Brain Wave

by Poul Anderson

  Sheila!

  He bowed his head, too miserable with the physical torment of sudden cellular readjustment to think any more, and wept.

  The ship went on into darkness.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE house stood on Long Island, above a wide strand sloping to the sea. It had once belonged to an estate, and there were trees and a high wall to screen it off from the world.

  Roger Kearnes brought his car to a halt under the portico and stepped out. He shivered a little and jammed his hands into his pockets as the raw wet cold fell over him. There was no wind, no shadow, only the late fall of snow, thick sad snow that tumbled quietly from a low sky and clung to the windowpanes and melted on the ground like tears. He wondered despairingly if there would ever again be a springtime.

  Well—He braced himself and rang the doorbell. There was work to do. He had to check up on his patient.

  Sheila Corinth opened the door for him. She was still thin, her eyes dark and huge in the pale childlike face; but she wasn’t trembling any more, and she had taken the trouble to comb her hair and put on a dress.

  “Hello, there,” he said, smiling. “How are you today?”

  “Oh—all right.” She didn’t meet his eyes. “Won’t you come in?”

  She led the way down a corridor whose recent repainting had not quite succeeded in creating the cheerful atmosphere Kearnes wanted. But you couldn’t have everything. Sheila could consider herself lucky to have an entire house and a pleasant elderly woman—a moron—for help and companionship. Even nowadays, it meant a lot if your husband was an important man.

  They entered the living room. A fire crackled on the hearth, and there was a view of beach and restless ocean. “Sit down,” invited Sheila listlessly. She threw herself into an armchair and sat unmoving, her eyes fixed on the window.

  Kearnes’ gaze followed hers. How heavily the sea rolled! Even indoors, he could hear it grinding against the shore, tumbling rocks, grinding away the world like the teeth of time. It was gray and white to the edge of the world, white-maned horses stamping and galloping, how terribly loud they neighed!

  Pulling his mind loose, he opened his briefcase. “I have some more books for you,” he said. “Psychological texts. You said you were interested.”

  “I am. Thank you.” There was no tone in her voice.

  “Hopelessly outdated now, of course,” he went on. “But they may give you an insight into the basic principles. You have to see for yourself what your trouble is.”

  “I think I do,” she said. “I can think more clearly now. I can see how cold the universe is and how little we are—” She looked at him with fright on her lips. “I wish I didn’t think so well!”

  “Once you’ve mastered your thoughts, you’ll be glad of this power,” he said gently.

  “I wish they would bring back the old world,” she said.

  “It was a cruel world,” he answered. “We’re well off without it.”

  She nodded. He could barely hear her whisper: “O soldier, lying hollow on the rime, there is frost in your hair and darkness behind your eyes. Let there be darkness.” Before he had time for a worried frown, she continued aloud, “But we loved and hoped then. There were the little cafes, do you remember, and people laughing in twilight, there were music and dancing, beer and cheese sandwiches at midnight, sailboats, leftover pies, worrying about income taxes, our own jokes, there were the two of us. Where is Pete now?”

  “He’ll be back soon,” said Kearnes hastily. No use reminding her that the star ship was already two weeks overdue. “He’s all right. It’s you we have to think about.”

  “Yes.” She knotted her brows together, earnestly. “They still come to me. The shadows, I mean. Words out of nowhere. Sometimes they almost make sense.”

  “Can you say them to me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. This house is on Long Island, long island, longing island, island of longing, where is Pete?”

  He relaxed a trifle. That was a more obvious association than she had sprung on him last time. What had it been? But when the uttermost hollow-frozen and time so dark that lightlessness is a weight is, then tell me, what lies beneath it…. Maybe she was healing herself in the quiet of her aloneness.

  He couldn’t be sure. Things had changed too much. A schizophrenic’s mind went into lands where he could not follow, the new patterns had simply not been mapped yet. But he thought Sheila was acting a little more healthily.

