The Biological Revolt

by Philip José Farmer

  He withdrew a little. "Don't feel sorry for me. This affair isn't over. You're not Ogtate's yet. Tell me, if you don't have to become aspate yourself, will you still marry me?"

  "Dear Yew! I thought your pride would be so hurt that you would have no more to do with me."

  "It is hurt. But I love you. And you didn't answer my question."

  "If I don't have to be aspated, I'll marry you."

  He clapped his hat on and said, "Good! Major Killison, will you come outside with me? The copter's ready."

  "Yes, sir." She smiled a little.

  5

  Outside, they walked upon the broad field, two forms threading between shiny pools of glass blasts made by rockets. They wandered beneath an enormous Mississippi moon. Killison gazed at the many buildings and towering silver needles and said, "All this was built because of one man?"

  He nodded and said, "That's how important he is. The military know it, hut we can't heat it into the heads of our citizens. Most think the war is ninety million miles off. It is, now, but any day the noses of Priami ships may materialize out of the air."

  They stepped into the copier and strapped themselves in. Yewliss checked the instruments, and then lifted up the ship.

  "According to my men, Ogtate flew back to his island where he'll be licking his wounds, and there we'll help him. Or, rather you will."

  She placed her hand upon her doctor's kit as if to make sure it hadn't dissolved. "How do you know he's sick.

  "His wife told me. Besides, the Comprob submitted he'd be most likely to break when he was sick."

  "I don't think it's malaria," she said. "I understand there is still some along the Amazon and the Congo. But there hasn't been a case on this continent for forty years. His fever may be psychosomatic."

  "Possibly from an allergy," he said.

  She glanced at him, wondering why he'd said that. "One of the reasons I volunteered, although by no means the strongest, was to study the asps. I don't agree with my colleagues who maintain that the effect can't be wiped out."

  "You'll get nowhere. We offered to place him in a lab where Earth's best brains would study him. He refused. He said they might work twenty years before they found anything. By then, the asps would have worn themselves out. Besides, they can discover as much using test animals as they could with him. He doesn't want to spend all that time behind glass windows, like an ape in a zoo."

  "Or a snake in a pit," she added.

  "In one way, I don't blame him. But he hasn't been at all co-operative. The main reason he wouldn't allow himself to be placed under observation is that he's afraid we'll pry the Belos out of him."

  She leaned back and gazed from the window. "The night is beautiful," she said. "The moon is giving herself to every lover in sight. I've never seen a nightscape like this."

  Then, as if her senses had been talking for her while she was thinking about something else, she said, "The major who met me at the transmitter briefed me. Perhaps you know more than he, a weakness of Ogtate's that you, as a psych, might have noticed."

  "Tell me what you know. I'll fill in anything you've missed." As he looked at her, he fought against his consuming desire to place his arm around her shoulders. She was Diana, bright and full at tines, shadowed and crescented at others, far off yet just beyond tiptoe reach, a blend of majesty and of passion. If she were to become Ogtate's, could Yewliss find her equal? Realist that he was, he knew there were women just as beautiful and intelligent and strong; spirited. Many would gladly be his mate; many could satisfy him in every way and would make him love them. But they were not Barbara, the only one he wanted.

  Closing her eyes, she talked. "The story as I know it began about three years ago. The Priami warned us to stay off Mars. Dr. Erkells, a physicist, and his assistant, Ogtate, were working on a device they thought would make interplanetary war impossible, or at least, extremely difficult."

  She opened her eyes and said, "Yew, am I boring you? You know all this, of course. It is so fantastic, so fairy-like. We step into booths, sit down, and, in what seems to us the next second, we're halfway around the Earth, or on Callisto or Ceres. And Erkells was going to wave his black sorcerer's wand and put an end to that. Of course, it was for a good cause, but how many bad deeds are done for good reasons? He even would have stopped EPB-travel between Earth cities, for the Belos would have distorted the waves so much that we'd be quite scrambled by the time we arrived at our destination.

