Brain Wave

by Poul Anderson

  Mandelbaum nodded. The single floodlight threw a hard black shadow across his face. He waited on the raft while three quiet burly men, who had been detectives in the old world, went among the conspirators and collected the guns they had thrown away as too hot to hold. Then he joined the police on the ground. Corinth and Helga followed.

  “Surely you didn’t expect to get away with this,” said Mandelbaum. His voice was not exultant but tired. He shook his head. “Why, the Observers had your pitiful little scheme watched almost from its beginning. Your very secrecy gave you away.”

  “Then why did you let it get so far?” asked the Australian. His tones were thick with anger.

  “Partly to keep you out of worse mischief and partly so you’d draw in others of like mind and thus locate them for us,” said Mandelbaum. “We waited till we knew you were all set to go, and then we came.”

  “That was vicious,” said the Frenchman. “It was the sort of coldbloodedness that has grown up since the change. I suppose the intelligent, the expedient thing for you now is to shoot us down.”

  “Why, no,” said Mandelbaum mildly. “As a matter of fact, we used a reaction damper along with the metal-heating field, just to keep your cartridges from going off and hurting you. After all, we’ll have to find out from you who else has backed you. And then you all have good minds, lots of energy and courage—quite a big potential value. It’s not your fault the change drove you insane.”

  “Insane!” The Russian spat, and recovered himself with a shaking effort. “Insane you call us!”

  “Well,” said Mandelbaum, “if the delusion that you few have the right to make decisions for all the race, and force them through, isn’t megalomania, then what is? If you really had a case, you could have presented it to the world soon enough.”

  “The world has been blinded,” said the Hindu with dignity. “It can no longer see the truth. I myself have lost the feeble glimpse of the ultimate I once had, though at least I know it was lost.”

  “What you mean,” said Mandelbaum coldly, “is that your mind’s become too strong for you to go into the kind of trance which was your particular fetalization, but you still feel the need for it.”

  The Hindu shrugged contemptuously.

  Grunewald looked at Corinth. “I thought you were my friend, Pete,” he whispered. “And after what the change did to your wife, I thought you could see—”

  “He’s had nothing to do with this,” said Helga, stepping forward a little and taking Corinth’s arm. “I’m the one who fingered you, Grunewald. Pete just came along with us tonight as a physicist, to look over your apparatus and salvage it for something useful.” Occupational therapy—O Pete, Pete, you have been hurt so much!

  Corinth shook his head and spoke harshly, with an anger new to his mildness. “Never mind finding excuses for me. I’d have done this alone, if I’d known what you planned. Because what would Sheila be like if the old world came back?”

  “You’ll be cured,” said Mandelbaum. “Your cases aren’t violent, I think the new psychiatric techniques can straighten you out pretty quick.”

  “I wish you’d kill me instead,” said the Australian.

  Manzelli was still crying. The sobs tore at him like claws.

  “Why can you not see?” asked the Frenchman. “Are all the glories man has won in the past to go for nothing? Before he has even found God, will you turn God into a nursery tale? What have you given him in return for the splendors of his art, the creation in his hands, and the warm little pleasures when his day’s work is done? You have turned him into a calculating machine, and the body and the soul can wither amidst his new equations.”

  Mandelbaum shrugged. “The change wasn’t my idea,” he said. “If you believe in God, then this looks rather like His handiwork, His way of taking the next step forward.”

  “It is forward from the intellectual’s point of view,” said the Frenchman. “To a nearsighted, soft-bellied, flatulent professor, this is no doubt progress.”

  “Do I look like a professor?” grunted Mandelbaum. “I was riveting steel when you were reading your first books about the beauties of nature. I was having my face kicked in by company goons when you were writing about the sin of pride and battle. You loved the working man, but you wouldn’t invite him to your table, now would you? When little Jean-Pierre, he was a divinity student before the war, when he was caught spying for our side, he held out for twenty-four hours against everything the Germans could do to him and gave the rest of us a chance to escape. Meanwhile, as I recall, you were safe in the States writing propaganda. Judas priest, why don’t you ever try those things you’re so ready to theorize about?”

