When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  "When do you die?" said the technician, socially.

  "Seventy-three years, two months, four days," said Tiga-belas agreeably. "I'm a fourth-and-last."

  "I thought so," said the technician. "You're smart. Nobody starts off that way. We all learn. I'm sure you'll take care of that girl."

  They left the laboratory together and ascended to the surface and the cool restful night of Earth.

  II

  Late the next day, Tiga-belas came in, very cheerful indeed. In his left hand he held a drama spool, full commercial size. In his right hand there was a black plastic cube with shimmering silver contact-points gleaming on its sides. The two technicians greeted him politely.

  The psychological guard could not hide his excitement and his pleasure.

  "I've got that beautiful child taken care of. The way she is going to be fixed, she'll keep her Daughter Potential, but it's going to be a lot closer to one thousand point double zero than it was with all those nines. I've used a mouse-brain."

  "If it's frozen," said the first technician, "we won't be able to put it in the computer. It will have to go forward with the emergency stores."

  "This brain isn't frozen," said Tiga-belas indignantly. "It's been laminated. We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it down, about seven thousand layers. Each one has plastic of at least two molecular thicknesses. This mouse can't spoil. As a matter of fact, this mouse is going to go on thinking forever. He won't think much, unless we put the voltage on him, but he'll think. And he can't spoil. This is ceramic plastic, and it would take a major weapon to break it."

  "The contacts . . . ? "said the second technician.

  "They don't go through," said Tiga-belas. "This mouse is tuned into that girl's personality, up to a thousand meters. You can put him anywhere in the ship. The case has been hardened. The contacts are just attached on the outside. They feed to nickel-steel counterpart contacts on the inside. I told you, this mouse is going to be thinking when the last human being on the last known planet is dead. And it's going to be thinking about that girl. Forever."

  "Forever is an awfully long time," said the first technician, with a shiver. "We only need a safety period of two thousand years. The girl herself would spoil in less than a thousand years, if anything did go wrong."

  "Never you mind," said Tiga-belas, "that girl is going to be guarded whether she is spoiled or not." He spoke to the cube. "You're going along with Veesey, fellow, and if she is an Old Twenty-two you'll turn the whole thing into a toddle-garden frolic complete with ice cream and hymns to the West Wind." Tiga-belas looked up at the other men and said, quite unnecessarily, "He can't hear me."

  "Of course not," said the first technician, very dryly.

  They all looked at the cube. It was a beautiful piece of engineering. The psychological guard had reason to be proud of it.

  "Do you need the mouse any more?" said the first technician.

  "Yes," said Tiga-belas. "One-third of a millisecond at forty megadynes. I want him to get her whole life printed on his left cortical lobe. Particularly her screams. She screamed badly at ten months. Something she got in her mouth. She screamed at ten when she thought the air had stopped in her drop-shaft. It hadn't, or she wouldn't be here. They're in her record. I want the mouse to have those screams. And she had a pair of red shoes for her fourth birthday. Give me the full two minutes with her. I've printed the key on the complete series of Marcia and the Moon Men—that was the best box drama for teen-age girls that they ran last year. Veesey saw it. This time she'll see it again, but the mouse will be tied in. She won't have the chance of a snowball in hell of forgetting it."

  Said the first technician, "What was that?"

  "Huh?" said Tiga-belas.

  "What was that you just said, that, at the end?"

  "Are you deaf?"

  "No," said the technician huffily. "I just didn't understand what you meant."

  "I said that she would not have the chance of a snowball in hell of forgetting it."

  "That's what I thought you said," replied the technician. "What is a snowball? What is hell? What sort of chances do they make?"

  The second technician interrupted eagerly. "I know," he explained. "Snowballs are ice formations on Neptune. Hell is a planet out near Khufu VII. I don't know how anybody would get them together."

