Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  So he exercised his imagination. With a wealth of material to draw upon, he would build himself worlds where he could move around, walk, talk, and make love, eat, drink and feel the caress of sunshine and wind.

  It was while he was engaged in this project that he touched another mind. He touched it, fused for a blinding second, and bounced away. He ran gibbering up and down the corridors of his own memory, mentally reeling from the shock of--identification!

  * * * * *

  Who was he? Paul Wendell? Yes, he knew with incontrovertible certainty that he was Paul Wendell. But he also knew, with almost equal certainty, that he was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was living--had lived--in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But he knew nothing of the Captain other than the certainty of identity; nothing else of that blinding mind-touch remained.

  Again he scoured his memory--Paul Wendell's memory--checking and rechecking the area just before that semi-fatal bullet had crashed through his brain.

  And finally, at long last, he knew with certainty where his calculations had gone astray. He knew positively why eight men had gone insane.

  Then he went again in search of other minds, and this time he knew he would not bounce.

  QUASI UNA FANTASIA POCO ANDANTE PIANISSIMO

  An old man sat quietly in his lawnchair, puffing contentedly on an expensive briar pipe and making corrections with a fountain pen on a thick sheaf of typewritten manuscript. Around him stretched an expanse of green lawn, dotted here and there with squat cycads that looked like overgrown pineapples; in the distance, screening the big house from the road, stood a row of stately palms, their fronds stirring lightly in the faint, warm California breeze.

  The old man raised his head as a car pulled into the curving driveway. The warm hum of the turboelectric engine stopped, and a man climbed out of the vehicle. He walked with easy strides across the grass to where the elderly gentleman sat. He was lithe, of indeterminate age, but with a look of great determination. There was something in his face that made the old man vaguely uneasy--not with fear but with a sense of deep respect.

  "What can I do for you, sir?"

  "I have some news for you, Mr. President," the younger one said.

  The old man smiled wryly. "I haven't been President for fourteen years. Most people call me 'Senator' or just plain 'Mister'."

  * * * * *

  The younger man smiled back. "Very well, Senator. My name is Camberton, James Camberton. I brought some information that may possibly relieve your mind--or, again, it may not."

  "You sound ominous, Mr. Camberton. I hope you'll remember that I've been retired from the political field for nearly five years. What is this shattering news?"

  "Paul Wendell's body was buried yesterday."

  The Senator looked blank for a second, then recognition came into his face. "Wendell, eh? After all this time. Poor chap; he'd have been better off if he'd died twenty years ago." Then he paused and looked up. "But just who are you, Mr. Camberton? And what makes you think I would be particularly interested in Paul Wendell?"

  "Mr. Wendell wants to tell you that he is very grateful to you for having saved his life, Senator. If it hadn't been for your orders, he would have been left to die."

  The Senator felt strangely calm, although he knew he should feel shock. "That's ridiculous, sir! Mr. Wendell's brain was hopelessly damaged; he never recovered his sanity or control of his body. I know; I used to drop over to see him occasionally, until I finally realized that I was only making myself feel worse and doing him no good."

  "Yes, sir. And Mr. Wendell wants you to know how much he appreciated those visits."

  * * * * *

  The Senator grew red. "What the devil are you talking about? I just said that Wendell couldn't talk. How could he have said anything to you? What do you know about this?"

  "I never said he spoke to me, Senator; he didn't. And as to what I know of this affair, evidently you don't remember my name. James Camberton."

  The Senator frowned. "The name is familiar, but--" Then his eyes went wide. "Camberton! You were one of the eight men who--Why, you're the man who shot Wendell!"

  Camberton pulled up an empty lawnchair and sat down. "That's right, Senator; but there's nothing to be afraid of. Would you like to hear about it?"

  "I suppose I must." The old man's voice was so low that it was scarcely audible. "Tell me--were the other seven released, too? Have--have you all regained your sanity? Do you remember--" He stopped.