  “I shouldn’t play with them, I know,” she said abruptly. “That’s dangerous. If you take them by the hand they’ll let you guide them for a while, but they won’t let go of your hand again.”

  “I’m glad you realize that,” he said. “What you want to do is exercise your mind. Think of it as a tool or a muscle. Go through those drills I gave you on logical processes and general semantics.”

  “I have.” She giggled. “The triumphant discovery of the obvious.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “you’re back on your feet enough to make snide remarks, at least.”

  “Oh, yes.” She picked at a thread in the upholstery. “But where is Pete?”

  He evaded the question and put her through some routine word-association tests. Their diagnostic value was almost nil—every time he tried them, the words seemed to have taken on different connotations—but he could add the results to his own data files. Eventually he would have enough material to find an underlying pattern. This new n-dimensional conformal-mapping technique looked promising, it might yield a consistent picture.

  “I have to go,” he said at last. He patted her arm. “You’ll be all right. Remember, if you ever want help, or just company, in a hurry, all you have to do is call me.”

  She didn’t get up, but sat there watching him till he was out of the door. Then she sighed. I do not like you, Doctor Fell, she thought. You look like a bulldog that snapped at me once, many hundred years ago. But you’re so easy to fool!

  An old song ran through her head:

  “He is dead and gone, lady,

  He is dead and gone;

  At his head a grass green turf,

  At his heels a stone.”

  No, she said to the other one who sang in her head. Go away.

  The sea growled and grumbled, and snow fell thicker against the windows. She felt as if the world were closing in on her.

  “Pete,” she whispered. “Pete, honey, I need you so much. Please come back.”

  CHAPTER 16

  THEY flashed out of the field, and the next few minutes were dreadful. Then:

  “Where are we?”

  The unknown constellations glittered around them, and the silence was so enormous that their own breathing was loud and harsh in their ears.

  “I don’t know,” groaned Lewis. “And I don’t care. Lemme sleep, will you?”

  He stumbled across the narrow cabin and flopped into a bunk, shaking with wretchedness. Corinth watched him for a moment through the blur that was his own vision, and then turned back to the stars.

  This is ridiculous, he told himself sharply. You’re free again. You have the full use of your brain once more. Then use it!

  His body shuddered with pain. Life wasn’t meant for changes like this. A sudden return to the old dimness, numb days fading into weeks while the ship hurled herself uncontrollably outward, and then the instant emergence, clear space and the nervous system flaring up to full intensity—it should have killed them.

  It will pass, it will pass, but meanwhile the ship is still outward bound, Earth lies farther behind with every fleeting second. Stop her!

  He sat grasping the arms of his chair, fighting down the dry nausea.

  Calmness, he willed, slowness, brake the racing heart, relax muscles that jerked against their bones, bank the fires of life and let them build up slowly as they should.

  He thought of Sheila waiting for him, and the image was a steadiness in his whirling universe. Gradually, he felt the strength spreading as he willed it. It was a conscious ba
ttle to halt the spasmodic gasps of his lungs, but when that was won the heart seemed to slow of itself. The retching passed away, the trembling stopped, the eyes cleared, and Peter Corinth grew fully aware of himself.

  He stood up, smelling the sour reek of vomit in the cabin and activating the machine which cleaned the place up. Looking out the viewscreens, he gathered in the picture of the sky. The ship would have changed speed and direction many times in her blind race through heaven, they could be anywhere in this arm of the galaxy, but—

  Yes, there were the Magellanic Clouds, ghosts against night, and that hole of blackness must be the Coal Sack, and then the great nebula in Andromeda—Sol must lie approximately in that direction. About three weeks’ journey at their top pseudospeed; then, of course, they’d have to cast about through the local region to find that very ordinary yellow dwarf which was man’s sun. Allow a few days, or even a couple of weeks, for that. Better than a month!

  No help for it, however impatient he was. Emotion was, causally, a psychophysiological state, and as such ought to be controllable. Corinth willed the rage and grief out of himself, willed calmness and resolution. He went over to the controls and solved their mathematical problem as well as he could with the insufficient data available. A few swift movements of his hands brought the ship’s flight to a halt, turned her about, and plunged her toward Sol.

