The Year's Best Science Fiction 5

by Judith Merril

  Ch’ien obeyed.

  Candron’s right hand was at his side, and his left hand was toying with a button on his coat. “Now up,” he said.

  Dr. James Ch’ien rolled his eyeballs upward.

  Candron had already taken a deep breath. Now he acted. His right hand balled into a list and arced upwards in a crashing uppercut to Ch’ien’s jaw. At almost the same time, he jerked the button off his coat, cracked it with his fingers along the special fissure line, and threw it to the floor.

  As the little bomb spewed forth unbelievable amounts of ultra-finely divided carbon in a dense black cloud of smoke, Candron threw both arms around the collapsing physicist, ignoring the pain in the knuckles of his right hand. The smoke cloud billowed around them, darkening the room and obscuring the view from the monitor screens that were watching them. Candron knew that the guards were acting now; he knew that the big Mongols outside were already inserting the key in the door and inserting their nose plugs; he knew that the men in the monitor room had hit an alarm button and had already begun to flood the room with sleep gas. But he paid no attention to these things.

  Instead, he became homesick.

  Home. It was a little place he knew and loved. He could no longer stand the alien environment around him; it was repugnant, repelling. All he could think of was a little room, a familiar room, a beloved room. He knew the cracks in its ceiling, the feel of the varnish on the homely little desk, the touch of the worn carpet against his feet, the very smell of the air itself. And he loved them and longed for them with all the emotional power that was in him.

  And suddenly the darkness of the smoke-filled prison apartment was gone.

  Spencer Candron stood in the middle of the little hotel room he had rented early that morning. In his arms, he held the unconscious figure of Dr. James Ch’ien.

  He gasped for breath, then, with an effort, he stooped, allowed the limp body of the physicist to collapse over his shoulder, and stood straight again, carrying the man like a sack of potatoes. He went to the door of the room and opened it carefully. The hall was empty. Quickly, he moved outside, closing the door behind him, and headed toward the stair. This time, he dared not trust the elevator shaft. The hotel only boasted one elevator, and it might be used at any time. Instead, he allowed his dislike for the stair treads to adjust his weight to a few pounds, and then ran up them two at a time.

  On the roof of the hotel, he adjusted his emotional state once more, and he and his sleeping burden drifted off into the night, toward the sea.

  * * *

  No mind is infinitely flexible, infinitely malleable, infinitely capable of taking punishment, just as no material substance, however constructed, is capable of absorbing the energies brought to bear against it indefinitely.

  A man can hate with a virulent hatred, but unless time is allowed to dull and soothe that hatred, the mind holding it will become corroded and cease to function properly, just as a machine of the finest steel will become corroded and begin to fail if it is drenched with acid or exposed to the violence of an oxidizing atmosphere.

  The human mind can insulate itself, for a time, against the destructive effects of any emotion, be it hatred, greed, despondency, contentment, happiness, pleasure, anger, fear, lust, boredom, euphoria, determination, or any other of the myriads of “ills” that man’s mind—and thus his flesh—is heir to. As long as a mind is capable of changing from one to another, to rotate its crops, so to speak, the insulation will remain effective, and the mind will remain undamaged. But any single emotional element, held for too long, will break down the resistance of the natural insulation and begin to damage the mind.

  Even that least virulent of emotions, love, can destroy. The hot, passionate love between new lovers must be modified or it will kill. Only when its many facets can be shifted around, now one and now the other coming into play, can love be endured for any great length of time.

  Possibly the greatest difference between the sane and the unsane is that the sane know when to release a destructive-force before it does more than minimal damage; to modify or eliminate an emotional condition before it becomes a deadly compulsion; to replace one set of concepts with another when it becomes necessary to do so; to recognize that point when the mind must change its outlook or die. To stop the erosion, in other words, before it becomes so great that it cannot be repaired.

  For the human mind cannot contain any emotion, no matter how weak or how fleeting, without change. And the point at which that change ceases to be constructive and becomes, instead, destructive—that is the ultimate point beyond which no human mind can go without forcing a change—any change—in itself.

  Spencer Candron knew that. To overuse the psionic powers of the human mind is as dangerous as overusing morphine or alcohol. There are limits to mental powers, even as there are limits to physical powers.

  Psychokinesis is defined as the ability of a human mind to move, no matter how slightly, a physical object by means of psionic application alone. In theory, then, one could move planets, stars, even whole galaxies by thought alone. But, in physical terms, the limit is easily seen. Physically, it would be theoretically possible to destroy the sun if one had enough atomic energy available, but that would require the energy of another sun—or more. And, at that point, the Law of Diminishing Returns comes into operation. If you don’t want a bomb to explode, but the only way to destroy that bomb is by blowing it up with another bomb of equal power, where is the gain?

  And if the total mental power required to move a planet is greater than any single human mind can endure—or even greater than the total mental endurance of a thousand planetsfull of minds, is there any gain?