  "Do we remember the extra-sensory perception formula? Yes, we do; all eight of us remember it well. It was based on faulty premises, and incomplete, of course; but in its own way it was workable enough. We have something much better now."

  The old man shook his head slowly. "I failed, then. Such an idea is as fatal to society as we know it as a virus plague. I tried to keep you men quarantined, but I failed. After all those years of insanity, now the chess game begins; the poker game is over."

  "It's worse than that," Camberton said, chuckling softly. "Or, actually, it's much better."

  "I don't understand; explain it to me. I'm an old man, and I may not live to see my world collapse. I hope I don't."

  Camberton said: "I'll try to explain in words, Senator. They're inadequate, but a fuller explanation will come later."

  And he launched into the story of the two-decade search of Paul Wendell.

  CODA--ANDANTINO

  "Telepathy? Time travel?" After three hours of listening, the ex-President was still not sure he understood.

  "Think of it this way," Camberton said. "Think of the mind at any given instant as being surrounded by a shield--a shield of privacy--a shield which you, yourself have erected, though unconsciously. It's a perfect insulator against telepathic prying by others. You feel you have to have it in order to retain your privacy--your sense of identity, even. But here's the kicker: even though no one else can get in, you can't get out!

  "You can call this shield 'self-consciousness'--perhaps shame is a better word. Everyone has it, to some degree; no telepathic thought can break through it. Occasionally, some people will relax it for a fraction of a second, but the instant they receive something, the barrier goes up again."

  "Then how is telepathy possible? How can you go through it?" The Senator looked puzzled as he thoughtfully tamped tobacco into his briar.

  "You don't go through it; you go around it."

  * * * * *

  "Now wait a minute; that sounds like some of those fourth dimension stories I've read. I recall that when I was younger, I read a murder mystery--something about a morgue, I think. At any rate, the murder was committed inside a locked room; no one could possibly have gotten in or out. One of the characters suggested that the murderer traveled through the fourth dimension in order to get at the victim. He didn't go through the walls; he went around them." The Senator puffed a match flame into the bowl of his pipe, his eyes on the younger man. "Is that what you're driving at?"

  "Exactly," agreed Camberton. "The fourth dimension. Time. You must go back in time to an instant when that wall did not exist. An infant has no shame, no modesty, no shield against the world. You must travel back down your own four-dimensional tube of memory in order to get outside it, and to do that, you have to know your own mind completely, and you must be sure you know it.

  "For only if you know your own mind can you communicate with another mind. Because, at the 'instant' of contact, you become that person; you must enter his own memory at the beginning and go up the hyper-tube. You will have all his memories, his hopes, his fears, his sense of identity. Unless you know--beyond any trace of doubt--who you are, the result is insanity."

  * * * * *

  The Senator puffed his pipe for a moment, then shook his head. "It sounds like Oriental mysticism to me. If you can travel in time, you'd be able to change the past."

  "Not at all," Camberton said; "that's like saying that if you read a book, the author's words will change.

  "Time isn't like t
hat. Look, suppose you had a long trough filled with supercooled water. At one end, you drop in a piece of ice. Immediately the water begins to freeze; the crystallization front moves toward the other end of the trough. Behind that front, there is ice--frozen, immovable, unchangeable. Ahead of it there is water--fluid, mobile, changeable.

  "The instant we call 'the present' is like that crystallization front. The past is unchangeable; the future is flexible. But they both exist."

  "I see--at least, I think I do. And you can do all this?"

  "Not yet," said Camberton; "not completely. My mind isn't as strong as Wendell's, nor as capable. I'm not the--shall we say--the superman he is; perhaps I never will be. But I'm learning--I'm learning. After all, it took Paul twenty years to do the trick under the most favorable circumstances imaginable."

  "I see." The Senator smoked his pipe in silence for a long time. Camberton lit a cigaret and said nothing. After a time, the Senator took the briar from his mouth and began to tap the bowl gently on the heel of his palm. "Mr. Camberton, why do you tell me all this? I still have influence with the Senate; the present President is a protégé of mine. It wouldn't be too difficult to get you men--ah--put away again. I have no desire to see our society ruined, our world destroyed. Why do you tell me?"

