The Classic Sci-Fi Collection

by Ayn Rand

  “Jay, look,” Forth said, and I felt him trying to reach through the barricade and touch, really touch that cold contained young man, “we couldn’t order any man to do anything like this. Aside from the ordinary dangers, it could destroy your personal balance, maybe permanently. I’m asking you to volunteer something above and beyond the call of duty. Man to man—what do you say?”

  I would have been moved by his words. Even at secondhand I was moved by them. Jay Allison looked at the floor, and I saw him twist his long well-kept surgeon’s hands and crack the knuckles with an odd gesture. Finally he said, “I haven’t any choice either way, Doctor. I’ll take the chance. I’ll go to the trailmen.”

  * * *

  The screen went dark again and Forth flicked the light on. He said, “Well?”

  I gave it back, in his own intonation, “Well?” and was exasperated to find that I was twisting my own knuckles in the nervous gesture of Allison’s painful decision. I jerked them apart and got up.

  “I suppose it didn’t work, with that cold fish, and you decided to come to me instead? Sure, I’ll go to the trailmen for you. Not with that Allison—I wouldn’t go anywhere with that guy—but I speak the trailmen’s language, and without hypnosis either.”

  Forth was staring at me. “So you’ve remembered that?”

  “Hell, yes,” I said, “my dad crashed in the Hellers, and a band of trailmen found me, half dead. I lived there until I was about fifteen, then their Old-One decided I was too human for them, and they took me out through Dammerung Pass and arranged to have me brought here. Sure, it’s all coming back now. I spent five years in the Spacemen’s Orphanage, then I went to work taking Terran tourists on hunting parties and so on, because I liked being around the mountains. I—” I stopped. Forth was staring at me.

  “You think you’d like this job?”

  “It would be tough,” I said, considering. “The People of the Sky—” (using the trailmen’s name for themselves) “—don’t like outsiders, but they might be persuaded. The worst part would be getting there. The plane, or the ‘copter, isn’t built that can get through the crosswinds around the Hellers and land inside them. We’d have to go on foot, all the way from Carthon. I’d need professional climbers—mountaineers.”

  “Then you don’t share Allison’s attitude?”

  “Dammit, don’t insult me!” I discovered that I was on my feet again, pacing the office restlessly. Forth stared and mused aloud, “What’s personality anyway? A mask of emotions, superimposed on the body and the intellect. Change the point of view, change the emotions and desires, and even with the same body and the same past experiences, you have a new man.”

  I swung round in mid-step. A new and terrible suspicion, too monstrous to name, was creeping up on me. Forth touched a button and the face of Jay Allison, immobile, appeared on the visionscreen. Forth put a mirror in my hand. He said, “Jason Allison, look at yourself.”

  I looked.

  “No,” I said. And again, “No. No. No.”

  * * *

  Forth didn’t argue. He pointed, with a stubby finger. “Look—” he moved the finger as he spoke, “height of forehead. Set of cheekbones. Your eyebrows look different, and your mouth, because the expression is different. But bony structure—the nose, the chin—”

  I heard myself make a queer sound; dashed the mirror to the floor. He grabbed my forearm. “Steady, man!”

  I found a scrap of my voice. It didn’t sound like Allison’s. “Then I’m—Jay2? Jay Allison with amnesia?”

  “Not exactly.” Forth mopped his forehead with an immaculate sleeve and it came away damp with sweat, “No—not Jay Allison as I know him!” He drew a long breath. “And sit down. Whoever you are, sit down!”

  I sat. Gingerly. Not sure.

  “But the man Jay might have been, given a different temperamental bias. I’d say—the man Jay Allison started out to be. The man he refused to be. Within his subconscious, he built up barriers against a whole series of memories, and the subliminal threshold—”

  “Doc, I don’t understand the psycho talk.”

  Forth stared. “And you do remember the trailmen’s language. I thought so. Allison’s personality is suppressed in you, as yours was in him.”