  The dragging weariness lifted from him as he swung into the old joy of struggle. His voice raised itself in a hard fierce tone, like hammers on iron. “The trouble with all of you is that one way or another, you’re all afraid to face life. Instead of trying to shape the future, you’ve been wanting a past which is already a million years behind us. You’ve lost your old illusions and you haven’t got what it takes to make new and better ones for yourselves.”

  “Including the American delusion of ‘Progress,’ ” snapped the Chinese.

  “Who said anything about that? That’s forgotten too, obsolete junk—another shibboleth born of stupidity and greed and smugness. Sure, all our past has been stripped from us. Sure, it’s a terrible feeling, bare and lonely like this. But do you think man can’t strike a new balance? Do you think we can’t build a new culture, with its own beauty and delight and dreams, now that we’ve broken out of the old cocoon? And do you think that men—men with strength and hope in them, all races, all over the world—want to go back? I tell you they don’t. The very fact you tried this secretly shows you knew the same thing.

  “What did the old world offer to ninety per cent of the human race? Toil, ignorance, disease, war, oppression, want, fear, from the filthy birth to the miserable grave. If you were born into a lucky land, you might fill your belly and have a few shiny toys to play with, but there was no hope in you, no vision, no purpose. The fact that one civilization after another went down into ruin shows we weren’t fitted for it; we were savages by nature. Now we have a chance to get off that wheel of history and go somewhere—nobody knows where, nobody can even guess, but our eyes have been opened and you wanted to close them again!”

  Mandelbaum broke off, sighed, and turned to his detectives. “Take ’em away, boys,” he said.

  The cabal were urged onto the raft—gently, there was no need for roughness and no malice. Mandelbaum stood watching as the raft lifted slowly up into the star ship. Then he turned to the long metal form on the ground.

  “What a heroic thing!” he muttered, shaking his head. “Futile, but heroic. Those are good men. I hope it won’t take too long to salvage them.”

  Corinth’s grin was crooked. “Of course, we are absolutely right,” he said.

  Mandelbaum chuckled. “Sorry for the lecture,” he replied. “Old habit too strong—a fact has to have a moral tag on it—well, we, the human race, ought to get over that pretty soon.”

  The physicist sobered. “You have to have some kind of morality,” he said.

  “Sure. Like you have to have motives for doing anything at all. Still, I think we’re beyond that smug sort of code which proclaimed crusades and burned heretics and threw dissenters into concentration camps. We need more personal and less public honor.”

  Mandelbaum yawned then, stretching his wiry frame till it seemed the bones must crack. “Long ride, and not even a proper gun battle at the end,” he said. The raft was coming down again, automatically. “I’m for some sleep. We can look over this mess of junk in the morning. Coming?”

  “Not just yet,” said Corinth. “I’m too tired.” (I want to think.) “I’ll walk over toward the beach.”

  “Okay.” Mandelbaum smiled, with a curious tenderness on his lips. “Good night.”

  “Good night.” Corinth turned and walked from the clearing. He
lga went wordlessly beside him.

  They came out of the jungle and stood on sands that were like frost under the moon. Beyond the reef, the surf flamed and crashed, and the ocean was roiled and streaked with the cold flimmer of phosphorescence. The big stars were immensely high overhead, but the night sky was like crystal. Corinth felt the sea wind in his face, sharp and salt, damp with the thousand watery miles it had swept across. Behind him, the jungle rustled and whispered to itself, and the sand gritted tinily underfoot. He was aware of it all with an unnatural clarity, as if he had been drained of everything that was himself and was now only a vessel of images.

  He looked at Helga, where she stood holding his arm. Her face was sharply outlined against the further darkness, and her hair—she had unbound it—fluttered loosely in the wind, white in the pouring unreal moonlight. Their two shadows were joined into one, long and blue across the glittering sand. He could feel the rhythm of her breathing where she stood against him.