  Tiga-belas looked at them with the weary amazement of the very old. He did not feel like explaining, so he said gently:

  "Let's leave the literature till another time. All I meant was, Veesey will be safe when she's cued into this mouse. The mouse will outlast her and everybody else, and no teen-age girl is going to forget Marcia and the Moon Men. Not when she saw every single episode twice over. This girl did."

  "She's not going to render the other passengers ineffectual? That wouldn't help," said the first technician.

  "Not a bit," said Tiga-belas.

  "Give me those strengths again," said the first technician.

  "Mouse—one-third millisecond at forty megadynes."

  "They'll hear that way beyond the moon," said the technician. "You can't put that sort of stuff into people's heads without a permit. Do you want us to get a special permit from the Instrumentality?"

  "For one-third of a millisecond?"

  The two men faced each other for a moment; then the technician began creasing his forehead, his mouth began to smile, and they both laughed. The second technician did not understand it and Tiga-belas said to him:

  "I'm putting the girl's whole lifetime into one-third of a millisecond at top power. It will drain over into the mouse-brain inside this cube. What is the normal human reaction within one-third millisecond?"

  "Fifteen milliseconds—" The second technician started to speak and stopped himself.

  "That's right," said Tiga-belas. "People don't get anything at all in less than fifteen milliseconds. This mouse isn't only veneered and laminated; he's fast. The lamination is faster than his own synapses ever were. Bring on the girl."

  The first technician had already gone to get her.

  The second technician turned back for one more question. "Is the mouse dead?"

  "No. Yes. Of course not. What do you mean? Who knows?" said Tiga-belas all in one breath.

  The younger man stared but the couch with the beautiful girl had already rolled into the room. Her skin had chilled down from pink to ivory and her respiration was no longer visible to the naked eye, but she was still beautiful. The deep freezing had not yet begun.

  The first technician began to whistle. "Mouse—forty megadynes, one-third of a millisecond. Girl, output maximum, same time. Girl input, two minutes, what volume?"

  "Anything," said Tiga-belas. "Anything. Whatever you use for deep personality engraving."

  "Set," said the technician.

  "Take the cube," said Tiga-belas.

  The technician took it and fitted it into the coffinlike box near the girl's head.

  "Good-bye, immortal mouse," said Tiga-belas. "Think about the beautiful girl when I am dead and don't get too tired of Marcia and the Moon Men when you've seen it for a million years . . ."

  "Record," said the second technician. He took it from Tiga-belas and put it into a standard drama-shower, but one with output cables heavier than any home had ever installed.

  "Do you have a code word?" said the first technician.

  "It's a little poem," said Tiga-belas. He reached in his pocket. "Don't read it aloud. If any of us misspoke a word, there is a chance she might hear it and it would heterodyne the relationship between her and the laminated mouse."

  The two looked at a scrap of paper. In clear, archaic writing there appeared the lines:

  Lady if a man

  Tries to bother you, you can

  Think blue,

  Count two,

  And look for a red shoe.

  The technicians laughed warmly. "That'll do it," said the first technician.

  Tiga-belas gave them an embarrassed smile of thanks.


  "Turn them both on," he said. "Good-bye, girl," he murmured to himself. "Good-bye, mouse. Maybe I'll see you in seventy-four years."

  The room flashed with a kind of invisible light inside their heads. In moon orbit a navigator wondered about his mother's red shoes. Two million people on Earth started to count "one-two" and then wondered why they had done so.

  A bright young parakeet, in an orbital ship, began reciting the whole verse and baffled the crew as to what the meaning might be.

  Apart from this, there were no side-effects.

  The girl in the coffin arched her body with terrible strain. The electrodes had scorched the skin at her temples. The scars stood bright red against the chilled fresh skin of the girl.

  The cube showed no sign from the dead-live live-dead mouse.

  While the second technician put ointment on Veesey's scars, Tiga-belas put on a headset and touched the terminals of the cube very gently without moving it from the snap-in position it held in the coffin-shaped box.

  He nodded, satisfied. He stepped back.

