by Eric Flint
"Is she damaged?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that. She's learned too much. But . . . details later." Hammond blinked at the check screen, swung around toward the door of the adjoining room, pulled it open.
"Administer the final injection to the subject!" he said sharply into the room. "Acknowledge!"
"The fourth and final injection of the Omega Stimulation series will be administered to the subject," the machine replied.
"Immediately!"
"Immediately."
Helen's voice reached Hammond again as he drew the door shut and came back to the desk. "At moments," she said, "the anti-energies were holding the ninety-six point of overload. Within four of the theoretical limit. Did she get to you at the energy balance?"
"Very nearly," Hammond told her. "A very high-energy, pseudo-hypno trick that didn't quite work. And she'll be back. I still have something she wants!"
On his desk, the telephone screen blurred. When he turned it on, the voice of Dr. Gloge sounded in his ears.
"We were cut off earlier, Mr. Hammond." The biologist's voice was strongly even and controlled.
"What happened?" Hammond asked warily.
"Mr. Hammond, I have finally analyzed what evolution really is. The universe is a spectrum. It needs energies in motion at all levels. This is why those at the higher levels do not interfere directly with individual activities at the lower. But this is also why they are concerned when a race reaches the point where it can begin to manipulate large forces."
Hammond said steadily, "Barbara, if the purpose of this call is to find out if I'll let you in, I will."
A pause, then a click. Then there was a tiny, momentary flickering in one of the check screen indicators. Then, in a different section, another.
"What's happening?" Helen asked tautly.
Hammond said, "She's coming through the screens, with my permission."
"Do you think it's a trick?"
"In a way. For some reason, she hasn't let herself reach that theoretical, final million-year point on Dr. Gloge's evolutionary scale. That may come a little later."
"And you're actually letting her in, believing that?"
"Of course." Helen did not answer him.
A minute went past in silence. Hammond shifted so that he faced the door, moved a few steps away from the control box and the desk, and stood waiting.
A small light burned red in a corner of the check screen. Something had come into the main office.
The heavy silence continued for some seconds. Then, on the hard flooring at the far end of the corridor, Hammond heard footsteps.
He couldn't have said what he had been expecting . . . but certainly nothing so commonplace as the sound of a woman's high-heeled shoes coming briskly toward the inner office.
She appeared in the doorway, stopped there, looking at him. Hammond said nothing. All outer indications were that this was the Barbara Ellington he had seen sitting in a chair in Dr. Gloge's office the night before. Nothing had changed either in her looks or in her clothing; even the brown purse she held in one hand seemed the same. Except for the air of radiant vitality, the alertness of her stance, the keen intelligence in her face, this also was, in fact, the awkward, overanxious, lean girl who had worked in the outer office for less than two weeks.
And therefore, Hammond thought, it was a phantom! Not a delusion; he was protected now against any attempt to tamper with his mind in that manner by barriers which would break only if he died. The shape standing in the door was real. The instruments recorded it. But it was a shape created for this meeting—not that of Barbara Ellington as she was at this hour.
He was unsure of her intention in assuming it. Perhaps it was designed to throw him off guard.
She came into the room, smiling faintly, and glanced about. Hammond knew then that he hadn't been mistaken. Something had come in with her . . . something oppressive, spine-tingling; a sense of heat, a sense of power.
The curiously brilliant, blue eyes turned toward him; and the smile deepened.
"I'm going to have to test why you're still here," she said carelessly. "So defend yourself!"
There was no sound; but a cloud of white light filled the air between them, enveloping them; faded; flared silently; faded again. Both stood unmoving, each watching the other. Nothing in the office had changed.
"Excellent!" the woman said. "The mystery behind you begins to reveal itself. I know the quality of your race now, John Hammond. Your science could never control the order of energies that are shielding you mentally and physically here!
"There should be other indications then that in extreme necessity you are permitted to employ devices created by beings greater than yourself—devices which you do not yourself understand. And where would such devices be found at the moment? . . . Over there, I believe!"
She turned toward the door of the adjoining room, took three steps, and halted. A rose-glowing haze had appeared before the door and the surrounding sections of wall and flooring.
"Yes," she said. "That comes from the same source! And here—"
She turned, moved quickly toward the control box on the desk, checked again. A rose haze also enveloped the box now.
"The three points you must consider vital here!" she said nodding. "Yourself, the being in that room and the controls of the section. You may safeguard these at the expense of revealing a secret you would otherwise least want to reveal. Now I think it is time for us to exchange information."
She came back to Hammond, stopped before him.
