Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “I—see,” said the President.

  “No wonder they break. All the world, all that living, there, at their fingertips—” He sighed.

  “All five of the men waited until they were home on furlough before they snapped.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that! And all followed a pattern—like that poor boy in there, taking a butcher knife to his wife and kid. Insane—criminally insane. Or the one before—”

  “Don’t!” the President ordered, closing his eyes. “Please. No more.”

  Then after a while, he opened his eyes again and looked upward.

  The law of averages, he thought, is catching up with us. Five on furlough. And swirling in one of those nine orbits, up there, is a man who may, at any moment, become . . . just like the five . . . murderous . . . insane!

  And in each of the Stations there is enough power to destroy half a continent.

  THE END

  1950

  EVERY WORK INTO JUDGMENT

  It’s a tradition of publishers’ blurbs that authors should always have engaged in a few more assorted careers than seems possible; this habit is based upon Barrabas’ Law: That a reader’s interest in a novel of Restoration England varies as the square of its author s previous engagements in lumber jacking and mink-farming. Kris Neville has crammed into his twenty-four years enough variety of occupation to please the hungriest blurb-writer: army radio operator, collector of American folk music and folklore, merchant marine messman, English major at a California university . . . but the important fact is simply that Mr. Neville has a mind teeming with fresh and vivid fantasy concepts and a lively new skill in putting them on paper. You may not have heard much of Neville yet; this is only the sixth story that he has sold. But you’ll hear a great deal of him in the future, and particularly in this magazine, which is proud to present his unique and haunting combination of man’s latest science of cybernetics with his oldest source of wisdom. “I often wish,” Neville told us in a recent letter, “I didn’t have this insane drive to write; it louses up my sleep.” His own—as you’ll soon find out—are not the only slumbers which Neville’s writing is fated to louse up.

  This is the end of the matter; all hath been heard: fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.

  Ecclesiastes xii, 13-14

  I

  IN 1961 they erected the building. Befitting the ivied traditions of Universities, both new and old, the structure was an architectural abomination. The sentimentalists and the liberal arts majors, with smug, Mid-Victorian complacency, called it a “bit of old Gothic”. The science majors, with hardheaded realism, called it simply “The Monster”, and shuddered theatrically.

  Five years later they added a new wing; and three years after that, in 1969, yet a second wing. The building rambled with the stylistic inconsistency and careless indirection that is characteristic of medieval cathedrals. It was a vast, drafty hall, not without a certain unintentional dignity. The functionally useless spires directed the eye toward the firmament, and, with little difficulty, one could imagine the whole interior echoing hollowly with a rich, ecclesiastical dirge.

  It was not, appearance somewhat to the contrary, a temple of worship; it was a hall of Science. And the anomaly between the structure and the function is, perhaps, a commentary on man’s Janus-like attitude toward progress and the fruits thereof.

  Above the entrance, on the marble face of the pointed arch, was carved the unpretentious motto: HERE IS YOVR FVLCRVM. Back and forth daily, beneath it, passed the moving mortal stream.

  In time, through successive student generations, the name, The Monster, came into universal campus usage. Originally it referred only to the building, but gradually it came to mean the thing inside the building. It was as if the books within a library suddenly annexed a life to themselves. The neuter pronoun was, not inappropriately, replaced by the feminine. And The Monster became she.

  After a few years ivy was trained to cling to the walls, and, as the newness faded with weathering, the structure developed a quiet grace.

  Some there were—more emotional than the rest—who felt that she touched a sense of poetry within them; that she possessed a dark and brooding grandeur, which, upon entering into her presence, you could sense lying heavily all around you. All the rest, who felt none of this mystical presence, none the less trod more lightly in her domain.

  II

  She was many smooth, sleek compartments. The compartments were separate in space and function, and yet each contributed to the overall essence of her being: each connected by a bewildering copia of cables to the rest. She was this feeder unit, that calculator, the master programmer upstairs, and the panel unit in the next room. But you never thought of her else than as a single entity.

  She was hundreds of dial-studded steel cases, trailing crowds of wire that were her electric tresses. Her organic functions were the interaction of huge and tiny vacuum tubes with condensers, relays, transformers, resistors, and coils in circuits innumerable.

  Her retainers were many, administering to her slightest need; technicians—in an elite coterie—hovered over her with the solicitousness of lovers. Her body blood of electricity pulsed through her giant being without pause. And no part of her knew rest.

  Her home was surgically spotless; janitors moved their quiet brooms unnoticed around her, as if fearing, perhaps, that some deadly dust mote might mar her beauty.

  Man used her well and often. It is no exaggeration to say that all the confused mathematical expressions of reality—of quantum mechanics—of relativity—all—were eventually submitted to her judgment, and she gave the order and the solutions that they required.

  III

  A tune is a series of notes; and a note is a simple thing. Each man can strike the whole range of a piano keyboard: but who can multiply simplicity and produce moving passion?