  There is not, and can never be, a system without limits, and the human mind is a system which obeys that law.

  None the less, Spencer Candron kept his mind on flight, on repulsion, on movement, as long as he could. He was perfectly willing to destroy his own mind for a purpose, but he had no intention of destroying it uselessly. He didn’t know how long he kept moving eastward; he had no way of knowing how much distance he had covered nor how long it had taken him. But, somewhere out over the smoothly undulating surface of the Pacific, he realized that he was approaching his limit. And, a few seconds later, he detected the presence of men beneath the sea.

  He knew they were due to rise an hour before dawn, but he had no idea how long that would be. He had lost all track of time. He had been keeping his mind on controlling his altitude and motion, and, at the same time, been careful to see whether Dr. Ch’ien came out of his unconscious state. Twice more he had had to strike the physicist to keep him out cold, and he didn’t want to do it again.

  So, when he sensed the presence of the American submarine beneath the waves, he sank gratefully into the water, changing the erosive power of the emotion that had carried him so far, and relaxing into the simple physical routine of keeping both himself and Ch’ien afloat.

  By the time the submarine surfaced a dozen yards away, Spencer Candron was both physically and mentally exhausted. He yelled at the top of his lungs, and then held on to consciousness just long enough to be rescued.

  * * *

  “The official story,” said Senator Kerotski, “is that an impostor had taken Dr. Ch’ien’s place before he ever left the United States—” He grinned. “At least, the substitution took place before the delegates reached China. So the ‘assassination’ was really no assassination at all. Ch’ien was kidnaped here, and a double put in his place in Peiping. That absolves both us and the Chinese Government of any complicity. We save face for them, and they save face for us. Since he turned up here, in the States, it’s obvious that he couldn’t have been in China.” He chuckled, but there was no mirth in it. “So the cold war still continues. We know what they did, and—in a way—they know what we did. But not how we did it.”

  The senator looked at the other two men who were with him on the fifth floor office of the Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research. Taggert was rela
xing on his couch, and Spencer Candron, just out of the hospital, looked rather pale as he sat in the big, soft chair that Taggert had provided.

  The senator looked at Candron. “The thing I don’t understand is, why was it necessary to knock out Ch’ien? He’ll have a sore jaw for weeks. Why didn’t you just tell him who you were and what you were up to?”

  Candron glanced at Taggert, but Taggert just grinned and nodded.

  “We couldn’t allow that,” said Candron, looking at Senator Kerotski. “Dr. James Ch’ien has too much of a logical, scientific mind for that. We’d have ruined him if he’d seen me in action.”

  The senator looked a little surprised. “Why? We’ve convinced other scientists that they were mistaken in their observations. Why not Ch’ien?”

  “Ch’ien is too good a scientist,” Candron said. “He’s not the type who would refuse to believe something he saw simply because it didn’t agree with his theories. Ch’ien is one of those dangerous in-betweens. He’s too brilliant to be allowed to go to waste, and, at the same time, too rigid to change his manner of thinking. If he had seen me teleport or levitate, he wouldn’t reject it—he’d try to explain it. And that would have effectively ruined him.”

  “Ruined him?” The senator looked a little puzzled.

  Taggert raised his heavy head from the couch. “Sure, Leo,” he said to the senator. “Don’t you see? We need Ch’ien on this interstellar project. He absolutely must dope out the answer somehow, and no one else can do it as quickly.”

  “With the previous information,” the senator said, “we would have been able to continue.”

  “Yeah?” Taggert said, sitting up. “Has anyone been able to dope out Fermat’s Last Theorem without Fermat? No. So why ruin Ch’ien?”

  “It would ruin him,” Candron broke in, before the senator could speak. “If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to explain what he saw. What else could a scientist do?”

  Senator Kerotski nodded, and his nod said: “I see. He would have diverted his attention from the field of the interstellar drive to the field of psionics. And he would have wasted years trying to explain an inherently nonlogical area of knowledge by logical means.”

  “That’s right,” Candron said. “We would have set him off on a wild goose chase, trying to solve the problems of psionics by the scientific, the logical, method. We would have presented him with an unsolvable problem.”

  Taggert patted his knees. “We would have given him a problem that he could not solve with the methodology at hand. It would be as though we had proved to an ancient Greek philosopher that the cube could be doubled, and then allowed him to waste his life trying to do it with a straight-edge and compass.”

  “We know Ch’ien’s psychological pattern,” Candron continued. “He’s not capable of admitting that there is any other thought pattern than the logical. He would try to solve the problems of psionics by logical methods, and would waste the rest of his life trying to do the impossible.”

  The senator stroked his chin. “That’s clear,” he said at last. “Well, it was worth a cracked jaw to save him. We’ve given him a perfectly logical explanation of his rescue and, simultaneously, we’ve put the Chinese government into absolute confusion. They have no idea of how you got out of there, Candron.”

  “That’s not as important as saving Ch’ien,” Candron said.