  “One thing, Doc. I don’t know a thing about blood fractions or epidemics. My half of the personality didn’t study medicine.” I took up the mirror again and broodingly studied the face there. The high thin cheeks, high forehead shaded by coarse dark hair which Jay Allison had slicked down now heavily rumpled. I still didn’t think I looked anything like the doctor. Our voices were nothing alike either; his had been pitched rather high, falsetto. My own, as nearly as I could judge, was a full octave deeper, and more resonant. Yet they issued from the same vocal chords, unless Forth was having a reasonless, macabre joke.

  “Did I honest-to-God study medicine? It’s the last thing I’d think about. It’s an honest trade, I guess, but I’ve never been that intellectual.”

  “You—or rather, Jay Allison is a specialist in Darkovan parasitology, as well as a very competent surgeon.” Forth was sitting with his chin in his hands, watching me intently. He scowled and said, “If anything, the physical change is more startling than the other. I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  “That tallies with me. I don’t recognize myself.” I added, “—and the queer thing is, I didn’t even like Jay Allison, to put it mildly. If he—I can’t say he, can I?”

  “I don’t know why not. You’re no more Jay Allison than I am. For one thing, you’re younger. Ten years younger. I doubt if any of his friends—if he had any—would recognize you. You—it’s ridiculous to go on calling you Jay2. What should I call you?”

  “Why should I care? Call me Jason.”

  “Suits you,” Forth said enigmatically. “Look, then, Jason. I’d like to give you a few days to readjust to your new personality, but we are really pressed for time. Can you fly to Carthon tonight? I’ve hand-picked a good crew for you, and sent them on ahead. You’ll meet them there. You’ll find them competent.”

  * * *

  I stared at him. Suddenly the room oppressed me and I found it hard to breathe. I said in wonder, “You were pretty sure of yourself, weren’t you?”

  Forth just looked at me, for what seemed a long time. Then he said, in a very quiet voice, “No. I wasn’t sure at all. But if you didn’t turn up, and I couldn’t talk Jay into it, I’d have had to try it myself.”

  * * *

  Jason Allison, Junior, was listed on the directory of the Terran HQ as “Suite 1214, Medical Residence Corridor.” I found the rooms without any trouble, though an elderly doctor stared at me rather curiously as I barged along the quiet hallway. The suite—bedroom, minuscule sitting-room, compact bath—depressed me; clean, closed-in and neutral as the man who owned them, I rummaged them restlessly, trying to find some scrap of familiarity to indicate that I had lived here for the past eleven years.

  Jay Allison was thirty-four years old. I had given my age, without hesitation, as 22. There were no obvious blanks in my memory; from the moment Jay Allison had spoken of the trailmen, my past had rushed back and stood, complete to yesterday’s supper (only had I eaten that supper twelve years ago)? I remembered my father, a lined silent man who had liked to fly solitary, taking photograph after photograph from his plane for the meticulous work of Mapping and Exploration. He’d liked to have me fly with him and I’d flown over virtually every inch of the planet. No one else had ever dared fly over the Hellers, except the big commercial spacecraft that kept to a safe altitude. I vaguely remembered the crash and the strange hands pulling me out of the wreckage and the weeks I’d spent, broken-bodied and delirious, gently tended by one of the red-eyed, twittering women of the trailmen. In all I had spent eight years in the Nest, which was not a nest at all but a vast sprawling city built in the branches of enormous trees. With the small and delicate humanoids who had been my playfellows, I had gathered the nuts and buds and trapped the small arbore
al animals they used for food, taken my share at weaving clothing from the fibres of parasite plants cultivated on the stems, and in all those eight years I had set foot on the ground less than a dozen times, even though I had travelled for miles through the tree-roads high above the forest floor.

  Then the Old-One’s painful decision that I was too alien for them, and the difficult and dangerous journey my trailmen foster-parents and foster-brothers had undertaken, to help me out of the Hellers and arrange for me to be taken to the Trade City. After two years of physically painful and mentally rebellious readjustment to daytime living, the owl-eyed trailmen saw best, and lived largely, by moonlight, I had found a niche for myself, and settled down. But all of the later years (after Jay Allison had taken over, I supposed, from a basic pattern of memory common to both of us) had vanished into the limbo of the subconscious.

