Element 79

by Fred Hoyle

  “The alternative?”

  “Immediate death. These last days, Professor, the beauty and pathos of these last days. That is what I bargain for.”

  “And the offer?”

  “The paper, the three sheets which you have just read. You will copy them and seal them in an envelope addressed to the Institute of Physics. You may trust me to see it reaches its destination. I am no defaulter on a bargain.”

  “Will you answer me a question before I decide?”

  “You may ask it.”

  “What possible advantage do you get out of this arrangement? I’m going to die anyway, so why not wait? It must come to the same thing from your point of view.”

  The stranger smiled. “I am pleased with the question, Professor. I will gladly answer it. If you accept the bargain, I shall get nothing at all from it. You will be the gainer. These papers will come as a thoroughly worthwhile final achievement to your life. You will go out with a bang, not a whimper. Understand, I make no claim that what I am giving is great physics. It is not a major new theory, nor need it be for your purpose. It is a thoroughly sound piece of craftsmanship, exactly the kind of thing you have always had the ambition to achieve.”

  In a considerable measure, Pym had now recovered his wits. He was puzzled. “So either way you get nothing out of it. If I refuse you get nothing, if I accept you get nothing.” The stranger considered the matter for a while. Then he said, “It hardly behooves me to explain my motives. Yet I will say this: I am gambling you will not yield a single day, a single hour, in exchange for the paper. You will cling to life until the ultimate moment.”

  “Surely it’s my own affair if I decide to refuse?”

  The stranger was reluctant to answer, so Pym plunged on. “Considering the advantages on your side, I don’t think you’re showing up very well.”

  At this, Pym’s tormentor bared his white teeth and snapped, “Professor Pym, as a physicist you know events are not lost. They exist, always. They remain for those with the power to recover them, just as a film of past events can remain after those events have taken place. I want a film of you, Professor, clinging to life, clinging to the last, tedious moment, in a negation of everything you claim to be.”

  Pym felt a sudden tautness. He was in a trap with his retreat cut off. The only possibility was to attack. “If it’s so important to you, I think you must be prepared to stake a lot more than these three sheets.”

  Pym‘s effrontery took the stranger by surprise. He indicated the papers, his eyes flashing. “These are all you will get from me, unless you are prepared to gamble very much more than the last days of your life.”

  The waters were rapidly deepening.

  “What have you in mind?” asked Pym.

  “You, Professor Pym, you must be the stake. If you want to play games with me.”

  “What do I stand to win?”

  “Anything you please, anything, my friend!”

  “And the wager itself?”

  “I wager that, even with a completely free wish, you are incapable of specifying anything that will make a permanent mark on the world. These sheets here, which made our previous game, will not serve you. Nor must you be vague—you are not permitted to ask for the solution to a problem you cannot define. You must not say ‘invent me a particle,’ or ‘give me a theory as good as Einstein’s.’ It is not to be as easy as that. My wager, Professor, is that in the deepest possible sense you are a failure. You can think of nothing of importance.”

  Pym felt as if strange, unknown muscles were tightening within him. His every instinct was to accept the challenge. He was angry now, with an inner, white-hot anger. Yet he saw clearly that if you could conceive of a problem you were already halfway to its solution. Which was the trouble with this wager. Unless you had the right concept, you just couldn’t come out with any significant idea. Then a curious notion flashed through his mind. It was certain to win, quite splendid.

  “I accept the wager. I will undertake to make a permanent mark on the world.”

  “You are free to ask whatever you wish.”

  Pym smiled broadly into the Devil’s face.

  “Without loss of life, build me a mountain range, up to thirty thousand feet in height, along the border between England and Scotland.”

  The Devil, seeing instantly that Pym, this pitiful little fellow, had outmaneuvered him, vanished in a flash of smoke, forgetting to take the three sheets of paper.

  Geordie Jones and Barney O’Connor shivered as they waited long hours for their train to be dug out. They knew nothing of Professor Pym, nor did they know the Devil is no defaulter on a bargain.

  Pym died during the winter. His last paper, easily his best, is still remembered with affection at the Institute of Physics, the “Pym Effect,” as it is internationally known. But of Pym’s greatest achievement, even the pundits are unaware. The British nowadays never speak about their weather. It is always bad, except miraculously in May and June, when the skies clear and Pym’s mountains can be seen high in the sky, utterly remote and indescribably beautiful.

  The Magnetosphere

  Francis Charles Lennox Pevensey, third son of the fourteenth Earl of Byeford, was a powerful great ox of a fellow. Home on vacation from prep school at the age of twelve, he engaged his father in a friendly wrestling bout. The fourteenth Earl was trapped unfortunately into a bear hug and had a couple of ribs broken for his pains—the ribs went off, in fact, like a pistol shot. Fortunately young Pev had an equable temperament, so events like this were quite rare.

  Pev’s performances in other directions were less impressive. For one thing, he was utterly and hopelessly incapable of grasping what his teachers were talking about. Languages, history, math, science, literature, all came the same to him, they rebounded without effect off his bulky frame.