  Lewis was unconscious, and Corinth didn’t wake him. Let him sleep off the shock of readjustment. The physicist wanted a little privacy for thinking anyway.

  He thought back over the terrible weeks in the field. When they had been there, he and Lewis, their lives since Earth had left it had seemed dreamlike. They could hardly imagine what they had been doing; they could not think and feel as those other selves had done. The chains of reasoning which had made the reorganization of the world and the building of the ship possible within months, had been too subtle and ramified for animal man to follow. After a while, their talk and their desperate scheming had faded into an apathy of despair, and they waited numbly for chance to release them or kill them.

  Well, thought Corinth on the edge of a mind that was dealing with a dozen things at once, as it happened, we were released.

  He sat looking out at the stupendous glory of heaven, and the realization that he was bound home and still alive and sane was a pulse of gladness within him. But the new coolness which he had willed into himself overlay him like armor. He could throw it off at the proper time, and would, but the fact of it was overwhelming.

  He should have foreseen that this would come. Doubtless many on Earth had already discovered it for themselves but, with communications still fragmentary, had not yet been able to spread the word. The history of man had, in one sense, represented an unending struggle between instinct and intelligence, the involuntary rhythm of organism and the self-created patterns of consciousness. Here, then, was the final triumph of mind.

  For him it had come suddenly, the shock of re-emergence into full neural activity precipitating the change which had been latent in him. For all normal humanity, though, it must come soon—gradually, continuously, perhaps, but soon.

  The change in human nature and human society which this would bring about was beyond even his imagination. A man would still have motivations, he would still want to do things, but he could select his own desires, consciously. His personality would be self-adjusted to the intellectually conceived requirements of his situation. He would not be a robot, no, but he would not resemble what he had been in the past. As the new techniques were fully worked out, psychosomatic diseases would vanish and even organic troubles ought to be controllable in high degree by the will; no more pain; every man could learn enough medicine to take care of the rest, and there would be no more doctors.

  Eventually—no more death?

  No, probably not that. Man was still a very finite thing. Even now, he had natural limitations, whatever they might be. A truly immortal man would eventually be smothered under the weight of his own experience, the potentialities of his nervous system would be exhausted.

  Nevertheless, a life span of many centuries ought to be attainable; and the specter of age, the slow disintegration which was senility, could be abolished.

  Protean man—intellectual man—infinity!

  The star was not unlike Sol—a little bigger, a little redder, but it had planets and one of them was similar to Earth. Corinth sent the ship plunging into the atmosphere of the night side.

  Detectors swept the area. No radiation above the normal background count, that meant no atomic energy; but there were cities in which the buildings themselves shone with a cool light, and machines and radio and a world-wide intercourse. The ship recorded the voices that talked through the night, later on the language could perhaps be analyzed.

  The natives, seen and photographed in a fractional second as the ship went noiselessly overhead, were of the humanoid sort, mammalian bipeds, though they had greenish fur and six fingers to a hand and altogether unhuman heads. Thronging their cities, they were almost pathetically like the crowds in old New York. The form was alien, but the life and its humble desires were the same.

  Intelligence, another race of minds, man is not alone in the hugeness of space-time—once it would have marked an epoch. Now it merely confirmed a hypothesis. Corinth rather liked the creatures that walked beneath him, he wished them well, but they were only another species of the local fauna. Animals.

  “They seem to be a lot more sensible than we were in the old days,” said Lewis as the ship spiraled over the continent. “I see no evidence of war or preparations for war; maybe they outgrew that even before they achieved machine technology.”

  “Or maybe this is the planet-wide universal state,” answered Corinth. “One nation finally knocked out all the others and absorbed them. We’ll have to study the place a bit to find out, and I, for one, am not going to stop now to do it.”