  A bookrack was crammed with large microcards; I slipped one into the viewer, with a queer sense of spying, and found myself listening apprehensively to hear that measured step and Jay Allison’s falsetto voice demanding what the hell I was doing, meddling with his possessions. Eye to the viewer, I read briefly at random, something about the management of compound fracture, then realized I had understood exactly three words in a paragraph. I put my fist against my forehead and heard the words echoing there emptily; “laceration ... primary efflusion ... serum and lymph ... granulation tissue....” I presumed that the words meant something and that I once had known what. But if I had a medical education, I didn’t recall a syllable of it. I didn’t know a fracture from a fraction.

  In a sudden frenzy of impatience I stripped off the white coat and put on the first shirt I came to, a crimson thing that hung in the line of white coats like an exotic bird in snow country. I went back to rummaging the drawers and bureaus. Carelessly shoved in a pigeonhole I found another microcard that looked familiar; and when I slipped it mechanically into the viewer it turned out to be a book on mountaineering which, oddly enough, I remembered buying as a youngster. It dispelled my last, lingering doubts. Evidently I had bought it before the personalities had forked so sharply apart and separated, Jason from Jay. I was beginning to believe. Not to accept. Just to believe it had happened. The book looked well-thumbed, and had been handled so much I had to baby it into the slot of the viewer.

  Under a folded pile of clean underwear I found a flat half-empty bottle of whiskey. I remembered Forth’s words that he’d never seen Jay Allison drink, and suddenly I thought, “The fool!” I fixed myself a drink and sat down, idly scanning over the mountaineering book.

  * * *

  Not till I’d entered medical school, I suspected, did the two halves of me fork so strongly apart ... so strongly that there had been days and weeks and, I suspected, years where Jay Allison had kept me prisoner. I tried to juggle dates in my mind, looked at a calendar, and got such a mental jolt that I put it face-down to think about when I was a little drunker.

  I wondered if my detailed memories of my teens and early twenties were the same memories Jay Allison looked back on. I didn’t think so. People forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year, the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical student who lost himself in his work. But I, Jason—I had always been the watcher behind, the person Jay Allison dared not be? Why was he past thirty—and I just 22?

  A ringing shattered the silence; I had to hunt for the intercom on the bedroom wall. I said, “Who is it?” and an unfamiliar voice demanded, “Dr. Allison?”

  I said automatically, “Nobody here by that name,” and started to put back the mouthpiece. Then I stopped and gulped and asked, “Is that you, Dr. Forth?”

  It was, and I breathed again. I didn’t even want to think about what I’d say if somebody else had demanded to know why in the devil I was answering Dr. Allison’s private telephone. When Forth had finished, I went to the mirror, and stared, trying to see behind my face the sharp features of that stranger, Doctor Jason Allison. I delayed, even while I was wondering what few things I should pack for a trip into the mountains and the habit of hunting parties was making mental lists about heat-socks and windbreakers. The face that looked at me was a young face, unlined and faintly freckled, the same face as always except that I’d lost my suntan; Jay Allison had kept me indoors too long. Suddenly I struck the mirror lightly with my fist.

  “The hell with you, Dr. Allison,” I said, and went to see if he had kept any clothes fit to pack.

  * * *

  Dr. Forth was waiting for me in the small skyport on the roof, and so was a small ‘copter, one of the fairly old ones assigned to Medical Service when they were too beat-up for services with higher priority. Forth took one startled stare at my crimson shirt, but all he said was, “Hello, Jason. Here’s something we’ve got to decide right away; do we tell the crew who you really are?”

  I shook my head emphatically. “I’m not Jay Allison; I don’t want his name or his reputation. Unless there are men on the crew who know Allison by sight—”

  “Some of them do, but I don’t think they’d recognize you.”

  “Tell them I’m his twin brother,” I said humorlessly.

