"I derive from the young lady's cube. Did you notice the lights dim? Tiga-belas left a false cube in her freeze-box but he hid me in the ship. When she thought the key notions at me, there was a fraction of a microvolt which called for more power at my terminals. I am made from the brain of some small animal, but I bear the personality and the strength of Tiga-belas. I shall last a billion years. When the current came on full power, I became operative as a distortion in your minds. I do not exist," said he, specifically addressing himself to Talatashar, "but if I needed to take out my imaginary pistol and to shoot you in the head with it, my control is so strong that your bone would comply with my command. The hole would appear in your head and your blood and your brains would pour out, just as much as blood is pouring from your hand just now. Look at your hand and believe me, if you wish."
Talatashar refused to look.
The stranger went on in a very deliberate tone. "No bullet would come from my pistol, no ray, no blast, nothing. Nothing at all. But your flesh would believe me, even if your thoughts did not. Your bone structure would believe me, whether you thought so or not. I am communicating to every separate single cell in your body, to everything which I feel to be alive. If I think bullet at you, your bone will pull aside for the imaginary wound. Your skin will part, your blood will pour out, your brains will splash. They will not do it by physical force but by communication from me. Communication direct, you fool. That may not be real violence, but it serves my purpose just as well. Now do you understand me? Look at your wrist."
Talatashar did not avert his eyes from the stranger. In an odd cold voice he said, "I believe you. I guess I am crazy. Are you going to kill me?"
"I don't know," said the stranger.
Trece said, "Please, are you a person or machine?"
"I don't know," said the stranger to him too.
"What's your name?" asked Veesey. "Did you get a name when they made you and sent you with us?"
"My name," said the stranger, with a bow to her, "is Sh'san."
"Glad to meet you, Sh'san," said Trece, holding out his own hand.
They shook hands.
"I felt your hand," said Trece. He looked at the other two in amazement. "I felt his hand, I really did. What were you doing out in space all this time?"
The stranger smiled. "I have work to do, not talk to make."
"What do you want us to do," said Talatashar, "now that you've taken over?"
"I haven't taken over," said Sh'san, "and you will do what you have to do. Isn't that the nature of people?"
"But, please—" said Veesey.
The stranger had vanished and the three of them were alone in the spaceboat cabin again. Trece's gag and bindings had finally drifted down to the carpet but Tala's blood hung gently in the air beside him.
Very heavily, Talatashar spoke. "Well, we're through that. Would you say I was crazy?"
"Crazy?" said Veesey. "I don't know the word."
"Damaged in the thinking," explained Trece to her. Turning to Talatashar he began to speak seriously. "I think that—" He was interrupted by the control board. Little bells rang and a sign lighted up. They all saw it. Visitors expected, said the glowing sign.
The storage door opened and a beautiful woman came into the cabin with them. She looked at them as though she knew them all. Veesey and Trece were inquisitive and startled, but Talatashar turned white, dead white.
V
Veesey saw that the woman wore a dress of the style which had vanished a generation ago—a style now seen only in the story-boxes. There was no back to it. The lady had a bold cosmetic design fanning out from her spinal column. In front, the dress hung from the usual magnet tabs which had been inserted into the shallow fatty area of the chest, but in her case the tabs were above the clavicles, so that the dress rose high, with an air of old-fashioned prudishness. Magnet tabs were at the usual place just below the ribcage, holding the half-skirt, which was very full, in a wide sweep of unpressed pleats. The lady wore a necklace and matching bracelet of off-world coral. The lady did not even look at Veesey. She went straight to Talatashar and spoke to him with peremptory love.
"Tal, be a good boy. You've been bad."
"Mama," gasped Talatashar. "Mama, you're dead!"
"Don't argue with me," she snapped. "Be a good boy. Take care of the little girl. Where is the little girl?" She looked around and saw Veesey. "That little girl," she added, "be a good boy to that little girl. If you don't, you will break your mother's heart, you will ruin your mother's life, you will break your mother's heart, just like your father did. Don't make me tell you twice."
She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and it seemed to Veesey that both sides of the man's face were equally twisted, for that moment.
She stood up, looked around, nodded politely at Trece and Veesey, and walked back into the storage room, closing the door after her.
Talatashar plunged after her, opening the door with a bang and shutting it with a slam. Trece called after him:
"Don't stay in there too long. You'll freeze."
Trece added, speaking to Veesey, "This is something your cube is doing. That Sh'san, he's the most powerful warden I ever saw. Your psychological guard must have been a genius. And you know what's the matter with him?" He nodded at the closed door. "He told me once, just in general. His own mother raised him. He was born in the asteroid belt and she didn't turn him in."
"You mean, his very own mother?" said Veesey.
"Yes, his genealogical mother," said Trece.
"How dirty!" said Veesey. "I never heard of anything like it."
Talatashar came back into the room and said nothing to either of them.
The mother did not reappear.
But Sh'san, the eidetic man imprinted in the cube, continued to assert his authority over all three of them.