"I discovered suddenly, John Hammond, that your kind are not native to Earth. You are superior to Earth's humanity, but not sufficiently superior to explain why you are here. You have an organization on this world. But it is a curious organization. It does not appear to serve the purposes of conqueror or exploiter . . . But let's leave it at that. Don't try to explain it. It doesn't matter. You are to release the human male who was to have received the series of serum injections with me. You and the other members of your race stationed here will then remove yourselves promptly from this planet. We have no further use for you."
Hammond shook his head.
"We might be forced off the planet," he said. "But that would make Earth an active danger spot. The Great Galactics whom I represent do have servant races who carry out military assignments for them. It would not be to your advantage if such a race were to occupy or quarantine Earth to make sure that the seedling race here continues to receive the necessary degree of supervision."
"John Hammond," the woman-shape said, "whether the Great Galactics send military servants to Earth or come here themselves is a matter that does not concern me in the least. It would be very unwise of them to do either. Within hours from now, the Omega serum will be available in limitless quantities. Within days, every man, woman, and child of Earth will have gone through the full evolutionary sequence. Do you think Earth's new humanity could still be supervised by any other race?"
"The Omega serum will never be used again," Hammond said. "I'll show you why . . ."
Hammond turned, went to the control box on the desk. The rose haze faded before him, appeared behind him again. He threw a switch and the haze vanished. He turned away from the controls. "The energy fields that kept you out of that room are being shut off," he said. "In a moment, the door will open. So see for yourself—the barriers are off."
Except for the blazing blue of the eyes, her face was a cold mask. Hammond thought she must already know what was there. But she turned, went to the open door, and stood looking into the room. Hammond moved to the side of the desk where he could look past her . . .
The energy trap enclosing the couch in the room had vanished. The dark thing on the couch was just sitting up. It shook its head dazedly, rolled over and came up on all fours.
Its huge, dull-black eyes stared at them for an instant; then it straightened, rose to its full height . . .
To a full height of twenty-two inches! It swayed unsteadily on the couch—a hairy
little figure with a wide-mouthed, huge-eyed goblin head.
Its eyes blinked in vague recognition. The mouth opened. It cried in a thin, bleating voice:
"Bar-ba-ra!"
XV
The woman wheeled, turning away. She did not look back at the grotesque little figure. But a faint smile touched her lips as she gazed at Hammond. "All right," she said, "there goes my last tie with Earth. I accept what you said. I gather that the Omega serum is a unique development and that it hasn't shown up elsewhere in the galaxy."
"That is not a literal truth," said Hammond.
She nodded toward the adjoining room. "Then perhaps you can tell me what went wrong."
Hammond told her Gloge's two-fold theory: that at this stage of man's evolution many possibilities remained for evolvement, and that apparently the serum stimulated one of these and thereafter was bound by natural law to follow that line of development.
As he talked, he was watching her, and he was thinking: "This problem isn't resolved. How are we going to deal with her?"
He sensed an almost incredible strength, an actual, palpable force. It poured from her in a steady stream of power.
He continued tensely: "The Great Galactics, when planting their seed on a new planet, have never interfered with the basic characteristics of the various races that live there. They interject selected bundles of their own genes by grafting into thousands of men and women on every continent. As the generations go by, these bundles intermix by chance with those that are native to the people of the planet. Apparently, the Omega serum stimulates one of these mixtures and carries it forward to whatever it is capable of, which, because of the singularity factor, usually leads to a dead end."
"The singularity factor—?" Her words were a question.
Men, Hammond explained, were born of the union of a man and a woman. No one person carried more than a portion of mankind's genes. As time passed, the interaction and interrelation of all the genes occurred; the race progressed because billions of chance intermixings of different bundles took place.
In Vince, one such bundle had been stirred, been whipped up to its ultimate point by repeated Omega Stimulation—but evidently that particular bundle had strictly limited possibilities, as would always be the case when a single person was bred, so to speak, with himself . . . the singularity factor.
And that was what had happened to Vince and herself. They were products of the most fantastic inbreeding ever attempted—life surviving through one line, a kind of incest carried to some ultimate sterility, fantastic, interesting, freakish.
"You are wrong," said the woman-shape softly. "I am not a freak. So what has happened here is even more improbable than I have realized. In myself, it was the galactic seedling bundle of genes that was stimulated. Now, I understand what it was I contacted out in space. One of them. And he let me. He understood instantly."
She added, "One more question, John Hammond. Omega is an unusual term. What does it mean?"
". . . When man becomes one with the ultimate, that is Point Omega."
