When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  II

  The Lost Locksheet

  Magno Taliano nodded to his pinlighters. The Stop-Captain bowed obsequiously from the doorway of the planoforming room. Taliano looked at him sternly, but with robust friendliness. With formal and austere courtesy he asked,

  "Sir and Colleague, is everything ready for the jonasoidal effect?"

  The Stop-Captain bowed even more formally. "Truly ready, Sir and Master."

  "The locksheets in place?"

  "Truly in place, Sir and Master."

  "The passengers secure?"

  "The passengers are secure, numbered, happy and ready, Sir and Master."

  Then came the last and the most serious of questions. "Are my pinlighters warmed with their pin-sets and ready for combat?"

  "Ready for combat, Sir and Master." With these words the Stop-Captain withdrew. Magno Taliano smiled to his pinlighters. Through the minds of all of them there passed the same thought.

  How could a man that pleasant stay married all those years to a hag like Dolores Oh? How could that witch, that horror, have ever been a beauty? How could that beast have ever been a woman, particularly the divine and glamorous Dolores Oh whose image we still see in four-di every now and then?

  Yet pleasant he was, though long he may have been married to Dolores Oh. Her loneliness and greed might suck at him like a nightmare, but his strength was more than enough strength for two.

  Was he not the captain of the greatest ship to sail between the stars?

  Even as the pinlighters smiled their greetings back to him, his right hand depressed the golden ceremonial lever of the ship. This instrument alone was mechanical. All other controls in the ship had long since been formed telepathically or electronically.

  Within the planoforming room the black skies became visible and the tissue of space shot up around them like boiling water at the base of a waterfall. Outside that one room the passengers still walked sedately on scented lawns.

  From the wall facing him, as he sat rigid in his Go-Captain's chair, Magno Taliano sensed the forming of a pattern which in three or four hundred milliseconds would tell him where he was and would give him the next clue as to how to move.

  He moved the ship with the impulses of his own brain, to which the wall was a superlative complement.

  The wall was a living brickwork of locksheets, laminated charts, one-hundred-thousand charts to the inch, the wall preselected and preassembled for all imaginable contingencies of the journey which, each time afresh, took the ship across half-unknown immensities of time and space. The ship leapt, as it had before.

  The new star focused.

  Magno Taliano waited for the wall to show him where he was, expecting (in partnership with the wall) to flick the ship back into the pattern of stellar space, moving it by immense skips from source to destination.

  This time nothing happened.

  Nothing?

  For the first time in a hundred years his mind knew panic.

  It couldn't be nothing. Not nothing. Something had to focus. The locksheets always focused.

  His mind reached into the locksheets and he realized with a devastation beyond all limits of ordinary human grief that they were lost as no ship had ever been lost before. By some error never before committed in the history of mankind, the entire wall was made of duplicates of the same locksheet.

  Worst of all, the Emergency Return sheet was lost. They were amid stars none of them had ever seen before, perhaps as near as five-hundred-million miles, perhaps as far as forty parsecs.

  And the locksheet was lost.

  And they would die.

  As the ship's power failed coldness and blackness and death would crush in on them in a few hours at the most. That then would be all, all of the Wu-Feinstein, all of Dolores Oh.

  III

  The Secret of the Old Dark Brain

  Outside of the planoforming room of the Wu-Feinstein the passengers had no reason to understand that they were marooned in the nothing-at-all.

  Dolores Oh rocked back and forth in an ancient rocking chair. Her haggard face looked without pleasure at the imaginary river that ran past the edge of the lawn. Dita from the Great South House sat on a hassock by her aunt's knees.

  Dolores was talking about a trip she had made when she was young and vibrant with beauty, a beauty which brought trouble and hate wherever it went.