  * * * * *

  Camberton smiled apologetically. "I'm afraid you might find it a little difficult to put us away again, sir; but that's not the point. You see, we need you. We have no desire to destroy our present culture until we have designed a better one to replace it.

  "You are one of the greatest living statesmen, Senator; you have a wealth of knowledge and ability that can never be replaced; knowledge and ability that will help us to design a culture and a civilization that will be as far above this one as this one is above the wolf pack. We want you to come in with us, help us; we want you to be one of us."

  "I? I'm an old man, Mr. Camberton. I will be dead before this civilization falls; how can I help build a new one? And how could I, at my age, be expected to learn this technique?"

  "Paul Wendell says you can. He says you have one of the strongest minds now existing."

  The Senator put his pipe in his jacket pocket. "You know, Camberton, you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought you said he was dead."

  Again Camberton gave him the odd smile. "I didn't say that, Senator; I said they buried his body. That's quite a different thing. You see, before the poor, useless hulk that held his blasted brain died, Paul gave the eight of us his memories; he gave us himself. The mind is not the brain, Senator; we don't know what it is yet, but we do know what it isn't. Paul's poor, damaged brain is dead, but his memories, his thought processes, the very essence of all that was Paul Wendell is still very much with us.

  "Do you begin to see now why we want you to come in with us? There are nine of us now, but we need the tenth--you. Will you come?"

  "I--I'll have to think it over," the old statesman said in a voice that had a faint quaver. "I'll have to think it over."

  But they both knew what his answer would be.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE ASSES OF BALAAM

  By Randall Garrett

  The remarkable characteristic of Balaam's ass was that it was more perceptive than its master. Sometimes a child is more perceptive--because more straightforward and logical--than an adult....

  It is written in the Book of Numbers that Balaam, a wise man of the Moabites, having been ordered by the King of Moab to put a curse upon the invading Israelites, mounted himself upon an ass and rode forth toward the camp of the Children of Israel. On the road, he met an angel with drawn sword, barring the way. Balaam, not seeing or recognizing the angel, kept urging his ass forward, but the ass recognized the angel and turned aside. Balaam smote the beast and forced it to return to the path, and again the angel blocked the way with drawn sword. And again the ass turned aside, despite the beating from Balaam, who, in his blindness, was unable to see the angel.

  When the ass stopped for the third time and lay down, refusing to go further, Balaam waxed exceeding wrath and smote again the animal with a stick.

  Then the ass spoke and said: "Why dost thou beat me? I have always obeyed thee and never have I failed thee. Have I ever been known to fail thee?"

  And Balaam answered: "No." And at that moment his eyes were opened and he saw the angel before him.

  --STUDIES IN SCRIPTURE

  by Ceggawynn of Eboricum

  With the careful precision of controlled anger, Dodeth Pell rippled a stomp along his right side. Clopclopclopclop-clopclop-clopclop-clopclopclopclop.... Each of his twelve right feet came down in turn while he glared across the business bench at Wygor Bedis. He started the ripple again, while he waited for Wygor's answer. The ripple was a good deal more effective than just tapping one's fingers, and equally as satisfying.

  Wygor Bedis twitched his mouth and allowed his eyelids to slide up over his eyeballs in a slow blink before answering. Dodeth had simply asked, "Why wasn't this reported to me before?" But Wygor couldn't find the answer as simply as that. Not that he didn't have a good answer; it was just that he wanted to couch it in exactly the right terms. Dodeth had a way with raking sarcasm that made a person tend to cringe.

  Dodeth was perfectly well aware of that. He hadn't been in the Executive Office of Predator Council all these years for nothing; he knew how to handle people--when to praise them, when to flatter them, when to rebuke them, and when to drag them unmercifully over the shell-bed.

  He waited, his right legs marching out their steady rhythm.