  They had no need to speak. Too much understanding had grown up between them, they had shared too much of work and watching, and now they stood for a while in silence. The sea talked to them, giant pulsing of waves, boom where they hit the reef, rush where they streamed back into the water. The wind hissed and murmured under the sky.

  Gravitation (sun, moon, stars, the tremendous unity which is space-time)

  + Coriolis force (the planet turning, turning, on its way through miles and years)

  + Fluid friction (the oceans grinding, swirling, roaring between narrow straits, spuming and thundering over rock)

  + Temperature differential (sunlight like warm rain, ice and darkness, clouds, mists, wind and storm)

  + Vulcanism (fire deep in the belly of the planet, sliding of unimaginable rock masses, smoke and lava, the raising of new mountains with snow on their shoulders)

  + Chemical reaction (dark swelling soil, exhausted air made live again, rocks red and blue and ocher, life, dreams, death and rebirth and all bright hopes)

  EQUALS

  This our world, and behold, she is very fair.

  Nevertheless there was a weariness and desolation in the man, and after a while he turned for comfort as if the woman had been his.

  “Easy,” he said, and the word and his tones meant: (It was too easy, for us and for them. They had a holy spirit, those men. It should have ended otherwise. Fire and fury, wrath, destruction, and the unconquerable pride of man against the gods.)

  “No,” she replied. “This way was better.” Quietly, calmly: (Mercy and understanding. We’re not wild animals any more, to bare our teeth at the fates.)

  Yes. That is the future. Forget all red glories.

  “But what is our tomorrow?” he asked. (We stand with the wreckage of a world about our feet, looking into a hollow universe, and we must fill it ourselves. There is no one to help us.)

  “Unless there is a destiny,” (God, fate, human courage) she said.

  “Perhaps there is,” he mused. “Consciously or not, a universe has been given into our hands.”

  She fled from the knowledge, knowing that to answer her he would have to summon up the bravery he needed. Have we the right to take it? If we make ourselves guardians of planets, is that better than Grunewald—blindness of causality, senseless cruelty of chance, the querning in his poor mad head?)

  “It would not be thus that we would enter on our destiny,” he told her. “We would be unseen, unknown guides, guardians of freedom, not imposers of an arbitrary will. When our new civilization is built, that may be the only work worthy of its hands.”

  O most glorious destiny! Why should I feel sorrow on this night? And yet there are tears behind my eyes.

  She said what had to be said: “Sheila was discharged a few days ago.” I weep for you, my darling in darkness.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “I saw it.” (She ran out like a little girl. She held her hands up to the sun and laughed.)

  “She has found her own answer. You still have to find yours.”

  His mind worried the past like a dog with a bone. “She didn’t know I was watching her.” It was a cold bright morning. A red maple leaf fluttered down and caught in her hair. She used to wear flowers in her hair for me. “She has already begun to forget me.”

  “You told Kearnes to help her forget,” she said. “That was the bravest thing you ever did. It takes courage to be kind. But are you now strong enough to be kind to yourself?”

  “No,” he answered. “I don’t want to stop loving her. I’m sorry, Helga.”

  “Sheila will be watched over,” she said. “She will not know it, but the Observers will guide her wandering. There is a promising moron colony—” Anguish “—north of the city. We have been helping it lately without its knowing. Its leader is a good man, a strong and gentle man. Sheila’s blood will be a leaven in their race.”

  He said nothing.

  “Pete,” she challenged him, “now you must help yourself.”

  “No,” he said. “But you can change too, Helga. You can will yourself away from me.”

  “Not when you need me, and know it, and still cling blind to a dead symbol,” she replied. “Pete, it is you now who are afraid to face life.”

  There was a long stillness, only the sea and the wind had voice. The moon was sinking low, its radiance filled their eyes, and the man turned his face from it. Then he shuddered and straightened his shoulders.

  “Help me!” he said, and took her hands. “I cannot do it alone. Help me, Helga.”

  There are no words. There can never be words for this.

  The minds met, flowing together, succoring need, and in a way which was new to the world they shared their strength and fought free of what was past.