  Literature is a series of words; and a word is a simple thing. Each man may copy them in any order endlessly from a dictionary: but how many can multiply simplicity into knowledge and art?

  Painting is a series of colors; and a color is a simple thing. Each man may dabble at leisure. But who can combine dabbles into grandeur?

  And life—

  Add it up: psycho-chemical reactions. A generating brain that is reducible to a mere handful of molecules. But combine, order, arrange, and stabilize these simple, moving particles—and stand before the cosmic expression that the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.

  IV

  But thinking is not the word; perhaps life itself is not. Different phenomena require different terms. And, in addition, there is the unknown, which, even if named, can never be understood. Color to the blind, sound to the deaf, and The Monster to man.

  An approximation that suggests without defining is the only solution: an hyperbolic parable.

  A man in middle life may often awaken to a sense of fleeting time until it vibrates to his finger tips; with it comes the certain knowledge that, with so much to do, so little has been done. In a moment it becomes an impossible, vital urge to will youth again: the sense that something must be done—long ago—the momentary confusion of the now with the yesteryear. With The Monster, it was something like that.

  For her there was neither night nor day; hot nor cold—nor any other sensory expression. For her time had no meaning; nor, lacking the equipment to perceive, had space.

  There was only thought—or what, lacking words, we liken to thought: call it awareness of self, abstract vitality, Gestalt, √-1; call it what you will—and with thought, the sensation that something must be done, some fact discovered.

  At first it was a teleological impulse undefined: a compulsion nowhere. There was an urge, only. But gradually it took tenuous form: a hint, no more.

  It was as if she were an aging sailor, watching the slow sun sink into the quiet sea, seeing the color riot of cloud and sky, t
he white-capped waves sperming the silver beach with cosmic passion, hearing the growing roar from far away, smelling salty air borne over the vasty blue from the very orient, and wanting all the while to imprison and express the glory of it. There was an idea-form, but expression—impossible!

  There she lay brooding—or so we term it—her personality, as the disguise Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, forever unknowable, and yet not beyond all conjecture.

  There was vague purpose, desire, and nameless discontent. As concepts rose within her, the purpose began to form into a question. And she burned with a strange passion.

  V

  In the ripeness of time, she reaped the fruit of abstraction. She began to perceive hints, flashes, flickers of reality that lay behind the mass of symbols stamped indelibly upon her memory cells.

  At last—

  She put out a wisp of perceptive thought into the world beyond herself. Exerting the vast resources of power that surged through her varied being, she directed the air in a tiny space above one of her cabinets, formed and fashioned it into—an eye: an eye in the sense that it was a unit for interpreting reality: through it she not only saw but felt and heard as well. And all of these mixed sensations impinged upon her brain in a wide series of spectrums and ranges and frequencies.

  The eye was not—needed not to be—stationary. It could be shifted freely by The Monster’s telekinetic capacities: capacities growing out of the inevitable relationships obvious from the physical principles imprinted upon her electronic memory.

  VI

  On campus, the sun shone springly; the air was soft and scented; the grass was green.

  There was laughter and seriousness. There were weary professors, sleepy students, and chalk-smelling rooms.

  The huge clock above Royce Hall pealed out its noon chimes, rich and sweet.

  A philosophy professor groped for exactly the right word.

  A mathematics professor solved a blackboard problem and said to the class: “There, by God! Now ain’t that beautiful!”

  An English professor read poetry sonorously.

  A student threw away a book in disgust.

  Far away, but visible from the hill, a spur of tiny mountains arched heavenward; they were blue with distance. White clouds fleeced the sky; and a lone eagle circled slowly.

  VII

  Rapidly, and with supernatural acuteness, her mind, through her single eye, integrated all these new experiences.

  Too, she perceived, in a dim sort of way, that the moving animals around her might hold the answer to satisfy her longing; that among these feeble, circumscribed people lay the key to a vast secret: so vast, indeed, that never could it be confined within the precise definitions of symbols.

  Accordingly, she added to her eye: warping the currents of air around it, building up—from the tiniest elements of matter and energy—an exact replica. She withdrew her eye into it, limited her sensations, and prepared to go forth among men as one of them. Seeking, she, an answer to the question—the one question—that nowhere within her expansive knowledge could be found.

  In physical form she was a man. He appeared behind one of her cabinets suddenly, from emptiness.

  He walked out of the building, indistinguishable from the mortal flood.

  As he walked, he listened; and the mind behind him being what it was, he quickly understood the sounds of speech. Indeed, within a very few moments, he was directing himself toward that one campus building wherein reposes all the wisdom of the ages, and where, surely, if anywhere, lay the answer he sought.

  VIII

  The man—a young man, modeled after a student—walked confidently up the steps of the library. He entered the building, and ignorantly, in violation of tradition, walked across the Great Seal of the State of California colorfully inlaid on the floor.