  "You're sure the girl got it?"

  "We'll read it back before she goes to deep-freeze."

  "Marcia and the Moon Men, what?"

  "Can't miss it," said the first technician. "I'll let you know if there's anything missing. There won't be."

  Tiga-belas took one last look at the lovely, lovely girl. Seventy-three years, two months, three days, he thought to himself. And she, beyond Earth rules, may be awarded a thousand years. And the mouse-brain has got a million years.

  Veesey never knew any of them—neither the first technician, nor the second technician, nor Tiga-belas, the psychological guard.

  To the day of her death, she knew that Marcia and the Moon Men had included the most wonderful blue lights, the hypnotic count of "one-two, one-two" and the prettiest red shoes that any girl had seen on or off Earth.

  III

  Three hundred and twenty-six years later she had to wake up.

  Her box had opened.

  Her body ached in every muscle and nerve.

  The ship was screaming emergency and she had to get up.

  She wanted to sleep, to sleep, or to die.

  The ship kept screaming.

  She had to get up.

  She lifted an arm to the edge of her coffin-bed. She had practiced getting in and out of the bed in the long training period before they sent her underground to be hypnotized and frozen. She knew just what to reach for, just what to expect. She pulled herself over on her side. She opened her eyes.

  The lights were yellow and strong. She closed her eyes again.

  This time a voice sounded from somewhere near her. It seemed to be saying, "Take the straw in your mouth."

  Veesey groaned.

  The voice kept on saying things.

  Something scratchy pressed against her mouth.

  She opened her eyes.

  The outline of a human head had come between her and the light.

  She squinted, trying to see if it might be one more of the doctors. No, this was the ship.

  The face came into focus.

  It was the face of a very handsome and very young man. His eyes looked into hers. She had never seen anyone who was both handsome and sympathetic, quite the way that he was. She tried to see him clearly, and found herself beginning to smile.

  The drinking-tube thrust past her lips and teeth. Automatically she sucked at it. The fluid was something like soup, but it had a medicinal taste too.

  The face had a voice. "Wake up," he said, "wake up. It doesn't do any good to hold back now. You need some exercise as soon as you can manage it."

  She let the tube slip from her mouth and gasped, "Who are you?"

  "Trece," he said, "and that's Talatashar over there. We've been up for two months, rescuing the robots. We need your help."

  "Help," she murmured, "my help?"

  Trece's face wrinkled and crinkled in a delightful grin. "Well, we sort of needed you. We really do need a third mind to watch the robots when we think we've fixed them. And besides, we're lonely. Talatashar and I aren't much company to each other. We looked over the list of reserve crew and we decided to wake you." He reached out a friendly hand to her.

  When she sat up she saw the other man, Talatashar. She immediately recoiled: she had never seen anyone so ugly. His hair was gray and cropped. Piggy little eyes peered out of eye-sockets which looked flooded with fat. His cheeks hung down in monstrous jowls on either side. On top of all that, his face was lopsided. One side seemed wide awake but the other was twisted in an endless spasm which looked like agony. She could not help putting her hand to her mouth. And it was with the back of her hand against her lips that she spoke.

  "I thought—I thought everybody on this ship was supposed to be handsome."

  One side of Talatashar's face smiled at her while the other half stayed with its expression of frozen hurt.

  "We were," his voice rumbled, and it was not of itself an unpleasant voice, "we all were. Some of us always get spoiled in the freezing. It will take you a while to get used to me." He laughed grimly. "It took me a while to get used to me. In two months, I've managed. Pleased to meet you. Maybe you'll be pleased to meet me, after a while. What do you think of that, eh, Trece?"

  "What?" said Trece, who had watched them both with friendly worry.

  "The girl. So tactful. The direct diplomacy of the very young. Was I handsome, she said. No, say I. What is she, anyhow?"

  Trece turned to her. "Let me help you sit," he said.

  * * *

  She sat up on the edge of her box.