It seemed to Hammond that, even as he finished speaking, she was growing remote, withdrawing from him. Or was it that it was he who was withdrawing? Not only from her but from everything—drifting away, not in any spatial sense, but, in some curious fashion, away from the reality of the entire universe? The brief thought came that this should be an alarming and disturbing experience. Then the thought itself was forgotten.
"There is something occurring," her voice was telling him. "In the small thing behind the door, the Omega evolutionary process is completed, in its fashion. In me, it is not completed—not quite.
"But it is being completed now . . ."
He was nowhere and nothing. New word-impressions, new thought impressions came suddenly and swept through him like the patter of rain.
The impressions took form. It was later in time. He seemed to be standing in the small room next to his office, looking down at the lanky, redheaded young man sitting groggily on the edge of the couch holding his head.
"Coming out of it, Vince?" Hammond asked.
Vincent Strather glanced uncertainly up at him, ran his hand over the jagged rent in the sleeve of his jacket.
"I guess so, Mr. Hammond," he muttered. "I . . . what happened?"
"You went for a drive tonight," Hammond told him, "with a girl named Barbara Ellington. You'd both been drinking. She was driving . . . driving too fast. The car went off a highway embankment, turned over several times. Witnesses dragged you to safety minutes before the car burst into flames. The girl was dead. They didn't attempt to save her body. When the police informed me of the accident, I had you brought here to Research Alpha."
As he spoke, he had the stunning realization that everything he was saying was true. The accident had happened late that evening, in exactly that manner.
"Well . . ." Vince began. He broke off, sighed, shook his head. "Barbara was an odd girl. A wild one! I was pretty fond of her once, Mr. Hammond. Lately, I've been trying to break off with her."
Hammond received the impression that much more had happened. Automatically, he looked back through the open door as the private telephone in the inner office signaled. "Excuse me," he said to Vince.
As he flicked on the instrument, Helen Wendell's face appeared on the phone screen. She gave him a brief smile, asked, "How is Strather?"
Hammond didn't reply at once. He looked at her, feeling cold, eerie crawlings over his scalp. Helen was seated at her desk in the outer office. She was not in a spaceboat standing off the planet.
He heard himself say, "He's all right. There is very little emotional shock . . . How about you?"
"I'm disturbed by Barbara's death," Helen admitted. "But now I have Dr. Gloge on the phone. He's quite anxious to talk to you."
Hammond said, "All right. Put him on."
"Mr. Hammond," Dr. Gloge's voice said a moment later, "this is in connection with the Point Omega Stimulation project. I've been going over all my notes and conclusions on these experiments, and I'm convinced that once you understand the extraordinary dangers which might results if the details of my experiments became known, you will agree that the project should be closed out and any records referring to it destroyed at once."
After switching off the phone, he remained for a while at the desk.
* * *
So that part of the problem also had been solved! The last traces of the Omega serum were being wiped out, would soon linger only in his mind.
And for how long there? Perhaps no more than two or three hours, John Hammond decided. The memory pictures were paling; he had a feeling that sections of them already had vanished. And there was an odd, trembling uncertainty about what was left . . . thin, colored mind-canvas being tugged by a wind which presently would carry it off—
He had no objections, Hammond told himself. He had seen one of the Great Ones, and it was not a memory that it was good for a lesser being to have.
Somehow, it hurt to be so much less.
He must have slept. For he awoke suddenly. He felt vaguely bewildered, for no reason that he could imagine.
Helen came in, smiling. "Don't you think it's time we closed up for the night. You're working too long hours again."
"You're right," Hammond nodded.
He got up and went into the room next to the office to tell Vincent Strather he was free to go home.
* * *
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SERIALS
Slan Hunter, Part 2
Written by A. E. van Vogt and Kevin J. Anderson
CHAPTER 14
From his headquarters office in the Martian city of Cimmerium, Jem Lorry received the vivid images from his vanguard forces at Earth. This was one of the most satisfying moments in his life.
Jem played the footage twice more just to savor it, then he picked up the display plate and hurried to sh
ow his father and the Authority members. Seeing this, they would have to admit that he had been right all along.
He marched into the cavernous crystal-ceilinged room, where the council members were packing up for the day. With a shout, he made the seven old men turn around. "I have news from Earth, glorious news! I must show it to you."
Altus looked impatient, as if he had tolerated enough from his son, but Jem stepped directly up to the podium where supplicants addressed the tendrilless Authority in open session. He plugged in his display plate and transferred the images to the tandem screens in front of all seven members. "Behold the fall of the human government! We have won. It was even smoother and more absolute than I had dreamed possible."