  “No,” the senator said quickly, “of course not. After all, the Secretary of Research needs Dr. Ch’ien—the man’s important.”

  Spencer Candron smiled. “I agree. He’s practically indispensable—as much as a man can be.”

  “He’s the Secretary’s right hand man,” said Taggert firmly.

  * * * *

  THE SOUND SWEEP by J. G. Ballard

  from Science Fantasy

  It was Fletcher Pratt who first brought to my attention the use of fantasy, or more specifically of the fantastic or science-fictional environment, to spotlight or enlarge human reactions: “The intensification of emotion,” he called it. Very often, this is the main function of a fantastic backdrop: to set the stage for a close-up view of an emotional interchange which, under “normal,” “realistic” circumstances occurs at such low intensity as to be almost imperceptible; or to magnify a “normal” experience of the “real” world to, for example, Faustian proportion.

  J. G. Ballard, one of the young British writers whose work has been much too little seen in this country, here provides an example of this sort of emotional intensification performed on a (literal) future stage-set of the past.

  * * * *

  1

  By midnight Madame Gioconda’s headache had become intense. All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the mid-town flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, a frenzied hypomaniac babel of jostling horns, shrilling tires, plunging brakes and engines that hammered down the empty corridors and stairways to the sound stage on the second floor, making the faded air feel leaden and angry.

  Exhausting but at least impersonal, these sounds Madame Gioconda could bear. At dusk, however, when the flyover quietened, they were overlaid by the mysterious clapping of her phantoms, the sourceless applause that rustled down onto the stage from the darkness around her, at first a few scattered ripples from the front rows that soon spread to the entire auditorium, mounting to a tumultuous ovation in which she suddenly detected a note of sarcasm, a single shout of derision that drove a spear of pain through her forehead, followed by an uproar of boos and catcalls that filled the tortured air, driving her away toward her couch where she lay gasping helplessly until Mangon arrived at midnight, hurrying onto the stage with his sonovac.

  Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing underlayer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened-in Madame Gioconda’s makeshift home—the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silverscreen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the program director’s podium; the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine cuttings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac’s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day.

  By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle onto the stove for Russian tea, sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser, switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it.

  * * * *

  Down in the alley behind the studio he clipped the sonovac onto the intake manifold of the sound truck. The vacuum drained in a few seconds, but he waited a discretionary two or three minutes before returning, keeping up the pretense that Madame Gioconda’s phantom audience was real. Of course the cylinder was always empty, containing only the usual daily detritus—the sounds of a door slam, a partition collapsing somewhere or the kettle whistling, a grunt or two, and later, when the headaches began, Madame Gioconda’s pitiful moanings. The riotous applause, that would have lifted the roof off the Met, let alone a small radio station, the jeers and hoots of derision were, he knew, quite imaginary, figments of Madame Gioconda’s world of fantasy, phantoms from the past of a once great prima donna who had been dropped by her public and had retreated in her imagination, each evening conjuring up a blissful dream of being once again applauded by a full house at the Metr
opolitan, a dream that guilt and resentment turned sour by midnight, inverting it into a nightmare of fiasco and failure.

  Why she should torment herself was difficult to understand, but at least the nightmare kept Madame Gioconda just this side of sanity and Mangon, who revered and loved Madame Gioconda, would have been the last person in the world to disillusion her. Each evening, when he finished his calls for the day, he would drive his sound truck all the way over from the West Side to the abandoned radio station under the flyover at the deserted end of F Street, go through the pretense of sweeping Madame Gioconda’s apartment on the stage of studio 2, charging no fee, make tea and listen to her reminiscences and plans for revenge, then see her asleep and tiptoe out, a wry but pleased smile on his youthful face.

  He had been calling on Madame Gioconda for nearly a year, but what his precise role was in relation to her he had not yet decided. Oddly enough, although he was more or less indispensable now to the effective operation of her fantasy world, she showed little personal interest or affection for Mangon; but he assumed that this indifference was merely part of the autocratic personality of a world-famous prima donna, particularly one very conscious of the tradition, now alas meaningless, Melba—Callas—Gioconda. To serve at all was the privilege. In time, perhaps, Madame Gioconda might accord him some sign of favor.

  Without him, certainly, her prognosis would have been poor. Lately the headaches had become more menacing, as she insisted that the applause was growing stormier, the boos and catcalls more vicious. Whatever the psychic mechanism generating the fantasy system, Mangon realized that ultimately she would need him at the studio all day, holding back the enveloping tides of nightmare and insanity with dummy passes of the sonovac. Then, perhaps, when the dream crumbled, he would regret having helped her to delude herself. With luck though she might achieve her ambition of making a comeback. She had told him something of her scheme—a serpentine mixture of blackmail and bribery—and privately Mangon hoped to launch a plot of his own to return her to popularity. By now she had unfortunately reached the point where success alone could save her from disaster.