Three days later Marcia herself appeared, talked to Veesey for half an hour about her adventures with the Moon Men, and then disappeared again. Marcia never pretended that she was real. She was too pretty to be real. A thick cascade of yellow hair crowned a well-formed head; dark eyebrows arched over vivid brown eyes; and an enchantingly mischievous smile pleased Veesey, Trece, and Talatashar. Marcia admitted that she was the imaginary heroine of a dramatic series from the story-boxes. Talatashar had calmed down completely after the apparition of Sh'san followed by that of his mother. He seemed anxious to get to the bottom of the phenomena. He tried to do it by asking Marcia.
She answered his questions willingly.
"What are you?" he demanded. The friendly smile on the good side of his face was more frightening than a scowl would have been.
"I'm a little girl, silly," said Marcia.
"But you're not real," he insisted.
"No," she admitted, "but are you?" She laughed a happy girlish laugh—the teen-ager tying up the bewildered adult in his own paradox.
"Look," he persisted, "you know what I mean. You're just something that Veesey saw in the story-boxes and you've come to give her imaginary red shoes."
"You can feel the shoes after I've left," said Marcia.
"That means the cube has made them out of something on this ship," said Talatashar, very triumphantly.
"Why not?" said Marcia. "I don't know about ships. I guess he does."
"But even if the shoes are real, you're not," said Talatashar. "Where do you go when you 'leave' us?"
"I don't know," said Marcia. "I came here to visit Veesey. When I go away I suppose that I will be where I was before I came."
"And where was that?"
"Nowhere," said Marcia, looking solid and real.
"Nowhere? So you admit you're nothing?"
"I will if you want me to," said Marcia, "but this conversation doesn't make much sense to me. Where were you before you were here?"
"Here? You mean in this boat? I was on Earth," said Talatashar.
"Before you were in this universe, where were you?"
"I wasn't born, so I didn't exist."
Marcia went back to talking about her adventures with the Moon Men and Veesey was fascinated to hear all the things they had had to leave out of the story-box version. When Marcia was through, she shook hands with the two men, gave Veesey a little peck of a kiss on her left cheek, and walked through the hull into the gnawing emptiness of space, marked only by the starless rhomboids of the sails which cut off part of the heavens from view.
Talatashar pounded his fist in his other, open hand. "Science has gone too far. They will kill us with their precautions."
Trece said, deadly calm, "And what might you have done?"
Talatashar fell into a gloomy silence.
And on the tenth day after the apparitions began, they ended. The power of the cube drew itself into a whole thunderbolt of decision. Apparently the cube and the ship's computers had somehow filled in each other's data.
The person who came in this time was a space captain, gray, wrinkled, erect, tanned by the radiation of a thousand worlds.
"You know who I am," he said.
"Yes, sir, a captain," said Veesey.
"I don't know you," said Talatashar, "and I'm not sure I believe in you."
"Has your hand healed?" asked the captain, grimly.
Talatashar fell silent.
The captain called them to attention. "Listen. You are not going to live long enough to get to the stars on your present course. I want Trece to set the macro-chronography for intervals of ninety-five years, and then I want to watch while he gives two of you at a time five years on watch. That will do to set the sails, check the tangling of the pod lines, and send out report beacons. This ship should have a sailor, but there is not enough equipment to turn one of you into a sailor, so we'll have to take a chance on the robot controls while all three of you sleep in your freeze-beds. Your sailor died of a blood clot and the robots pushed him out of the cabin before they woke you—"
Trece winced. "I thought he had committed suicide."
"Not a bit," said the captain. "Now listen. You'll get through in about three sleeps if you obey orders. If you don't, you'll never get there."
"It doesn't matter about me," said Talatashar, "but this little girl has got to get to Wereld Schemering while she still has some life. One of your blasted apparitions told me to take care of her, but the idea is a good one, anyhow."
"Me too," said Trece. "I didn't realize that she was just a kid until I saw her talking to that other kid Marcia. Maybe I'll have a daughter like her some day."
The captain said nothing to these comments but gave them the full, happy smile of an old, wise man.
An hour later they were through with the checkup of the boat. The three were ready to go to their separate freeze-beds. The captain was getting ready to make his farewell.
Talatashar spoke up. "Sir, I can't help asking it, but who are you?"
"A captain," said the captain promptly.
"You know what I mean," said Tala wearily.
The captain seemed to be looking inside himself. "I am a temporary, artificial personality created out of your minds by the personality which you call Sh'san. Sh'san is on the ship, but hidden from you, so that you will do him no harm. Sh'san was imprinted with the personality of a man, a real man, by the name of Tiga-belas. Sh'san was also imprinted with the personalities of five or six good space officers, just in case those skills might be needed. A small amount of static electricity keeps Sh'san on the alert, and when he is in the right position, he has a triggering mechanism which can call for more current from the ship's supply."
"But what is he? What are you?" Talatashar kept on, almost pleading. "I was about to commit a terrible crime and you ghosts came in and saved me. Are you imaginary? Are you real?"