  ". . . so the guardsman killed the captain and then came to my cabin and said to me, 'You've got to marry me now. I've given up everything for your sake,' and I said to him, 'I never said that I loved you. It was sweet of you to get into a fight, and in a way I suppose it is a compliment to my beauty, but it doesn't mean that I belong to you the rest of my life. What do you think I am, anyhow?'"

  Dolores Oh sighed a dry, ugly sigh, like the crackling of sub-zero winds through frozen twigs. "So you see, Dita, being beautiful the way you are is no answer to anything. A woman has got to be herself before she finds out what she is. I know that my lord and husband, the Go-Captain, loves me because my beauty is gone, and with my beauty gone there is nothing but me to love, is there?"

  An odd figure came out on the verandah. It was a pinlighter in full fighting costume. Pinlighters were never supposed to leave the planoforming room, and it was most extraordinary for one of them to appear among the passengers.

  He bowed to the two ladies and said with the utmost courtesy,

  "Ladies, will you please come into the planoforming room? We have need that you should see the Go-Captain now."

  Dolores's hand leapt to her mouth. Her gesture of grief was as automatic as the striking of a snake. Dita sensed that her aunt had been waiting a hundred years and more for disaster, that her aunt had craved ruin for her husband the way that some people crave love and others crave death.

  Dita said nothing. Neither did Dolores, apparently at second thought, utter a word.

  They followed the pinlighter silently into the planoforming room.

  The heavy door closed behind them.

  Magno Taliano was still rigid in his Captain's chair.

  He spoke very slowly, his voice sounding like a record played too slowly on an ancient parlophone.

  "We are lost in space, my dear," said the frigid, ghostly voice of the Captain, still in his Go-Captain's trance. "We are lost in space and I thought that perhaps if your mind aided mine we might think of a way back."

  Dita started to speak.

  A pinlighter told her: "Go ahead and speak, my dear. Do you have any suggestion?"

  "Why don't we just go back? It would be humiliating, wouldn't it? Still it would be better than dying. Let's use the Emergency Return Locksheet and go on right back. The world will forgive Magno Taliano for a single failure after thousands of brilliant and successful trips." The pinlighter, a pleasant enough young man, was as friendly and calm as a doctor informing someone of a death or of a mutilation. "The impossible has happened, Dita from the Great South House. All the locksheets are wrong. They are all the same one. And not one of them is good for emergency return."

  With that the two women knew where they were. They knew that space would tear into them like threads being pulled out of a fiber so that they would either die bit by bit as the hours passed and as the material of their bodies faded away a few molecules here and a few there. Or, alternatively, they could die all at once in a flash if the Go-Captain chose to kill himself and the ship rather than to wait for a slow death. Or, if they believed in religion, they could pray.

  The pinlighter said to the rigid Go-Captain, "We think we see a familiar pattern at the edge of your own brain. May we look in?"

  Taliano nodded very slowly, very gravely.

  The pinlighter stood still.

  The two women watched. Nothing visible happened, but they knew that beyond the limits of vision and yet before their eyes a great drama was being played out. The minds of the pinlighters probed deep into the mind of the frozen Go-Captain, searching amid the synapses for the secret of the faintest clue to their pos
sible rescue.

  Minutes passed. They seemed like hours.

  At last the pinlighter spoke. "We can see into your midbrain, Captain. At the edge of your paleocortex there is a star pattern which resembles the upper left rear of our present location."

  The pinlighter laughed nervously. "We want to know, can you fly the ship home on your brain?"

  Magno Taliano looked with deep tragic eyes at the inquirer. His slow voice came out at them once again since he dared not leave the half-trance which held the entire ship in stasis. "Do you mean can I fly the ship on a brain alone? It would burn out my brain and the ship would be lost anyhow . . ."

  "But we're lost, lost, lost," screamed Dolores Oh. Her face was alive with hideous hope, with a hunger for ruin, with a greedy welcome of disaster. She screamed at her husband, "Wake up, my darling, and let us die together. At least we can belong to each other that much, that long, forever!"