  "Nobody thinks about that. If Ogtate tells us the secret, we defeat the Martians. But we also go back, for a while at least, to flight on the wings of matter. Our magical energy-chariots are grounded. Yet few realize this; they're all so blase and talk about weekends in Paris or Luna Port as if they were hot-dog stands down the street. So do I, but now and then I wake up and catch my breath and say, 'Dabs, can this be? Is this you, in this age? Why, Babs, Louis XIV or Pharaoh Cheops would give all they had to be the commonest citizen of Earth. And wouldn't Shelley or Poe or Dunsany or Li Po have signed in blood to step through the magical gate of Space and Time annihilated? How can we look around and not run screaming down the street with joy? Babs, this is you, now!' "

  He patted her hand. "I like you, Barbara. You're one of the few people I know who aren't walking corpses. You're alive. Your eyes aren't world-shot. Others live horizontally; you, if you can see what I mean, live perpendicularly."

  She closed her eyes and put her head back. "So," she resumed, indifferently, "when the war began, Erkells and Ogtate were working hard on the theory of their weapon. They succeeded in thinking out the equations. It was a marvelous invention, and, if given to both sides, would make interplanetary war impossible. Before Erkells could begin work on the practical part, however, the human element entered-though, perhaps, it had never been absent.

  "Erkells fell out of love with his wife. She knew it. She knew the young woman he intended to marry after the divorce. So, because she didn't want to lose him, she looked for something to prevent his going to the other woman. She found help in an assistant of her husband's, a man who was on the point of losing his job because his love-life interfered with his work. In this case, although Erkells didn't know it, the assistant's trouble sprang from Erkells' wife. She, thinking she could trust him because he was fond of her, asked him to help her. He gave her an illegal drug. It was a post-hypnotic affecting thalamocortical integration. Once it was fed to the scientist, he'd not be able to resist his wife's suggestion that he abandon his bride-to-be and continue happily married to her.

  "Sounds Dark-Ageish, doesn't it? So it is. Technologically, we're in the Golden Age, but people change slowly. They take a long time to come out of the Brass.

  "Unfortunately, the assistant, by means of the drug, implanted the suggestion that the physicist destroy himself by fire! Suggestion is not easily effected, and it has little chance of success unless there is a similar, strong neurosis or psychosis already buried in the subject. This was Erkells' case, as the assistant knew. His victim, however, fought his growing insanity. He went to a therapist, and in time the doctor would have discovered the cause of his aberration. Not long afterwards, though, Erkells' copter crashed while he was flying to the therapist's office. He died of radiation-sickness from the broken fuel-tank.

  "Before he died, he did something he had sworn he would never do. He gave the secret of the Belos to his scientific colleague, Ogtate. The master himself had done all of the concluding work on the equations. When he surrendered his knowledge, however, he made the young man swear he wouldn't give the weapon to Earth, unless she was in danger of annihilation. Erkells was a pacifist. He believed the whole conflict was based on misunderstanding and that it could peaceably be resolved. As both factions had potentially democratic political systems, they should be able to avert a cataclysmic war.

  "Erkells figured that if the Earth had a monopoly upon the Belos, it would easily win, for the Priami would not be able to penetrate our power fields. Conquest would therefore be so easy for us that we
might become an arrogant, empire-building race. We would lose all the ideals and freedom we have gained in the last two hundred years. Moreover, he thought the Priami were no different from Terrans."

  "He had never seen one of those monsters!" interrupted the General. "Nor one of our Callistan stations they've bombed."

  "No, that's certain. Anyway, the assistant and Mrs. Erkells were sent to a therapeutic institution. Ogtate was left with the burden of decision. If he didn't divulge the Belos until Earth was in danger, he might be too late, for it took time and organization to set up the equipment for the field. But if he told scientists the secret, he might launch the moral downfall of his people."

  "Idiot!" said Yewliss. "How can he linger in mist and moonshine with the threat of bombs?"