  Sport was like the parson’s egg. He was a sucker for the bowlers at cricket. Nor did he show up particularly well at tennis. But anything that had to be thrown or heaved was simply thrown or heaved, yards and yards further than anybody else. His performances on the rugger field came near to making the game ridiculous. Once he had grasped the object of the game, to carry the ball to that place over yonder beneath those goal posts, why that was exactly what he did. He carried it to the goal posts whenever it came to him. It was all perfectly simple. His school lost no games while he played.

  Public school followed prep school. Neither the psychologist, nor the leopard with its spots, will be surprised to learn that Pev showed no sign of changing in the smallest respect. In olden times, Oxford would have followed public school. Pev would have spent two or three years working under a coach for his matriculation. Meanwhile he would have chewed Cambridge to a fine mince whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  With the elimination of privilege from the Oxford-Cambridge setup, this classic pattern was utterly beyond realization. Even the fourteenth Earl became reconciled at last to the idea that Oxford and Cambridge were not only crammed with bricklayers’ sons but the damned bricklayers themselves were actually running the show, his old College even. The only idea which recommended itself was to send the lad to the United States, on the curious understanding that the streets of New York were paved with gold.

  Following six torrid months of “business,” young Pev conceived the idea of entering space school. Surprisingly, he got over the first hurdle, admission for a preliminary year. It was typical of the difference between the American and the British ways of life that the Americans admitted him on his few strong points, very strong points, whereas the British would have turned him down on his many weak ones.

  Not until Pev appeared on the football field did his new career gather any aura of distinction. Sent in a few minutes before the end of the second quarter, Pev got his hands on the ball and proceeded to march fifty-five yards—for a safety. Instantly he became something of a celebrity, he had gotten himself an image. The eleven occasions that first year on which he bulled over for a touchdown did nothing to dispel
the image.

  His instructors were compelled to bow to the facts—his prowess on the football field, his good temper, his impeccable manners, and, above all else, that indeed he was a real, genuine English lord. In sum, they found it impossible to flunk him. Always they gave him a bare pass, always the minimum, except of course in the physical examinations. With these he had little trouble. When it came to the toughness tests, particularly acceleration tests, Pev came out at the top, not the bottom. Under 5g most people looked like rubber. He didn’t, he felt the acceleration, and that was about all. The doctors said he was a freak, which seemed to him to explain a lot he hadn’t understood before.

  Miraculously, he graduated, very low on the list, it is true, but graduated he was nonetheless. Now he had that malicious little bit of paper, which gives nothing directly to its holder, but which will debar you utterly should you not have it. Now he was licensed to proceed. Whither, the bit of paper did not say.

  Unknown to Pev, a controversy soon raged around his person. Weight for weight, how did he compare with a pile of electronic junk, taken as an all-purpose computer? Pev was chosen because he was the dumbest graduate anybody could think of. The answer turned out to be conditional on the circumstances. In well-understood situations the electronics was much better—it was better, for that matter, than the brightest graduates. In ill-understood situations, on the other hand, a human showed up more favorably. If you couldn’t foresee what was going to happen, so that you had no idea at all of how to design your electronic instrument, even Pev came out ahead.

  When at last the first extrasolar system mission was blasted out into distant space, Pev was included in the crew, on much this same basis. Nobody knew what to expect on a planet ten light years away. Pev’s sheer brute strength might have its place. If it didn’t turn out that way, the mission would hardly be prejudiced, it seemed—there was plenty of brain-power in the rest of the crew.

  Monotony was the killer on the outward journey. Everybody expected trouble with time but nobody had quite realized how bad it was going to be. It was the concentration that went to pieces—you tried to read, but your attention inevitably wandered. You didn’t talk, because you got to hate the others. You tried to sleep, but after a while you found you couldn’t sleep properly, you kept waking every ten or twenty minutes.

  In the narrow confines of the spaceship, the crew baited Pev unmercifully. It was a raw, primitive situation, with everybody pecking the unfortunate individual who happened to lie at the bottom of the order. True, Pev could have smashed any one of them in two or three massive blows, but his upbringing and his temperament forbade any such crude physical demonstration. He took it all with a smile, but it bit gradually deeper as time went slowly by. Particularly, he came to hate the navigational fixes. Naturally, he did the measurements wrong, and his reductions of the data hadn’t the smallest conceivable validity in mathematics. The others forced him to do them just for the laughs. They stood around while he made the measurements, then they all examined his reduction sheets. Like an animal which learns to play up to its master, Pev learned to do the fixes in the way that seemed to amuse them most. He stood there smiling as they laughed, pitifully hoping to ingratiate himself, like a dog thumping its tail.

  Once they landed on the new planet, Pev had a fair measure of revenge. Gravity turned out to be seventy percent stronger than it is on Earth. He was the only one strong enough to get around more or less normally. The others moved slowly, especially uphill, when their gait reminded Pev of climbers near the summit of Mount Everest. They panted and sweated as if their hearts and lungs were bursting, which was very nearly true. It was a pity, because the new planet was quite remarkably beautiful. There were big woolly clouds and lots of gentle, warm rain. It was wonderfully green everywhere. Shimmering streams ran down valleys glowing with brilliant flowers. There were fish in the streams. There were insects and tiny animals the size of a mouse, but no large creatures and no birds.