  Lewis shrugged. “I daresay you’re justified. Let’s go, then—a quick sweep around the day side, and we’ll let it go at that.”

  Despite the self-command which had been growing in him, Corinth had to battle down a fury of impatience. Lewis was right in his insistence that they at least investigate the stars which lay near their homeward path. It wouldn’t kill anyone on Earth to wait a few weeks more for their return, and the information would be valuable.

  A few hours after entering the atmosphere, the Sheila left it again and turned starward. The planet fell rapidly behind her driving hull, the sun dwindled and was lost, a whole living world—life, evolution, ages of history, struggle and glory and doom, dreams, hates and fears, hope and love and longing, all the many-layered existence of a thousand million sentient beings—was swallowed by darkness.

  Corinth looked out and let the shiver of dismay run free within him. The cosmos was too big. No matter how swiftly men fled through it, no matter how far they ranged in all ages to come and how mightily they wrought, it would be the briefest glimmer in one forgotten corner of the great silence. This single dust mote of a galaxy was so inconceivably huge that even now his mind could not encompass the knowledge; even in a million years, it could not be fully known; and beyond it and beyond it lay shining islands of stars, outwardness past imagination. Let man reach forth till the cosmos itself perished, he would still accomplish nothing against its unheeding immensity.

  It was a healthy knowledge, bringing a humility which the coldness of his new mind lacked. And it was good to know that there would always be a frontier and a challenge; and the realization of that chill hugeness would draw men together, seeking each other for comfort, it might make them kinder to all life.

  Lewis spoke slowly in the quiet of the ship: “This makes nineteen planets we’ve visited, fourteen of them with intelligent life.”

  Corinth’s memory went back over what he had seen, the mountains and oceans and forests of whole worlds, the life which blossomed in splendor or struggled only to live, and the sentience which had arisen to take blind nature in hand
. It had been a fantastic variety of shape and civilization. Leaping, tailed barbarians howled in their swamps; a frail and gentle race, gray like silver-dusted lead, grew their big flowers for some unknown symbolic reason; a world smoked and blazed with the fury of nations locked in an atomic death clutch, pulling down their whole culture in a voluptuous hysteria of hate; beings of centaur shape flew between the planets of their own sun and dreamed of reaching the stars; the hydrogen-breathing monsters dwelling on a frigid, poisonous giant of a planet had evolved three separate species, so vast were the distances between; the world-civilization of a biped folk who looked almost human had become so completely and inflexibly organized that individuality was lost, consciousness itself was dimming toward extinction as antlike routine took the place of thought; a small snouted race had developed specialized plants which furnished all their needs for the taking, and settled down into a tropical paradise of idleness; one nation, of the many on a ringed world, had scorned wealth and power as motivations and given themselves to a passionate artistry. Oh, they had been many and strange, there was no imagining what diversity the universe had evolved, but even now Corinth could see the pattern.

  Lewis elaborated it for him: “Some of those races were much older than ours, I’m sure. And yet, Pete, none of them is appreciably more intelligent than man was before the change. You see what it indicates?”

  “Well, nineteen planets—and the stars in this galaxy alone number on the order of a hundred billion, and theory says most of them have planets—What kind of a sample is that?”

  “Use your head, man! It’s a safe bet that under normal evolutionary conditions a race only gets so intelligent and then stops. None of those stars have been in the inhibitor field, you know.

  “It ties in; it makes good sense. Modern man is not essentially different from the earliest Homo sapiens, either. The basic ability of an intelligent species is that of adapting environment to suit its own needs, rather than adapting itself to environment Thus, in effect, the thinking race Can maintain fairly constant conditions. It’s as true for an Eskimo in his igloo as it is for a New Yorker in his air-conditioned apartment; but machine technology, once the race stumbles on to it, makes the physical surroundings still more constant. Agriculture and medicine stabilize the biological environment. In short—once a race reaches the intelligence formerly represented by an average I.Q. of 100 to, say, 150, it doesn’t need to become smarter than it is.”