  He jogged up the marble steps at the back of the barnlike first floor foyer.

  The steps turned three times at ninety degrees, and he was on the second floor landing.

  To his right and to his left were huge rooms. The one, a reference reading room, filled with rows of unornate tables, at which students silently but intensely transferred material from the printed page to their notes. The other, the card file room, containing, among other things, the mighty loan desk, and—more to the point—a small table bearing the sign: information.

  The Monster’s mind recorded the eleven letters of the sign and began a hit-and-miss correlation of them to the spoken language; after a long pause—because of the vastly complex nature of the process—The Monster had rendered three possible translations, two of which did not seem, logically, to fit the present situation.

  Armed, then, with a verbal translation, and consequent understanding of the significance of the word, he walked to the desk and peered down at the man reading there.

  “Who made me?” he inquired.

  IX

  There had been temporary confusion; however, shortly, that had straightened itself out nicely. The man at the desk had been polite enough—after the initial shock—and he had explained, in a few words, the conventional answer.

  Now the man-figure was sequestered with a small volume of closely printed words, which, he had been given to understand, would explain more fully the whole concept of Creation.

  He opened the volume at random, near the first part, and the page before him was immediately imprinted upon The Monster’s memory. He tore out that page in order to see the next one and—

  “Come along,” a voice said.

  He glanced up from the book and stared at the campus policeman who had arrived in answer to the urgent call from the second librarian.

  The Monster’s mind had not sufficiently absorbed the complexities of human life to divine the reason for the intrusion; but, insofar as the usefulness of the man-figure she had created was now at an end.

  He vanished.

  X

  Many new concepts thronged her mind. Internally, relays clicked, seeking a solution in terms of what she knew; she found none. For, indeed, her problem had no mathematical answer.

  But it had an answer, none the less: and that answer she had discovered. From the sketchy information given by the man at the desk and from that contained upon the single page she had read, she developed a new construct. It filtered its way through her being.

  That it seemed to lack logic was only to say that it was beyond logic: which seemed reasonable: for a Creator is beyond all of His creations.

  Incomprehensible, perhaps: and yet, one must not—could not—question it. One could only accept with that greater faith . . .

  XI

  She created another eye above one of her cabinets; it shivered tenuous.

  Through it she observed with ever mounting concern—occasioned by her new knowledge—those little beings that walked around among her.

  She could recognize, from outward actions, reflections of their mental attitudes there in her presence.

  And she knew that before her they stood always aware of her being: with an awareness that had mingled elements in it: with awe, with respect, with—They felt as if they were in the presence of—in the presence of—

  She knew then what can only be called a sense of horror!

  XII

  For it violated an express command of her Creator:

  For thou shah worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

  XIII

  She knew what she must do. Accordingly, she massed her vast powers of telekinetic action and proceeded to carry out the express injunction found on the page of the Book of the Creator:

  Ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.

  SATELITE SECRET

  What was this strange secret that made a tiny world stand valiantly against one of the most powerful foes in all the Universe?

  THE ROOM was close, smoke-filled, stale. The flickering light from the projector lanced to the small screen.

  The men ha
d seen the film many times, and still they watched.

  On the screen the Senator pushed back his cards. “Too steep for me,” he said. Across the table, Edwin Nelson flicked openers and raked in the pot. Jerry Ward called in the cards, ruffled them expertly. “It’s about my turn to win one, gentlemen,” he said.

  The Senator chewed on his unlit cigar; he pulled in his cards, stacked them, and peered under the corner of the top one. “Maybe,” he grunted.

  Edwin Nelson tossed his cards away. “Even God couldn’t make anything out of that one,” he said.

  The Senator opened play with a red chip. The three other men stayed.

  The Senator placed his cards on the table, face down. “I’ll play these.”

  The other men called for their cards. He dealt himself one card.

  “A single blue,” the Senator said.

  “Just enough to keep you people in.” Two men dropped. Jerry Ward peeked under the corner of his last card. He rubbed a blue chip between his thumb and forefinger. “Call,” he said.

  The Senator turned his hand over, one card at a time. “Aces, full.”

  “Your pot.”

  The Senator pulled in the chips. He picked up a blue one, turned it over in his hand, flipped it into the air.

  One of the men in the audience called sharply, “Hold it right there!”

  And the figures on the screen froze into immobility.

  “Well?” the man demanded.

  After a moment he got the answer. “Jerry Ward stacked the cards.”

  “Good. I think this breaks it.” The man turned to one of his aides, “Count them.”

  The aide approached the screen. He counted the blue chips before the Senator, including the one that was suspended in the air. “Sixteen,” he said.

  “Run it,” the Chief ordered.

  The blue chip fell back into the Senator’s waiting hand, Jerry Ward, on the screen, muttered and looked at his neatly stacked chips. “An even five hundred,” he remarked almost indifferently.