  "I intend to find out," she said, and squirmed to find a more comfortable position. He watched the shifting of curves, the upthrust of breasts, the rotation of hips below the slim waist, as she settled back with a sigh. He closed his eyes and gripped the wheel.

  6

  "About this time," she continued, "Ogtate joined the Militant Pacifists Party. Inasmuch as everyone knew he alone kept the Belos' secret, he rose quickly to a high position in the MP's. He led these in their demand to sue for peace at once even if we had to forswear all claims to any part of our system. He thought the Priami-a reasonable race, according to him would be so impressed with our generosity they would come to terms. But his opponents insisted our contacts with the Priami were enough to prove that we were dealing with devils.

  "Despite this, Ogtate presented to the Council a law that would halt the war. His opponents claimed that, if the law were passed, we would be slaughtered, unless he would hand over the Belos.

  "The night before the law was to be considered, Ogtate was seized by a band of masked men. They aspated him! People were horrified. They decided to vote the Council out of office at once, for they suspected that the men who'd done the outrageous deed were of the same party. That very night, however, the Priami helium-bombed Callisto. So the government stayed in power, and the MP's dissolved from lack of adequate membership. The government did everything they could to make up to Ogtate. Too late. He lost his wife and children; his friends deserted him; he was forced to live alone."

  "Here we are," said Yewliss.

  The copter crossed the moonspotted Mississippi and settled down upon a heart-shaped bit of earth: Lemons' Island. Artificially built, it had once been a pleasure resort. Ogtate had requested it and got it. The craft landed in a clearing before a large, white house built in pseudo-prebellum style. Although there were lights inside, no one appeared at the doors or windows.

  When the wheels touched, Yewliss took a hypo from a kit and injected the contents into Killison's left arm. "It's 0100," he said. "You have ten hours before the effect wears off. After that, take no more, or you'll be sensitized. Second shots have been tried on lab animals; they always die."

  "You forget I'm an M.D.," she said, sharply. She took her kit and began to climb out.

  He pulled her back. "No kiss?"

  "If I fail in this mission, we'll have enough time for that then. Meanwhile, silly as this may sound, I'd feel unfaithful to Ogtate if I kissed you."

  "Just a meeting of the lips?" He wasn't sure whether she was kidding him.

  "I put all of myself into a kiss. Nothing's, held back."

  "The asp has affected you already," he said trying to carry it off with a laugh. Even to himself, he sounded dismal. "Remember," he called after her, "to contact me at once if anything comes up."

  She waved goodnight and walked off. A moment later, his copter whirred away.

  General Yewliss set the automatic controls after leveling out his copter and turned to the visor. Idly, he twisted the dial until a New York program jumped upon the screen. It was one of the many discussion panels filling the air, and this, like most of its competitors, was discussing the Asp and the Belos. Although the panelers were scientists and intellectuals, they had nothing new to offer. Yewliss listened with half an ear and then cut them off.

  Everybody knew that when Terrans went to Mars, they found underground colonies of the so-called Priami. This race had come to the solar system from a star's planet system that long ago flared into a nova. Knowing their fate, the Priami had escaped by means of a unique form of interstellar travel. Years before they themselves emigrated, they launched a ship driven by ion beams and containing automatic energy-matter wave receivers and converters. Then the beings were passed from matter into alpha energy-waves and were beamed to the solar system, which they knew had planets.

  After fifty years of near-lightspeed travel, the ship entered the sun's gravitomagnetic field, which electron-triggered the machinery. The wave-charts, not as yet deteriorated by the rather short trip, fed into the converter. The coded pulses were then metamorphosed again into matter: spaceships and crews.

  It was during the mid-1940's, that Terrans themselves succeeded in their first experiments with energy-into-matter conversion. They didn't know, as they celebrated feeble success in creating several atoms from energy and adding them to some carbon molecules, that the Priami not only anticipated them by quite a few hundred years but used the classic development to survive as a race.

