As he drove it off with a steady barrage of repeller rays the thing seemed to expand and soften again. The agitated voice of Jackson snapped over the circuit, "Either we broke it down or it's given up, Angel. But something's brewing aboard their ship. They suddenly changed their major aim, somehow. Murphy says they're looking for something—think it's—?"
"Dead Center!" yelled Maclure. Almost under his very eyes the only unique phenomenon in creation had suddenly appeared.
It had risen from the plain with a splashing of colors and sounds, so violent a contravention of all the rest of the universe that his ship was transparent under its colors and the roaring, constant crash of its sound threatened to crystallize and rend the framework of his body. He could do no more than collapse limply and regard it in wonder.
The Center was, in short, everything that the rest of creation was not. In no terms at all could it be described; those which Maclure saw as light and heard as sound were, he realized, no more than the border-phenomena caused by the constant turmoil between the outer world and the Quiet Place that it surrounded.
Angel Maclure came to with a violent start. The ectoplasmic weapon had, he saw, been allowed to disperse. There was a strange quiet in space then. He snapped a tentative spy-ray on the other ship. Its screens fell away easily. Angel blinked. "What goes on?" he muttered.
The ray penetrated easily, and as he swept it through the ship he saw not one living figure. There was nothing at the barrage-relay but a complicated calculating device with shut-offs and a lead-wire to the control booth. And everywhere the ray peered he found nothing but machinery.
But in the booth from which the ship was guided his ray found and revealed Mr. Sapphire, alone and untended, his machinery pulsing away and the ancient, crusted skin dull and slack. In the faintest of faint whispers Angel heard Mr. Sapphire speak: "Maclure. My detector tells me you have a ray on us. Pull alongside and board me. You have safe-conduct."
Obeying he knew not what insane impulse, Angel heeled the ship around and clamped alongside the other. "Come on, Jackson," he called. Together they entered the ship and easily forced the door to the control booth.
"Mr. Sapphire," said Maclure.
"Maclure," sounded the whisper. "You have beaten me, I think. For I died more than three hours ago. I cannot keep this up much longer, Angel."
"Died," gasped Maclure. "How—"
With the feeblest semblance of mockery the ancient creature whispered: "A man does not meditate for a hundred years without a moment's pause without learning so simple a secret as the difference between life and death. I sought the Center, Maclure, that I might find youth and being again. There was hot in me the urge to smash and create anew—the thing that is the trouble of every mind above the ape.
"I see that I have failed again …the Center is yours. You may do many things with it—operate its laws as wisely and well as you have the more familiar laws of the outer world. Now
"Stop my machinery, Angel Maclure. I am a proud man, and this mockery of life in death is more than I can bear."
Without another word Angel's nimble fingers danced among the tangle of tubes and found a petcock that he turned off with a twitch of his wrist. The machinery stopped in its pulsing, and there was no difference at all save in the complicated unit that had been Mr.
Sapphire.
"And was it really you that complained against the grimness of life in this place?" asked Jackson with a smile.
Angel, tapping away with lightning fingers at a vast calculating machine's keyboard, looked up without ceasing from his work. "Could have been," he admitted. "But there's nothing like work on a grand and practical scale to make a man forget. This business of mapping out the laws and principles of a whole new kind of creation is what I might call my meat."
"Yeah," jeered Jackson. "The only original and authentic superman."
"In person," Angel admitted modestly.
Interference
[Cosmic Stories - July 1941 as by Walter C. Davies]
"Take it easy, now," warned the President of the United States. "A lot depends on you—don't go off half-cocked. You only get one chance.
That's all we can afford."
Boyle took the extended hand and shook it heartily. "We'll certainly do our best, sir," he said. And from the tone of his voice you could tell that he meant it.
The vast field was crowded; beneath the hot summer sun sweated twenty thousand people, surging, cheering, breaking through cordons of police lined up for their own protection. Dips were doing a thriving business; more than one light-fingered gentleman was planning to retire on the rich pickings from the crowd. People were far too excited to consider whether or not it was their own hands in their pockets or that of some total stranger of predatory instincts. The crowd was in a holiday mood, exalted to be in the same rocket field with Boyle and Cantrell.
The two objects of adoration were bearing up well under the strain, humble psychologists though they had been up to a few weeks ago.
After shaking the President's hand and being clapped on their backs by enough distinguished foreigners to fill an embassy the size of the great pyramid, they were blushing a little and very happy at their good fortune.
"But," whispered Boyle from the corner of his mouth, "if we don't come back they'll know we died trying." Suddenly grim, he surveyed the vast sea of faces stretching before him. An emcee took him by the arm and led him to a mike through which he would address the crowd.
"Hello—" he began, and then broke off, startled by the sound of his own voice roaring out across the field. "Hello, all you people. My partner and I just want to thank you before we leave in the Andros. If we don't return send out more men, men better than Cantrell and I. Because we aren't coming back before we crack the problem that's assigned to us.
When—if—you see the jets of the old Andros in the sky again, maybe in a week, maybe in a year, you'll know that the answer is in our hands and that the plague, the spastitis, is over. Or as good as over."