  “That wouldn’t be necessary. There’s not enough resemblance.” Forth raised his head and beckoned to a man who was doing something near the ‘copter. He said under his breath, “You’ll see what I mean,” as the man approached.

  He wore the uniform of Spaceforce—black leather with a little rainbow of stars on his sleeve meaning he’d seen service on a dozen different planets, a different colored star for each one. He wasn’t a young man, but on the wrong side of fifty, seamed and burly and huge, with a split lip and weathered face. I liked his looks. We shook hands and Forth said, “This is our man, Kendricks. He’s called Jason, and he’s an expert on the trailmen. Jason, this is Buck Kendricks.”

  “Glad to know you, Jason.” I thought Kendricks looked at me half a second more than necessary. “The ‘copter’s ready. Climb in, Doc—you’re going as far as Carthon, aren’t you?”

  We put on zippered windbreaks and the ‘copter soared noiselessly into the pale crimson sky. I sat beside Forth, looking down through pale lilac clouds at the pattern of Darkover spread below me.

  “Kendricks was giving me a funny eye, Doc. What’s biting him?”

  “He has known Jay Allison for eight years,” Forth said quietly, “and he hasn’t recognized you yet.”

  But we let it ride at that, to my great relief, and didn’t talk any more about me at all. As we flew under silent whirring blades, turning our backs on the settled country which lay near the Trade City, we talked about Darkover itself. Forth told me about the trailmen’s fever and managed to give me some idea about what the blood fraction was, and why it was necessary to persuade fifty or sixty of the humanoids to return with me, to donate blood from which the antibody could be, first isolated, then synthesised.

  It would be a totally unheard-of thing, if I could accomplish it. Most of the trailmen never touched ground in their entire lives, except when crossing the passes above the snow line. Not a dozen of them, including my foster-parents who had so painfully brought me out across Dammerung, had ever crossed the ring of encircling mountains that walled them away from the rest of the planet. Humans sometimes penetrated the lower forests in search of the trailmen. It was one-way traffic. The trailmen never came in search of them.

  * * *

  We talked, too, about some of those humans who had crossed the mountains into trailmen country—those mountains profanely dubbed the Hellers by the first Terrans who had tried to fly over them in anything lower or slower than a spaceship. (The Darkovan name for the Hellers was even more explicit, and even in translation, unrepeatable.)

  “What about this crew you picked? They’re not Terrans?”

  Forth shook his head. “It would be murder to send anyone re
cognizably Terran into the Hellers. You know how the trailmen feel about outsiders getting into their country.” I knew. Forth continued, “Just the same, there will be two Terrans with you.”

  “They don’t know Jay Allison?” I didn’t want to be burdened with anyone—not anyone—who would know me, or expect me to behave like my forgotten other self.

  “Kendricks knows you,” Forth said, “but I’m going to be perfectly truthful. I never knew Jay Allison well, except in line of work. I know a lot of things—from the past couple of days—which came out during the hypnotic sessions, which he’d never have dreamed of telling me, or anyone else, consciously. And that comes under the heading of a professional confidence—even from you. And for that reason, I’m sending Kendricks along—and you’re going to have to take the chance he’ll recognize you. Isn’t that Carthon down there?”

  * * *

  Carthon lay nestled under the outlying foothills of the Hellers, ancient and sprawling and squatty, and burned brown with the dust of five thousand years. Children ran out to stare at the ‘copter as we landed near the city; few planes ever flew low enough to be seen, this near the Hellers.

  Forth had sent his crew ahead and parked them in an abandoned huge place at the edge of the city which might once have been a warehouse or a ruined palace. Inside there were a couple of trucks, stripped down to framework and flatbed like all machinery shipped through space from Terra. There were pack animals, dark shapes in the gloom. Crates were stacked up in an orderly untidiness, and at the far end a fire was burning and five or six men in Darkovan clothing—loose sleeved shirts, tight wrapped breeches, low boots—were squatting around it, talking. They got up as Forth and Kendricks and I walked toward them, and Forth greeted them clumsily, in bad accented Darkovan, then switched to Terran Standard, letting one of the men translate for him.