose home an’ keep um, we’ll be rich an’ I can have a pony an’ a hundred dolls an’—”
“Chee,” Chris said again and gingerly picked up the golden egg. As he did so the goose was released suddenly, and its rooted claws shot it forward face first into the earth, where it lay stunned and quonking dismally. As only a farm child can, the young’un caught its legs together and picked it up in her arms.
“We’re rich!” breathed Chris and laughed. Then he remembered his assertions and frowned. “Aw, it didn’t lay no egg. Someone lost it an’ this ol’ goose jus’ found it here.”
“It’s the golden-egg goose! It is too!” shrilled the young’un.
Chris spat on the egg and rubbed it with his cuff. “It’s sure pretty,” he said half to himself, and tossed it into the air. He must have stood there open-mouthed for two full minutes with his hands out, because it never came down. It vanished.
They found out later that the goose was a gander. Neither of them ever quite got over it.
“It might be interesting,” thought the armored brain to himself as he lay in the stratosphere, “to be a biped like that for a while. I believe I will try it. I wonder which of the two is the more intelligent—the feathered or unfeathered ones?” He pondered a moment over this nice distinction and then remembered that the boy had armed himself with a stick, while the goose had not. “They are a little ungainly,” he thought, then shrugged mentally. “I shall be one of those.”
He plummeted down to earth, braked off, and shot along just over the surface until he came to a small town. A movement in a tiny alley caught his attention; a man there was leveling a gun at another across the street. Unseen, the being from space flashed between them, and his path intersected that of the bullet. It struck his smooth side and neither left a mark nor changed his course by a thousandth of a degree as it spun into the street four feet below him. The intended victim went his way unharmed, and the man in the alley swore and went to his room to take his gun apart wonderingly. He had never missed a shot like that before!
Just outside the town the brain found what he had been looking for—a field under which was a huge mass of solid rock. He came to rest in the field and dropped from sight, sinking through sod and earth and granite as if it had been water; and in a matter of minutes he had cut himself a great underground chamber in the rock, with high arched walls and a vaulted ceiling and a level, polished floor. Hovering for a moment in midair, he tested the surrounding countryside for its exact chemical content, sending out delicate high-frequency beams, adjusting them fractionally for differences in molecular vibrations. The presence of a certain fine harmonic at any given frequency indicated to him the exact location of the elements he needed. There were not many. These bipeds were hardly complex.
“A type—a type,” he thought. “I must have something to work from. I gather that these creatures are differentiated from each other in certain ways.”
He slipped up through the roof of his chamber and went back to the town, where he found a busy corner and hid up under an eave, where he could watch the people passing.
“Those smaller ones must be the males,” he ruminated, “the ones that strut and slink and apparently do little work and wear all those blatant colors and so ridiculously accentuate the color of the oral orifice. And the large, muscular ones, I suppose, are females. How drab.”
He projected a beam that would carry thought impulses to him. It touched the mind of a young man who was mooning after a trim blonde just ahead of him. He was a hesitant and shy young man, and a passionate one, and the battle he fought within himself, between his inclinations and his diffidence, almost dislodged the creature in the eaves.
“Whew!” thought the golden ovoid. “An emotional monstrosity! And i
t appears that I was a little mistaken about males and females. How very quaint!
“I shall be one of the males,” he decided at length.
Wisely, he searched about until he found a girl who was suffering from every “osis” in the advertisements, as well as an inferiority complex, acne, bunions, and tone-deafness, knowing that her idea of an ideal man would be really something. Inserting gentle thought tendrils into her mind, he coaxed her to dream a lovely dream of her ideal man as she walked along, and carefully filed away all the essentials, disregarding only the passion the dream man showered on the poor starved creature. Enveloped by the dream he had induced, she walked into the path of an automobile and was rather badly hurt, which was all right, because she later married the driver.
The brain sped back to the laboratory, nursing his mental picture of a muscular, suave, urbane, sophisticated, and considerate demigod, and began to assemble his machinery.
Now the brain had no powers, as such. What he had was control. The engineer of a twenty-car train would be stupid even to dream about hurling such a train at a hundred and twenty miles an hour along a track if had to do so himself with his own physical powers. But with his controls the thing is easy. In the case of the brain, his controls were as weak compared with the final results of it as is a man’s arm compared with the two thousand horsepower delivered by a locomotive. But the brain knew the true nature of space: that it is not empty, but a mass of balanced forces.
Press two pencils together, end to end. As long as the pressure is even and balanced the effect is the same as if the pencils were just resting their ends together. Now get some tiny force to press on the point where the pencils come together. They snap out of line; they deliver a powerful resultant, out of all proportion to the push which upset the equilibrium, and you probably break a knuckle. The resultant is at right angles to the original equalized forces; it goes just so far and then the forces come together in equilibrium again, knuckles notwithstanding.
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