The roar that went up from the crowd was deafening as he modestly stepped back from the mike. The emcee was yelling things into it, but the tremendous ovation drowned out even the tornado of sound that the loudspeakers created.
Boyle waved at the crowd again. "All ready?" he snapped at Cantrell, his partner in the enterprise. "Everything checked?"
"Betcha life," said Cantrell. "Get in." Like an insect disappearing in the knothole of a giant tree trunk, Boyle eased through the tiny port in the grey, slab-sided hull of the Andros. Cantrell vaulted in immediately after him, and the huge plug of metal that sealed the ship swung into place from the inside.
The crowd had quieted, and the annunciators roared warnings to stand back from the breath of the fiery Titan that soon would roar its own message. Police cleared the mob away from the firing area with squad cars driving masses of people before them. Hastily the reviewing stand was rolled away from the ship.
The President got into his car, a long, low open Jefferson 22. He looked a little ill. "I hope they make it," he said, with a visible effort. "They're plucky young—" Then he could no longer contain himself. He began to cough violently, his hands trembling toward his mouth.
Doctors clustered around as he collapsed. Even in unconsciousness his body twitched grotesquely and his finely modeled hands trembled as if with cold. "He's got it," said one surgeon grimly. "The President has spastitis. It's spreading faster than we thought. And there go the dream-boys who have to get out into space to find a cure." He gestured at the Andros, which was ponderously aiming itself at the zenith with its own self-elevators.
With a mind-staggering crash the ship took off. The wind of its departure almost tore clothes from the surgeons at the Presidential car.
Long after it had vanished—seemingly dead into the sun—their ears rang with the concussion, and breezes stiffly whipped along the field.
Cantrell grinned feebly from the bunk. "I'm all right," he said weakly. "I can get up. This damned space-sickness
gets me every time. You ready to try out the polyphone?"
The hardy Boyle grinned back through a tangle of electronics supplies.
"It's all rigged up and ready for you. Catch." He tossed over a set of headphones connected with the machinery and donned a similar set of his own. "Relax," he warned. "If we're not far enough out this ought to be a full-blooded shock to mind and body." He switched on a dull-glowing tube.
Cantrell squinted his eyes shut and concentrated on the familiar thought patterns of his partner. He caught them for a moment. Boyle was thinking of the blackness of space through which they were speeding and wondering vaguely whether the meteor interceptor would work as well under stress as it had in the tests. He held up a hand with thumb and forefinger meeting, both crooked, in the time-honored technicians' gesture of: coming over 100%.
Then there was a sudden rip in the smoothly unreeling pattern. It was as though a panorama were being opened before his eyes; the panorama of his partner's mind. Then a seam opened suddenly and without warning. He was reading the minds of total strangers, people he'd never heard of.
In rapid sequence he caught the image of a grubby little room as seen by a short man, and then surges of physical disgust at the sight—
through this short stranger's eyes—of a big, muscular woman.
Following that image and impression was a vision of staring dead into the sun, some fool who was looking for their ship, no doubt. Back to the grubby room, but this time seen from the slightly higher elevation of the muscular woman, who obviously didn't like the little man she focused on any more than he liked her.
For a full hour Cantrell tried to claw his way back to the mind stream of the man who was raptly sitting a few feet from him, but the obtrusive thoughts of people back on Earth insisted on popping up. For a full hour Cantrell plumbed the depths of degradation in some minds, read the noble and exalted thoughts of others. He tuned in on one murder and two suicides, seen in dizzy angles by the different participants in the violence done.
Through them all was a continual undertone of abominable worry and expectancy of death. Cantrell grunted softly whenever that image emerged. He recognized it easily; that was what he and Boyle were out there in space to fight. It was the ever-present dread of being struck down by the plague raging on Earth—the shakes, spastitis malignans, whatever you wanted to call it.
Cantrell saw people drop in the street, only to begin to tremble horribly at the hands and feet with the disease. Finally he tore the headset off in disgust. Boyle looked at him mildly.
"You try it solo," said Cantrell. "I can't get a damned thing out of the ether except the pressure-waves from Tellus. And they aren't pretty."
Boyle removed his own set carefully. "It's eavesdropping," he said. "I tried to get you every second. What were you doing?"
"Just what you were," grunted his partner. "Just exactly. I was trying to get you, but you weren't to be had. We have to move on, Boyle. Do what you can with the accelerators."
Boyle went to the instrument panel, worked the multiplex of levers. Too near the Earth! Too near to the suffering stew of human beings in agony, never knowing who would be next with the shakes. That was what they had to get away from—the emotional jags and lunatic vibrations from the home planet.
He and Cantrell had been carefully teamed as psychological mates for the full utilization of the polyphone. Essentially the machine was intended to heighten to the nth degree the rapport of a pair like this one. But they were too sensitive for the machine. There was interference from the thousands who passed in the street, from everybody all over the globe who was thinking consecutively at the time.
And because the shakes was a disease of psychological degeneration, you had to fight it by probing into a mind and finding what was wrong.
It didn't have to be a diseased mind, for every normal mind has in its depths the seeds of every psychological affliction that breaks out in wilder form. In Boyle's well-ordered brain were minute traces of megalomania, satyriasis, schizophrenia, all the words ending in philia and phobia as well as other unpleasant matters. Everybody has them, whether he knows it or not.