  "Well," said Wygor at last, "it was just that I couldn't see any point in bothering you with it at that point. I mean, one specimen--"

  "Of an entirely new species!" snapped Dodeth in a sudden interruption. His legs stopped their rhythmic tramp. His voice rose from its usual eight-thousand-cycle rumble to a shrill squeak. "Fry it, Wygor, if you weren't such a good field man, I'd have sacked you long ago! Your trouble is that you have a penchant for bringing me problems that you ought to be able to solve by yourself and then flipping right over on your back and holding off on some information that ought to be brought to my attention immediately!"

  There wasn't much Wygor could say to that, so he didn't try. He simply waited for the raking to come, and, sure enough, it came.

  Dodeth's voice lowered itself to a soft purr. "The next time you have to do anything as complicated as setting a snith-trap, you just hump right down here and ask me, and I'll tell you all about it. On the other hand, if the lower levels all suddenly become infested with shelks at the same time, why, you just take care of that little detail yourself, eh? The only other alternative is to learn to think."

  Wygor winced a trifle and kept his mouth shut.

  Having delivered himself of his jet of acid, Dodeth Pell looked down at the data booklet that Wygor had handed him. "Fortunately," he said, "there doesn't seem to be much to worry about. Only the Universal Motivator knows how this thing could have spawned, but it doesn't appear to be very efficient."

  "No, sir, it doesn't," said Wygor, taking heart from his superior's mild tone. "The eating orifice is oddly placed, and the teeth are obviously for grinding purposes."

  "I was thinking more of the method of locomotion," Dodeth said. "I believe this is a record, although I'll have to look in the files to make sure. I think that six locomotive limbs is the least I've ever heard of on an animal that size."

  "I've checked the files," said Wygor. "There was a four-limbed leaf-eater recorded seven hundred years ago--four locomotive limbs, that is, and two grasping. But it was only as big as your hand."

  Dodeth looked through the three pages of the booklet. There wasn't much there, really, but he knew Wygor well enough to know that all the data he had thus far was there. The only thing that rankled was that Wygor had delayed for three work periods before reporting the intrusion of the new beast, and now five of them had been spotted.

  He looked at the page which
showed the three bathygraphs that had been taken of the new animals from a distance. There was something odd about them, and Dodeth couldn't, for the hide of him, figure out what it was. It aroused an odd fear in him, and made him want to burrow deeper into the ground.

  "I can't see what keeps 'em from falling over," he said at last. "Are they as slow-moving as they look?"

  "They don't move very fast," Wygor admitted, "but we haven't seen any of them startled yet. I don't see how they could run very fast, though. It must take every bit of awareness they have to stay balanced on two legs."

  Dodeth sighed whistlingly and pushed the data booklet back across the business bench to Wygor. "All right; I'll file the preliminary spotting report. Now get out there and get me some pertinent data on this queer beast. Scramble off."

  "Right away, sir."

  "And ... Wygor--"

  "Yes, sir?"

  "It's apparent that we have a totally new species here. It will be called a wygorex, of course, but it would be better if we waited until we could make a full report to the Keepers. So don't let any of this out--especially to the other Septs."

  "Certainly not, sir; not a whistle. Anything else?"

  "Just keep me posted, that's all. Scramble off."

  After Wygor had obediently scrambled off, Dodeth relaxed all his knees and sank to his belly in thought.

  His job was not an easy one. He would like to have his office get full credit for discovering a new species, just as Wygor had--understandably enough--wanted to get his share of the credit. On the other hand, one had to be careful that holding back information did not constitute any danger to the Balance. Above all, the Balance must be preserved. Even the snith had its place in the Ecological Balance of the World--although one didn't like to think about sniths as being particularly useful.

  After all, every animal, every planet had its place in the scheme; each contributed its little bit to maintaining the Balance. Each had its niche in the ecological architecture, as Dodeth liked to think of it. The trouble was that the Balance was a shifting, swinging, ever-changing thing. Living tissues carried the genes of heredity in them, and living tissues are notoriously plastic under the influence of the proper radiation or particle bombardment. And animals would cross the poles.