  "Why die?" said the pinlighter softly. "You tell him, Dita."

  Said Dita, "Why not try, Sir and Uncle?"

  Slowly Magno Taliano turned his face toward his niece. Again his hollow voice sounded. "If I do this I shall be a fool or a child or a dead man, but I will do it for you."

  Dita had studied the work of the Go-Captains and she knew well enough that if the paleocortex was lost the personality became intellectually sane, but emotionally crazed. With the most ancient part of the brain gone the fundamental controls of hostility, hunger, and sex disappeared. The most ferocious of animals and the most brilliant of men were reduced to a common level—a level of infantile friendliness in which lust and playfulness and gentle, unappeasable hunger became the eternity of their days.

  Magno Taliano did not wait.

  He reached out a slow hand and squeezed the hand of Dolores Oh. "As I die you shall at last be sure I love you. "

  Once again the women saw nothing. They realized they had been called in simply to give Magno Taliano a last glimpse of his own life.

  A quiet pinlighter thrust a beam-electrode so that it reached square into the paleocortex of Captain Magno Taliano.

  The planoforming room came to life. Strange heavens swirled about them like milk being churned in a bowl.

  Dita realized that her partial capacity of telepathy was functioning even without the aid of a machine. With her mind she could feel the dead wall of the locksheets. She was aware of the rocking of the Wu-Feinstein as it leapt from space to space, as uncertain as a man crossing a river by leaping from one ice-covered rock to the other.

  In a strange way she even knew that the paleocortical part of her uncle's brain was burning out at last and forever, that the star patterns which had been frozen in the locksheets lived on in the infinitely complex pattern of his own memories, and that with the help of his own telepathic pinlighters he was burning out his brain cell by cell in order for them to find a way to the ship's destination. This indeed was his last trip.

  Dolores Oh watched her husband with a hungry greed surpassing all expression.

  Little by little his face became relaxed and stupid.

  Dita could see the midbrain being burned blank, as the ship's controls with the help of the pinlighters searched through the most magnificent intellect of its time for a last course into harbor.

  Suddenly Dolores Oh was on her knees, sobbing by the hand of her husband.

  A pinlighter took Dita by the arm.

  "We have reached destination," he said.

  "And my uncle?"

  The pinlighter looked at her strangely.

  She realized he was speaking to her without moving his lips—speaking mind-to-mind with pure telepathy.

  "Can't you see it?"

  She shook her head dazedly.

  The pinlighter thought his emphatic statement at her once again.

  "As your uncle burned out his brain, you picked up his skills. Can't you sense it? You are a Go-Captain yourself and one of the greatest of us."

  "And he?"

  The pinlighter thought a merciful comment at her.

  Magno Taliano had risen from the chair and was being led from the room by his wife and consort, Dolores Oh. He had the amiable smile of an idiot, and his face for the first time in more than a hundred years trembled with shy and silly love.

  From Gustible's Planet

  Shortly after the celebration of the four thousandth anniversary of the opening of space, Angary J. Gustible discovered Gustible's planet. The discovery turned out to be a tragic mistake.

  Gustible's planet was inhabited by highly intelligent life forms. They had moderate telepathic powers. They immediately mind-read Angary J. Gustible's entire mind and life history, and embarrassed him very deeply by making up an opera concerning his recent divorce.

  The climax of the opera portrayed his wife throwing a teacup at him. This created an unfavorable impression concerning Earth culture, and Angary J. Gustible, who held a reserve commission as a Subchief of the Instrumentality, was profoundly embarrassed to find that it was not the higher realities of Earth which he had conveyed to these people, but the unpleasant intimate facts.

  As negotiations proceeded, other embarrassments developed.

  In physical appearance the inhabitants of Gustible's planet, who called themselves Apicians, resembled nothing more than oversize ducks, ducks four feet to four feet six in height. At their wing tips, they had developed juxtaposed thumbs. They were paddle-shaped and sufficed to feed the Apicians.

