The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  “It is not an environment alien to you, Jeff, for you are a Mag, and the environment of the City of Brock is compatible with the mind of the Mag.”

  The words formed silently in Jarvis’ mind, and with them he had a feeling of the presence of John Daniels. He felt warmth and welcome in the intruding thought, but the city was still a quarter of a mile away, and he could not see the Negro.

  He said to Mitch, casually, “The Mags are telepathic—that’s what makes them different from ordinary people.”

  “More than telepathic, Jeff,” Daniels’ voice sounded again in his mind. “Our minds are to us what their arms and legs, their machines and their weapons, are to them.”

  They were approaching the gate. Jarvis said, “Mitch, what is a Sap?”

  “If you haven’t guessed by now,” Mitch growled, “I won’t be the one to tell you—Eamus Brock undoubtedly will.”

  “Don’t guess, Jeff. Sap is short for homo sapiens. You don’t belong to the human race, Jeff. Mitch does. That’s why he resents you…us. He can’t help it. It is a trait of homo sap to fear and distrust anything he does not understand—anything that is different. But we are your people. We understand you, and you will learn to understand us. The gate of our city is open to you.”

  Passing through the gate was like stepping from air into vacuum, Jarvis thought—no, more like passing from Hell into Paradise. The feeling was profound, indescribable. It was not the same as it had been. He was here, nowhere, and everywhere at once. Daniels was beside him, in front of him—on all sides, and even inside. There was a oneness to be experienced that he had never knowledged before.

  “It’s dark,” he said confusedly. “No—it’s light! It—it’s both at once and neither. I—I’m alone…yet I feel you, John Daniels, and many, many others…”

  “You are a newborn infant, Jeff Jarvis,” Daniels assured him. “How does a baby feel when it first emerges into the world? The same way you feel right now. You can not separate space and time, because they are one, and you have not yet learned to achieve the psychological distinction of one from the other. But you will grow, Jeff, like a baby grows. You will crawl a while before you walk erect among the Mags, but you are a Mag, and don’t ever forget it!”

  “I can’t seem to understand anything,” Jarvis commented, dismayed.

  “God will bring you understanding, as He brought understanding to Eamus Brock. Nothing is changed, Jeff, except environment. All the other true things, like God, remain true, even here.”

  “God—here?”

  “I thought this place was God when I first entered,” Daniels avowed. “Now I know it’s just the closest place hereabouts to God, but that’s a mighty big comfort.”

  “And Eamus Brock is—?”

  “No more than the rest of us—except he’s the leader of the Mags. Don’t look for anything supernatural here, Jeff. But I’m just a lawyer—and I’m not good at explaining things like this. You ready to see Eamus Brock?”

  Jarvis felt a sensation of peace, drifting peace. The soft, flowing colors of the city soothed him in their bath of iridescence. And the muted melodies of countless human beings—no, not human but more than human beings—that the city housed surrounded him and permeated him with a pulse of the ultimate in life. He felt the presence of them en masse and individually, and heard for the first time in his soul the throbbing symphony of the Song of Power, which was the soul-song of the Mighty.

  They were the Mags—they were the City. There were all races among them, men, women and children. And they were all kin to him. He recognized that kinship with a deep pang of gladness. He accepted their oneness with him, relinquishing his own individuality, glad to be home at last.

  He was alone in one of the tallest towers in the city. Without explanation, Daniels had left him. Or had the lawyer been with him at all? Jarvis had no physical sensation of being anywhere. And then he saw that he had company—a man shrouded in a glowing, cocoon-like garment. Jarvis went over toward him and the man turned. The lined face and sightless eyes—Eamus-Brock!

  Brock smiled. “Sit down, Jeff. I’ll be with you in a moment—as soon as I finish recording my thoughts of the day. But let me insulate you first—I’m afraid this must be terribly confusing to you.”

  Jarvis felt suddenly at ease, well placed, with two feet on the ground. There was a chair by him and he sat, noticing the appointments of the office in which he found himself. Brock sat at a large desk that had a recording machine of some kind on it, to which he was addressing himself. It all seemed quite normal and business-like.

  Brock concluded his task at the machine, waved his hand, and the recorder vanished. He bestowed another smile on Jarvis.

  “This is a trying period for Magnanthropus,” he explained, “and generations in the future will be grateful for my daily thought recordings. There is so much being done, and so much to be done.”

  “I’m grateful for whatever you did to clear away my confusion,” Jarvis acknowledged.

  “On the contrary, I simply reconfused you,” Brock retorted amiably. “For the first time in your life, you were thinking clearly, only-you could not realize it. I re-established your ordinary environment of confusion, to which you are accustomed.”

  “If this is confusion,” Jarvis exclaimed, “spare me clarity, please!”

  Brock laughed. “You will learn—I cannot tell you how, but you will. Perhaps I can guide you a little—as a parent guides a newborn baby. But you will find your own way of learning, and you will grow up among us yet.”

  Jarvis ranged his glance around the room. An air-conditioning unit purred in the window. The floor was thick and soft with carpet. Paneled wood walls reflected the overhead lights. It was all quite natural and normal, and Brock was telling him that none of this was real—only a vision conjured in his mind to stave off from his senses what reality was actually like.