  Wordlessly he passed the skin of fluid to her with its drinking tube, and she went back to sucking her broth. Her eyes peered up at the two men like the eyes of a small child. They were as innocent and troubled as the eyes of a kitten which has met worry for the first time.

  "What are you?" said Trece.

  She took her lips away from the tube for a moment. "A girl," she said.

  Half of Talatashar's face smiled a sophisticated smile. The other half moved a little with muscular drag, but expressed nothing. "We see that," said he, grimly.

  "He means," said Trece conciliatorily, "what have you been trained for?"

  She took her mouth away again. "Nothing," said she.

  The men laughed—both of them. First, Trece laughed with all the evil in the world in his voice. Then Talatashar laughed, and he was too young to laugh his own way. His laughter, too, was cruel. There was something masculine, mysterious, threatening, and secret in it, as though he knew all about things which girls could find out only at the cost of pain and humiliation. He was as alien, for the moment, as men have always been from women: filled with secret motives and concealed desires, driven by bright sharp thoughts which women neither had nor wished to have. Perhaps more than his body had spoiled.

  There was nothing in Veesey's own life to make her fear that laugh, but the instinctive reaction of a million years of womanhood behind her was to disregard the evil, go on the alert for more trouble, and hope for the best at the moment. She knew, from books and tapes, all about sex. This laugh had nothing to do with babies or with love. There was contempt and power and cruelty in it—the cruelty of men who are cruel merely because they are men. For an instant she hated both of them, but she was not alarmed enough to set off the trigger of the protective devices which the psychological guard had built into her mind itself. Instead, she looked down the cabin, ten meters long and four meters wide.

  This was home now, perhaps forever. There were sleepers somewhere, but she did not see their boxes. All she had was this small space and the two men—Trece with his warm smile, his nice voice, his interesting gray-blue eyes; and Talatashar, with his ruined face. And their laughter. That wretchedly mysterious masculine laughter, hostile and laughing-at in its undertones.

  Life's life, she thought, and I must live it. Here.

  Talatashar, who had finished laughing, now spoke in a very different voice.

 
"There will be time for the fun and games later. First, we have to get the work done. The photonic sails aren't picking up enough starlight to get us anywhere. The mainsail is ripped by a meteor. We can't repair it, not when it's twenty miles across. So we have to jury-rig the ship—that's the right old word."

  "How does it work?" asked Veesey sadly, not much interested in her own question. The aches and pains of the long freeze were beginning to bedevil her.

  Talatashar said, "It's simple. The sails are coated. We were put into orbit by rockets. The pressure of light is bigger on one side than on the other. With some pressure on one side and virtually no pressure on the other, the ship has to go somewhere. Interstellar matter is very fine and does not give us enough drag to slow us down. The sails pull away from the brightest source of light at any time. For the first eighty years it was the sun. Then we began trying to get both the sun and some bright patches of light behind it. Now we have more light coming at us than we want, and we will be pulled away from our destination if we do not point the blind side of the sails at the goal and the pushing sides at the next best source. The sailor died, for some reason we can't figure out. The ship's automatic mechanism woke us up and the navigation board explained the situation to us. Here we are. We have to fix the robots."

  "But what's the matter with them? Why don't they do it themselves? Why did they have to wake up people? They're supposed to be so smart." She particularly wondered, Why did they have to wake up me? But she suspected the answer—that the men had done it, not the robots—and she did not want to make them say it. She still remembered how their masculine laughter had turned ugly.

  "The robots weren't programmed to tear up sails—only to fix them. We've got to condition them to accept the damage that we want to leave, and to go ahead with the new work which we are adding."

  "Could I have something to eat?" asked Veesey.

  "Let me get it!" cried Trece.

  "Why not?" said Talatashar.

  While she ate, they went over the proposed work in detail, the three of them talking it out calmly. Veesey felt more relaxed. She had the sensation that they were taking her in as a partner.