  Gustible's planet matched Earth in several respects: in the dishonesty of the inhabitants, in their enthusiasm for good food, in their instant capacity to understand the human mind. Before Gustible began to get ready to go back to Earth, he discovered that the Apicians had copied his ship. There was no use hiding this fact. They had copied it in such detail that the discovery of Gustible's planet meant the simultaneous discovery of Earth . . .

  By the Apicians.

  The implications of this tragic development did not show up until the Apicians followed him home. They had a planoforming ship capable of traveling in non-space just as readily as his.

  The most important feature of Gustible's planet was its singularly close match to the biochemistry of Earth. The Apicians were the first intelligent life forms ever met by human beings who were at once capable of smelling and enjoying everything which human beings smelled and enjoyed, capable of following any human music with forthright pleasure, and capable of eating and drinking everything in sight.

  The very first Apicians on Earth were greeted by somewhat alarmed ambassadors who discovered that an appetite for Munich beer, Camembert cheese, tortillas, and enchiladas, as well as the better grades of chow mein, far transcended any serious cultural, political, or strategic interests which the new visitors might have.

  Arthur Djohn, a Lord of the Instrumentality who was acting for this particular matter, delegated an Instrumentality agent named Calvin Dredd as the chief diplomatic officer of Earth to handle the matter.

  Dredd approached one Schmeckst, who seemed to be the Apician leader. The interview was an unfortunate one.

  Dredd began by saying, "Your Exalted Highness, we are delighted to welcome you to Earth—"

  Schmeckst said, "Are those edible?" and proceeded to eat the plastic buttons from Calvin Dredd's formal coat, even before Dredd could say though not edible they were attractive.

  Schmeckst said, "Don't try to eat those, they are really not very good."

  Dredd, looking at his coat sagging wide open, said, "May I offer you some food?"

  Schmeckst said, "Indeed, yes."

  And while Schmeckst ate an Italian dinner, a Peking dinner, a red-hot peppery Szechuanese dinner, a Japanese sukiyaki dinner, two British breakfasts, a smorgasbord, and four complete servings of diplomatic-level Russian zakouska, he listened to the propositions of the Instrumentality of Earth.

  These did not impress him. Schmeckst was intelligent despite his gross and offensive eating habits. He pointed out: "We two worlds are equal in weapons. We can't fight. Look," said he
to Calvin Dredd in a threatening tone.

  Calvin Dredd braced himself, as he had learned to do. Schmeckst also braced him.

  For an instant Dredd did not know what had happened. Then he realized that in putting his body into a rigid and controlled posture he had played along with the low-grade but manipulable telepathic powers of the visitors. He was frozen rigid till Schmeckst laughed and released him.

  Schmeckst said, "You see, we are well matched. I can freeze you. Nothing short of utter desperation could get you out of it. If you try to fight us, we'll lick you. We are going to move in here and live with you. We have enough room on our planet. You can come and live with us too. We would like to hire a lot of those cooks of yours. You'll simply have to divide space with us, and that's all there is to it."

  That really was all there was to it. Arthur Djohn reported back to the Lords of the Instrumentality that, for the time being, nothing could be done about the disgusting people from Gustible's planet.

  They kept their greed within bounds—by their standards. A mere seventy-two thousand of them swept the Earth, hitting every wine shop, dining hall, snack bar, soda bar, and pleasure center in the world. They ate popcorn, alfalfa, raw fruit, live fish, birds on the wing, prepared foods, cooked and canned foods, food concentrates, and assorted medicines.

  Outside of an enormous capacity to hold many times what the human body could tolerate in the way of food, they showed very much the same effects as persons. Thousands of them got various local diseases, sometimes called by such undignified names as the Yangtze rapids, Delhi belly, the Roman groanin', or the like. Other thousands became ill and had to relieve themselves in the fashion of ancient emperors. Still they came.