  “I didn’t guide you half-way across North America to make fun of you,” Brock said seriously. “Nor have I time, myself, to instruct you in the ways of the Mags. But I think your first contact with the Mag environment is best made through me. We knew each other years ago, Jeff, when you were a child. I took those memories away from you and they will never come back. When they took you away to the House of Correction, I believed I had made a mistake in you, and I renounced you. I now sincerely apologize. I was wrong in thinking that a true Mag should know enough to conform, but now I realize that you have something else—an indomitable kind of courage that even many Mags do not possess.

  “It was only because you were a Mag at all that I gave you the drive to find me. Now I am glad I did.”

  “You directed me to find Toby and bring him to you,” Jarvis said.

  The blind man nodded. “You are wondering, if I could do that, why I did not reveal myself to you. I could have, but I chose not to. For one thing, I was curious as to how you would get along by yourself—not merely curious, I was beginning to have plans for you. I had to see how you could prove yourself. And then there was the girl…”

  “Jo?”

  “Yes. You know, of course, she is not a Mag? You made yourself responsible for her, and I quickly had a view of the kind of man you were. You wouldn’t have left her behind to come to me by means faster than you could travel—”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand…”

  “You may have heard it called teleportation. There are other names. But we could not have brought Jo that way, so it had to be as it was. But all this is beside the point. You have many questions to ask, and you won’t learn anything if we skip around at random. Listen and I will tell you what you want to know…”

  Eamus Brock leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. He looked like a tired old man, sleeping, but the “voice” that sounded in Jarvis’ brain was full of vigor and strong.

 
In Jarvis’ mind a picture of the Universe grew. He understood things he had not known, or had only guessed, before. Brock led him from the familiar concept that matter is not entity, but only energy in another form, to other concepts upon which Jarvis had never speculated. What was that which was to energy as energy was to matter? It was nothing less than thought. So that from thought was made energy and from energy, matter, and so the Universe was made.

  Thought was the primal drive behind the creation of the Universe, the matrix in which both energy and matter found being.

  Brock did not profess to know, or even to understand, what primal Mind was. It had had many names in the history of Mankind—the one most familiar to Jarvis was God.

  The very concept of mind was infinite, Brock told him. But infinity implied more than endlessness. It also meant numbers without end. If Mind could conceive of such a thing as a Universe without end, it could in the same effort conceive universes without number.

  Jarvis tried to visualize an infinite number of simultaneous universes, and failed. For every star in the sky, there was an infinite number of identical, or almost identical stars, in an infinite number of identical universes. He wrestled with the concept, thinking that all universes occupied the same place, but knowing they were not in the same space. His brain whirled dizzily.

  Brock simplified. Imagine the Universe of Earth and the Universe of Eloraspon, co-existing in separate spaces, each the same except for a thin differential in concept.

  What was the blind man trying to convey? Not universes simultaneous in space. Not universes simultaneous in Time. But universes simultaneous in concept!

  “I discovered Eloraspon the year I was fifteen,” Brock said. “When you were fifteen, you were in the House of Correction…for being a fool. But I have forgiven you that, and we shall speak of it no more. I was always blind, you see, and I was a Mag. I had the mind of Magnanthropus and, in my dark world, I had little else to do than learn to use it. I first reasoned out the probability of simultaneous universes. Once I had my theory, I attacked the problem both mathematically and conceptually. Where mathematics failed, my brand of conceptual reasoning went straight to the truth—and I literally thought my way through the division of concepts that separates Earth’s Universe from that of Eloraspon.

  “I had a freedom of movement it would be difficult for you, at this stage, to realize. And my capacity for discovery and learning was correspondingly great.

  “I was enchanted with Eloraspon. I made contacts—telepathically—with various of its people.

  “The planet, I learned, was slightly larger and warmer than Earth. The entire Elorasponian solar system, in fact, was an almost exact counterpart of our own.”

  “But Eloraspon has two moons!” Jarvis objected.

  “You mean there are two moons in the sky of Eloraspon,” Brock corrected. “One is the original satellite of Eloraspon—the other is the moon of Earth! Perhaps now you are getting an inkling of the disaster that overtook the Earth and the entire Solar System. You see—there has always been a certain instability in the Mind matrix involving the conceptual regions of Earth and Eloraspon. What happened was simply this: Eloraspon and its Solar System materialized into the terrestrial Universe—but partially, not completely.”

  Jarvis understood. Earth and Eloraspon now occupied the same space at the same time, and it was clear to him how this was possible. The thought of it took his breath away, and dread made his heart beat a swift tattoo.

  CHAPTER 17

  Once before in the ages of Earth, this same disaster had occurred, Brock told him. It was at that time that the moons of Earth and Eloraspon had separated from simultaneity. But in the case of the planets, the simultaneity had both times been absolute…and Eloraspon, larger than Earth, had encompassed the latter, its atoms materializing within the empty, inter-atomic spaces of the physical structure of Earth.