  To Pev it was a veritable Paradise. He traveled about as much as he could, but with the others more or less incapacitated by the deadly gravitation, he couldn’t venture too far away. After the cramped years in the spaceship, it was galling not to be able to cover the whole of this new world. Yet the nights made up in a large measure for Pev’s disappointment. The nights were the chief glory of this new world. The sky blazed with pulsating colors, driven like lances across the heavens. Mostly there would be three or four arcs of light. They didn’t stay long in the same place. New arcs would flash out like the trail of a brilliant meteorite, sometimes overhead, sometimes down near the horizon, sometimes to the right of you, sometimes to the left. You never knew where the next one would burst out. Occasionally, perhaps half a dozen times in a night, the whole sky would fill with lights, as if a huge, multicolored cosmic firecracker had suddenly gone off. It was all completely silent.

  The mission was not so much concerned with esthetics, however, as with the collection of facts. Auroral activity of this very great intensity must produce strong electromagnetic signals. Receivers were set up. Sure enough, there were electromagnetic signals in plenty. The emissions were monitored carefully from day to day and it emerged that there were marked regularities. The aspects of a phased situation were revealed step by step. Incredible as it seemed, there was a controlled order in the magnetosphere of this planet. Could some form of data-processing be going on up there? Were the electrons and the magnetic field disposed in such a configuration that the vast magnetosphere, encompassing the whole planet, was behaving like a gigantic electronic brain?

  The next step was for the crew to transmit electromagnetic signals themselves. This they did in the hope of receiving some response. So far as anybody could tell, either by looking directly up at the flickering sky, or from the instrumental records, there was no change. It all went on exactly the same as before. The mission continued its explorations on the ground, but there was always a return to the sky, to the problem of what was going on up there.

  After their long outward journey, the men had come to feel acutely alone. Earth was now many many years away. Memories of acquaintances, even of families and friends, had become unpleasantly diffuse, as if the old life had lost reality. The spaceship had become their world. During the voyage it had seemed to each man as if the others were all there was of life, anywhere in the whole universe. The landing on this new planet had come as an indescribable relief. Even the insects were a relief. Yet the green valleys and the chuckling streams were no substitute for some form of intelligible communication. It was this the men ached for, not so much to learn something new as to feel they weren’t alone. The desperate need was to get away from the feeling of isolation, of being a negligible microcosm in the vast, implacable, unyielding infinity of space and time.

  Establishing contact with the wonderful thing in the sky came to have overriding importance. Then failure after failure led to a growing impatience. If only the thing would respond in some way, any way, even an answering ray of light would do, only so long as it didn’t go on ignoring them. All they wanted now was the slightest sign of recognition. Yet nothing they did made the smallest difference.

  Someone had the idea that perhaps their signals weren’t getting through, perhaps it wasn’t possible for signals to propagate directly from the ground into the magnetosphere. It could be the waves were being reflected or refracted, back to the ground again. This suggested that signals be injected directly into the magnetosphere, from the ship in orbit around the planet. Unfortunately, it meant waiting until the beginning of the homeward flight, because the captain didn’t want to put the strain of a double landing on his rocket motors, not with gravity as strong as it was here. Partly because of this, and partly because of the sheer physical strain of putting up day after day with the excess weight occasioned by the gravity, the captain decided to cut short the length of the explorations on the ground.

  One trouble was that nobody had any idea of the kind of response they should be looking for. Could
this thing be aware of the spaceship flying right through it, any more than we ourselves are aware of some particular bacterium inside our own bodies? The electromagnetic signals they were now injecting into it should be producing some disturbance, but could the Thing be aware of the source of the disturbance? At all events, they got no more in the way of a response than before. Whatever it was, it ignored them completely.

  A reaction set in. The electronic-brain fell out of favor. It began to look as though they were dealing only with some unusual natural phenomenon and not at all with an utterly new form of “life.” This made a big difference, a big difference in the tactics they should adopt. They’d better quit fooling with electromagnetic signals. They’d better do something really effective to stir up the situation. A nuclear bomb exploded in the works, after the manner of the old Starfish project, was more in line with the needs of the case. Back on Earth there had been objectors to Starfish. Here there would be no objectors, thought the captain, as he set about preparations for the experiment in hand. Actually he was wrong. Pev objected, although he didn’t say so. Pev didn’t understand the talk about electronics, or of the need for a bomb, or about flutings in the magnetic field. What he did know was that he liked this planet, with its gentle landscape and its magnificent skies. He couldn’t conceive of any reason for wanting to change it.

  It was easy for Pev to make a blunder on purpose, to set the motors firing for a sweep-out from orbit. He had acquired a reputation for mistakes of all kinds. Nobody would suspect him of anything more than another stupidity. The others felt the growing acceleration. A glance at the controls made the situation clear to the captain, made it clear there would barely be enough time for them to strap themselves down before the big drive came on. The controls had gotten preset, there was no stopping it now.