The idea had been to shoot these two out into space, far from the influence and interference of Earth; then they would work deeper and deeper into each other's minds, finally to discover the seeds of the shakes that were inevitably lying dormant.
One of the pleasant features of psychiatry is that once you have your problem broken down it is already solved. The synthetic element of logic is superfluous; analysis is sufficient. It might be that the shakes consisted of a fear of technical progress reaching epidemic proportions through hysterical contagion. You see a man fall in the street feebly kicking his heels in protest at being deprived of the liberty to roam on grassy fields and your own elements of protest are somewhat stirred.
Then one day you feel despondent and they explode when your censor band is not on guard against subversive urges like that. And for the rest of your life you are a spastic, kicking and squirming uncontrollably. Or until someone calmly explains to you what is wrong—about the machine age and the rest. Then you are miraculously cured. And one cure breeds a thousand as confidence grows.
Meanwhile there was the matter of interference from Earth. Boyle pushed the fuel rod down to the limits of the outward-bound trip.
Dammit, they'd have to get away from the static, he brooded.
"What's our position?" queried Boyle. He was relaxing, Cantrell at the driving panel.
"Practically ideal," said his partner. "I haven't checked, but we should be well out of the range of anything from Earth. Going high and fancy, we are—per second acceleration for two weeks. That's plenty far. Do you want to try out the polyphone again?"
"Blow off the dust," grunted Boyle, swinging himself from the bunk.
Gravity on the ship was at Earth level; that had meant tons of extra equipment and power consumption far above normal, but these two on whom the fate of their planet depended could not be distracted by space sickness and flying soup.
Cantrell readied the polyphone, testing and checking the scores of minute connections and solders that held the complex creation together. Some he tightened, others he ripped out and replaced. At length the psychologist reported: "All ready. Let's make this tryout a good one."
"Right. You stay open and receptive; I'll drive as deep into your mind as I can. And Cantrell—I know it's not a nice thing to ask, but you'll have to have complete confidence in me. I don't want you to seal off any sections at all from me. I want you to stay as open as though you weren't being probed. You're a specialist; you could close off whatever you wanted to. But we don't know where the spastitis seeds lie. It may be in some group-unconscious engram or some especially unsavory crime you've committed and forced yourself to forget. I'll play square with you, Cantrell. For the sake of the whole planet back there—don't keep any secret places."
His partner stared at him curiously. "Okay," he said at last. "You know best. But if you find anything especially nasty, do me the favor of not telling me about it."
"Agreed," said Boyle with relief. He switched on the machine as they donned the head sets. The great tube glowed.
Cantrell relaxed in body and mind as he felt the probing fingers sent from his partner's brain pluck away at his grey matter. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation, rather like a mental Swedish massage. Vaguely, images came through. He stiffened a little. There shouldn't be any images here, and if there were he shouldn't get them. For the moment putting aside the receptive mood, he reached out, shutting his eyes and wrinkling his brow in an effort to encompass the foreign thought vibrations that were filtering into his skull.
He saw a sky then through the eyes of some person on whose mind he had landed. The sky was curiously dusky. And with the vision of the sky was a poignant sense of longing that filled the mind of Cantrell's host.
The words of it seemed to be: "My loved one! My loved one—on their side. Now we are enemies …"
A quick st
art of alarm. The sky swiveled away, and Cantrell saw through these other eyes a group of horsemen bearing down on his host. A shrill scream of terror, an intolerable wave of revulsion and regret, and then the blankness of death. Cantrell's host had been ridden under the hooves of the horsemen.
The psychologist, not believing what he had experienced, reached out with his mind and seized on one of the riders. He did know that there was a sense of guilt in the rider's mind; what it meant he could not tell.
He heard a conversation begun with a shrill, nervous laugh. Then:
"Damned rebel—we showed him."
"Right. Fix them all up like that and this world will be worth living on, sir. Where do we go now?"
"Keep scouting. Look for rebels and treat them the right way, like that dead thing back there—"
Cantrell had suddenly lost interest in the conversation. The talk of rebels was beyond him anyway. He had been studying, through his host's eyes, the costume of the riders. They were unfamiliar, and somehow totally alien to anything earthly. Then with a shock of terror Cantrell saw that the horses had peculiarly long heads—and six legs!
He tore the set from his head and stared, wide-eyed, at Boyle. "Where were you?" he demanded. There was a shrill, hysterical note in his voice.
"Trying to get over," said Boyle as he switched off the set. "But there was interference. We'll have to go farther yet. I tuned in on a series of love-affairs from back on Earth."
"Sure of that?" countered Cantrell. "Are you sure it was from Earth that you got the vibrations?"
"Why?" snapped Boyle. "What did you receive?"
Cantrell told him, and Boyle sat quietly for a long time, rattling his fingernails on a tabletop. "Yeah," said Boyle at last. "I suspected something like that. Those women reacted in wholly unearthly fashion.
The anatomy of these broadcasters is similar, but they aren't Homo sapiens."
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 96