  “The planets are not exactly congruent,” Brock explained. “In a few isolated spots on the surface of Eloraspon, the surface of Earth shows through—such as your midwestern town and this isolated tip of Pike’s Peak. There are a few other areas hereabouts, some in Central America, a portion of Tibet, and so on. Before the disaster, I directed men and women of the Mag race to these areas—that was how you found yourself where you did when catastrophe struck. But only a few thousand were saved, and most of these are now here in the City of Brock. Within a few days, the last of them shall have come trickling in.”

  So there was no hope, Jarvis thought, of ever regaining Earth. That world was dead, buried with all it contained within the body of Eloraspon. What few of Earth’s billions that still lived owed their lives to Eamus Brock.

  “At the time,” Brock said, “that the moons of Earth and Eloraspon were jarred out of simultaneity, everything that lived upon the Earth was destroyed. And everything that lived had been the monstrous lizards, the tree ferns, and the trilobites that had inhabited the Earth in prehistoric times. But the situation was different on Eloraspon; for here a race of remarkable beings had developed. They were humanoid. They were similar in many ways to the race of Man I call Magnanthropus—Man the Mighty.”

  Eloraspon, then, was Earth in simultaneity, but it was not Earth. Its destiny had been predicated on different circumstances than Earth’s, circumstances that lay on the other side of a thin veil of thought, hence had to differ.

  When the first germs of life had begun to swim in the tropic seas of Earth, in remote, ante-Devonian times, Eloraspon was already populated with a race of intelligent beings who called themselves the Mighty. The path of the race had been similar to that of Man—rising through stages of social and technological advance to a high state of civilization, but incredibly faster than Mankind’s development.

  What was it that distinguished Man, Brock asked, from the beast that fathered him? What was it, more than a reasoning brain, that differentiated Man from the animals? Jarvis suggested that a soul made the difference, but Brock pointed out that the Mighty had proved that even things have souls…afterlife in the conceptual thought-matrix of the universes.

  Man was an unfinished animal. That was his difference. An animal is born into the world complete, ready to cope with its environment—furred, clawed, an elemental machine.

  But Man came into the world not equipped with anything with which to fend for himself. His jaw was puny, his teeth useless. He had no talons to rend his prey, the grip of his hands was weak. He was slow on his feet and he had not the stamina of the beast. Man was a frail weakling, equipped with only a mind.

  With the power of his mind, Mankind had thought his way to mastership of the world. The environment into which he had been born was one that would not accept him. So Man made his own environment. He had no claws, so he learned the use of stone and club. He had no fur, so he clothed himself in the skins of the beasts he slew. When animals fled the fire set in the forest by lightning, Man approached it and made use of it.

  Man did not adapt to environment. He adapted environment to himself. Therefore he survived. The same series of evolutionary events took place on both Earth and Eloraspon, each in its own time.

  In the beginning, Man had been born of beast because of a slight shift in the parent-genes. More recently, a similar shift had occurred—and a new race had been borne of Mankind, the race of Magnanthropus, Man the Mighty!

  Magnanthropus was not new, geologically speaking. He had occurred many times. Brock claimed to have discovered sporadic incursions of the Mag race even in early historic times, perhaps even in prehistoric times. To him, every great man in the history of the race was suspect of having been in truth a Mag.

  But the rate of emergence of the Mag race had recently been accelerated—possibly by the effects of atomic bomb tests on human genes during the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century Earth would ever know.

  The new race differed from homo sa
piens only in relative mental, ability—the difference was wholly conceptual. Man’s brain from the beginning had been capable of reasoning, imagining, and creating. Wholly specialized man of the pushbutton age had no longer needed such a brain. Mankind had at last created an environment wholly and perfectly adapted to himself.

  Magnanthropus, on the other hand, was characterized by his inability to fit into the mold created by homo sapiens. Jarvis had proved that point to his own sorrow.

  The Mag mind, however, was not limited to the environment of its predecessors. It could and would create its own environment, which was typified here in the City of Brock on Eloraspon. Man’s swansong had been inexorably begun, when disaster had forestalled the event of his dissolution by natural means.

  “Under ordinary circumstances,” Brock said, “the Mag race might have taken hundreds of thousands of generations to realize its full potentiality. Perhaps, somewhere in the interwoven matrices of thought comprising the numberless universes, there is a spark of Intelligence that guides these destinies to a rightful conclusion. I like to believe that there is, and that God is guiding us right now along the perilous path we must tread.”

  The concept of peril delivered by Brock startled Jarvis. There was vehemence in the blind man’s thought—even dread.

  Brock shook himself, as if to disavow the thought.

  “But let me not digress. I meant to explain that Mankind measured its expansion upon a horizontal plane, instead of reaching upward. Man dissipated his genius and spread his intellect thin in mere acquisition of things. He left unborn within him the seed of greater things than any he had ever allowed to flourish. Man’s self-created environment was not worthy of him. He housed the gem of intellect in a cheap shell of chrome and plastic and developed a recognized ‘guilt feeling’—his subliminal recognition of his own shortcomings. He had substituted technology for culture, possession for civilization, and denied the values of humility and spiritual enlightenment. It was time, indeed, for Magnanthropus to dispossess him!