"That's philosophy. I'm made by science. I wouldn't know," said the captain.
"Please," said Veesey, "could you tell us what it seems like to you? Not what it is. What it seems like."
The captain sagged, as though the discipline had gone out of him—as though he suddenly felt terribly old. "When I'm talking and doing things, I suppose that I feel about like any other space captain. If I stop to think about it, I find myself pretty upsetting. I know that I'm just an echo in your minds, combined with the experience and wisdom which has gone into the cube. So I guess that I do what real people do. I just don't think about it very much. I mind my business." He stiffened and straightened and was himself again. "My own business," he repeated.
"And Sh'san," said Trece, "how do you feel about him?"
A look of awe—almost a look of terror—came upon the captain's face. "He? Oh, him." The tone of wonder enriched his voice and made it echo in the small cabin of the spaceboat. "Sh'san. He is the thinker of all thinking, the 'to be' of being, the doer of doings. He is powerful beyond your strongest imagination. He makes me come living out of your living minds. In fact," said the captain with a final snarl, "he is a dead mouse-brain laminated with plastic and I have no idea at all of who I am. Good night to you all!"
The captain set his cap on his head and walked straight through the hull. Veesey ran to a viewpoint but there was nothing outside the ship. Nothing. Certainly no captain.
"What can we do," said Talatashar, "but obey?"
They obeyed. They climbed into their freeze-beds. Talatashar attached the correct electrodes to Veesey and to Trece before he went to his bed and attached his own. They called to each other pleasantly as the lids came down.
They slept.
VI
At destination, the people of Wereld Schemering did the ingathering of pods, sails, and ship themselves. They did not wake the sleepers till they had them all assured of safety on the ground.
They woke the three cabinmates together. Veesey, Trece, and Talatashar were so busy answering questions about the dead sailor, about the repaired sails, and about their problems on the trip that they did not have time to talk to each other. Veesey saw that Talatashar seemed to be very handsome. The port doctors had done something to restore his face, so that he seemed a strangely dignified young-old man. At last Trece had a chance to talk to her.
"Good-bye, kid," he said. "Go to school for a while here and then find yourself a good man. I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?" she said, a terrible fear rising within her.
"For smooching around with you before that trouble came. You're just a kid. But you're a good kid." He ran his fingers through her hair, turned on his heel, and was gone.
She stood, utterly forlorn, in the middle of the room. She wished that she could weep. What use had she been on the trip?
Talatashar had come up to her unnoticed.
He held out his hand. She took it.
"Give it time, child," said he.
Is it child again? she thought to herself. To him she said, politely, "Maybe we'll see each other again. This is a pretty small world."
His face lit up in an oddly agreeable smile. It made such a wonderful difference for the paralysis to be gone from one side. He did not look old at all, not really old.
His voice took on urgency. "Veesey, remember that I remember. I remember what almost happened. I remember what we thought we saw. Maybe we did see all those things. We won't see them on the ground. But I want you to remember this. You saved us all. Me too. And Trece, and the thirty thousand out behind."
"Me?" she said. "What did I do?"
"You tuned in help. You let Sh'san work. It all came through you. If you hadn't been honest and kind and friendly, if you hadn't been terribly intelligent, no cube could have worked. That wasn't any dead mouse working miracles on us. It was your mind and your own goodness that saved us. The cube just added the sound effects. I tell you, if you hadn't been along, two dead men would be sailing off into the Big Nothing with thirty t
housand spoiling bodies trailing along behind. You saved us all. You may not know how you did it, but you did."
An official tapped him on the arm; Tala said, firmly but politely, to him, "Just a moment."
"That's it, I guess," he said to her.
A contrary spirit seized her; she had to speak, though she risked unhappiness by talking. "And what you said about girls . . . then . . . that time?"
"I remember it." His face twisted almost back to its old ugliness for a moment. "I remember it. But I was wrong. Wrong."
She looked at him and she thought in her own mind about the blue sky, about the two doors behind them, and about the red shoes in her luggage. Nothing miraculous happened. No Sh'san, no voices, no magic cubes.
Except that he turned around, came back to her, and said, "Look. Let's make sure that we see each other next week. These people at the desk can tell us where we are going to be, so that we'll find each other. Let's pester them."
Together they went to the immigration desk.
The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All
I
The Naked and Alone
We looked through the peephole of the hospital door.
Colonel Harkening had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked face down on the floor.
His body was rigid.
His face was turned sharply to the left so that the neck muscles showed. His right arm stuck out straight from the body. The elbow formed a right angle, with the forearm and hand pointing straight upward. The left arm also pointed straight out, but in this case the hand and forearm pointed downward in line with the body.
The legs were in the grotesque parody of a running position.
Except that Colonel Harkening wasn't running.
He was lying flat on the floor.
Flat, as though he were trying to squeeze himself out of the third dimension and to lie in two planes only. Grosbeck stood back and gave Timofeyev his turn at the peephole.
"I still say he needs a naked woman," said Grosbeck. Grosbeck always went in for the elementals.
When the People Fell Page 20