  The newcomers, noting the large population, industries, and quarrelsomeness of the Terrans, ignored Earth and burrowed into arid Mars. They freed oxygen from the rusty rocks and contented themselves with sending occasional space ships to report on their neighbors' progress.

  By the time man's rockets reached Mars, the Priami were beginning to build on the surface, whose sterile soil was being converted to fertility. In several more centuries they would make of the red globe a smaller, but green Earth.

  Only one thing could destroy them-man. Strangely, the Martians didn't fear man's bombs or diseases or rapacity. They dreaded a factor which man himself would never have considered a weapon. Man was a liar!

  The Priami could not lie, or rather, if they did, it was by a super-effort of will. But then they went into psychosomatic decline and death, often suicide. Prolonged and intimate contact with man would lead to race extinction.

  Nonlying was a culturally-conditioned characteristic. Many Priami, realizing they would inevitably have to face man in numbers, tried to change their culture. They were determined to teach themselves to lie and to listen to lies. However, the flexibles met opposition. The change was delayed so bitterly that it would be centuries before Mars as a whole would be a planet of prevaricators. Meanwhile, the Priami issued ultimatums to keep off Terrans. When man, unable to take their life-and-death problem seriously, persisted, the Priami attacked Earthmen in self-defense. The first interplanetary war had begun.

  Independently, Terra evolved its energy-matter converters and transmitters. During the mid-twentieth century scientists photographed individual atoms with electron microscopes. Out of these were born electronic scanners that could "blueprint" the most complicated matter. Combining these with the converters, the scientists could disintegrate a rocketship, atom by atom, and beam them in pulses, to be reassembled at a distance.

  By Yewliss' time, they proved that electrons consisted of points of convergence in lines of force or energy waves. They formed positive and negative convergence points from energy to build atoms, and so on up the scale of size to complete man.

  Humankind was justly proud of this achievement, but soon found that the EPB-converters could only be set up on Earth, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter's moons and some of the asteroids. The Priami had stations and colonies on every other body worth occupying. They warned that if man transgressed, a converter ship would drop close to Earth and would materialize a whole fleet of war-vessels.

  Earth could do the same to Mars, but retribution would follow.

  There was a stalemate. Yet, a move could be made, and Terra could make it. She knew of a new weapon that could nullify enemy Energy-Pulse-Blueprint Realizers, while her own dropped unmarked upon Mars. It was called the Belos, the Greek
word for weapon. The principle of the Belos was known quite well. The application was not.

  According to theory, a series of tremendous generators from North Magnetic Pole to South Magnetic Pole, geared thus to the Earth's electro-magnetic field, would produce a shell of energy around the globe. This shell corresponds, for various scientific reasons, with the ionosphere, and would work on a principle first deduced in the 1940's by two British astronomers. This was the idea that the universe was expanding and being kept from entropy because hydrogen atoms were continuously forming in space. Later, scientists found that it was, instead, electrons that formed de nova. These, along with some short-lived subatomic particles came into being when gravitomagnetic lines of force converged.

  Founded on this discovery, the Belos shell consisted of shifting electro-magnetic stresses, statically bound to cross enough energy waves so particles would be "created". Thus, if a Priami materializer-rocket penetrated the Earth's atmosphere with the intention of converting a huge fleet in the air, before the Terrans could do anything about it, the attack would be thwarted. The Belos would generate "endostatic", mixing the matter with foreign particles, then adding or subtracting electrons from the new configurations, making accurate materialization impossible. If the converter-ship stayed far out of the Belos, it might as well not leave its home port, for Earth radar would pick up the distant Martians, and send interceptors. To be effective, the invaders should come into being at close range, but as long as the third planet had the Belos, they could do it. Only one man knew how to put the Belos into operation. He would not tell. His name was Bill Ogtate.

  7

  Bill Ogtate was sitting at a little table, contemplating a queen, when he heard a copter cutting the air outside. "You'd better take off," he said to Smith, his opponent.

  Smith withdrew a three-fingered hand from a king. "Take off? That means fly? Remove? Unveil? Imitate?"