  To love, honor, and cherish, until death do us part.

  It was an old story, she thought among the thunders. It was the oldest and finest story on Earth, so it was entitled to an old language. Sea, and stars—why, there was even a full moon.

  CHAPTER 21

  AUTUMN again, and winter in the air. The fallen leaves lay in heaps under the bare dark trees and hissed and rattled across the ground with every wind. Only a few splashes of color remained in the woods, yellow or bronze or scarlet against grayness.

  Overhead the wild geese passed in great flocks, southward bound. There was more life in the sky this year—fewer hunters, Brock supposed. The remote honking drifted down to him, full of wandering and loneliness. It was a clear pale blue up there, the sun wheeled bright and heat-less, spilling its coruscant light across a broad and empty land. The wind was strong, flowing around his cheeks and flapping his clothes, the trees were noisy with it.

  He went slowly from the main house, scuffing the sere grass under his boots. Joe followed quietly at heel. From the shed came a hammering of sheet iron, Mehitabel and Mac were building their charcoal gas distillator: for them it was too much fun to let be, and the gasoline supplies were very low. Some of the people had gone to town, some were sleeping off their Sunday dinner. Brock was alone.

  He thought he might stop in and chatter with Mehitabel. No, let her work undisturbed; her conversation was rather limited anyway. He decided to take a stroll through the woods; it was late afternoon already, and too nice a day to te indoors.

  Ella Mae came out of one of the cottages and giggled at him. “Hello,” she said.

  “Uh, hello,” he answered. “How’re you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Want to come inside? Nobody else in here now.”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I, well, I have to check a fence.”

  “I could come along?” she asked timidly.

  “Better not,” he said. “The pigs, you know. They might still be running around in there.”

  Ella Mae’s watery blue eyes filled with tears, and she lowered her misshapen head. “You never stop by with me,” she accused.

  “I will when I get the chance,” he said hastily. “It’s just that I’m awful busy. You know how it goes.” He made his retreat as fast as
he could.

  Have to get a husband for her, he reflected. There must be a number of her kind wandering loose even now. I can’t have her chasing after me this way, it’s too hard on both of us.

  He grinned crookedly. Leadership seemed to be all burden and little reward. He was commander, planner, executive, teacher, doctor, father confessor—and now matchmaker!

  He bent over and caressed Joe’s head with a big rough hand. The dog licked his wrist and wagged a joyous tail. Sometimes a man could get damnably lonely. Even a friend like Joe couldn’t fill all needs. On this day of wind and sharp light and blowing leaves, a day of farewell, when all the earth seemed to be breaking up its summer home and departing down some unknown road, he felt his own isolation like a pain within him.

  Now, no more of such thoughts, he reproved himself. “Come on, Joe, let’s take us a walk.”

  The dog poised, it was a lovely taut stance, and looked toward the sky. Brock’s eyes followed. The flash of metal was so bright it hurt him to look.

  An airship—some kind of airship. And it’s landing!

  He stood with his fists clenched at his sides, feeling the wind chill on his skin and hearing how it roared in the branches behind him. The heart in his breast seemed absurdly big, and he shivered under the heavy jacket and felt sweat on his palms.

  Take it easy, he told himself. Just take it easy. All right, so it is one of Them. He won’t bite you. Nobody’s harmed us, or interfered with us, yet.

  Quietly as a falling leaf, the vessel grounded nearby. It was a small ovoid, with a lilting grace in its clean lines and curves, and there was no means of propulsion that Brock could see. He began walking toward it, slowly and stiffly. The revolver sagging at his waist made him feel ridiculous, as if he had been caught in a child’s playsuit.

  He felt a sudden upsurge of bitterness. Let Them take us as we are. Be damned if I’ll put on company manners for some bloody Sunday tourist.

  The side of the aircraft shimmered and a man stepped through it. Through it! Brock’s first reaction was almost disappointment. The man looked so utterly commonplace. He was of medium height, a stockiness turning plump, an undistinguished face, an ordinary tweed sports outfit. As Brock approached, the man smiled.