Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “And one more indulgence. A point on your desk—somewhere with enough area to support that paperweight.”

  “Damn it, no! Go get those cards and we’ll settle the matter in hand. I fail to see—”

  Don’t let him rant. Find your own spot and ask him if it suits him.

  Like a man in a hailstorm, Roan advanced through the booming and shrieking syllables and pointed.

  “Will this do?” he shouted, just loud enough to be heard over the storm.

  The Private stopped just then and Roan’s voice was like an airfoil crashing the sound barrier. Both men recoiled violently; to his own astonishment, Roan found that he recovered first. The old man was still sunk deep in his chair, the base of the beard quivering. In Roan’s ear, Granny cackled.

  Roan grasped the two horns protruding from one of the spheres on his machine and turned them so that the beam from each rested on the center of the paperweight.

  “The production model would have other means of aiming,” he explained as he worked. “This is for demonstration only.” The other two beams were aimed at the indicated spot on the desk. “Ready now, Private.”

  “For what?” snarled the Private, then grunted as if he had swallowed a triple ration of roughage, for when Roan touched the control, there was a soft click and the paperweight appeared on the desk, exactly in the small pool of light from the beams. He put out a hand, hesitated, dropped back in his chair. “Again.”

  Roan threw the lever the other way. The paperweight lay quietly on the carpet. “For years, I have used every available minute on the research needed for this device and in building it. If the Private feels that the machine is of no use to this firm and the industry, that the time spent on it was wasted or stolen, then I shall be satisfied with his previously suggested—”

  “Now come off it, son,” said the beard. He rose and approached Roan, but kept his eyes glued on the machine in fascination. “You know the old man was just trying to throw a scare into you.”

  Got ’im!

  “Could a large model be built?”

  “Larger than a transplat,” Roan said.

  “Have you built any larger than this?”

  Tell him yes!

  “Yes, Private.”

  Slowly, the Private’s eyes left the machine and traveled to Roan’s face. Roan would have liked to retreat, but his back was against the wooden case.

  Watch out!

  “You feel this could be better than the transplat?”

  Yes. Tell ’im yes—even if it hurts, tell im!

  Roan found he could not speak. He tremblingly nodded his head.

  “Hmm.” The Private walked around the machine and back, though there was nothing to be seen. “Tell me,” he said gently, “is this machine built on the same principle as the transplat?”

  Sweat broke out on Roan’s brow. He wished he could wipe it off, but to raise his glove would have been a rudeness. He let it trickle.

  “No,” he whispered.

  “You are telling me that this is a new kind of machine, better than the transplat!” When Roan neither moved nor spoke, the Private suddenly shouted, “Liar!”

  Roan, white, dry-mouthed, with a great effort brought his eyes up to meet those of the livid Private. “A transplat can’t do that,” he said, nodding to the paperweight.

  “You’ve got to be lying! If there was such a machine as this, you couldn’t build it. You couldn’t even conceive it! Where did you get it?”

  Say you built it—quick!

  “I built it,” Roan breathed.

  “I can’t understand it,” mumbled the Private.

  Roan had never seen him so distressed and his curiosity got the better of his own tension. “What is it that you want me to say, Private?”

  The Private swung around, face to face with his son. “You’re holding something back. What is it?”

  This is it! Now hold tight, honey. Tell him it works by PK.

  Roan shook his head and set his lips, and the Private roared at him. “Are you refusing to answer me?”

  Tell him, tell him about the PK. Tell him!

  Roan had never felt so torn apart. There had to be more to this than he knew about. What was pushing him? What tied his tongue, knotted his stomach, swelled his throat?

  Trust me, Roan. Trust me, no matter what.

  It broke him. He choked out, “This is only a direction-finder. It works by psychokinetic energy.”

  “By what? What?” The Private fairly bounced with eagerness.

  “It’s called PK. Mental power.”

  “Then it really isn’t a machine at all!”

  “Well—yes, you might say so. That’s my theory, anyway.” And where were the tied tongue, the aching throat? Gone!

  “And you believe in that psycho-stuff?”

  Roan found himself smiling. “It works.”

  “Why were you hiding it?”

  “Would you have believed in such a thing, Private?”

  “I confess I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, then—I wanted to get it finished and tested, that’s all.”

  “Then what?”

  Give it to him. I mean it—give it to him!

  “Why, it’s yours. Ours. The company’s. What else?”

  The dry sound was the slow rubbing of gloved hands together. The other, which only Roan heard, was Granny’s acid chuckle. And he didn’t even ask where the psychic operator was—notice? And he never will.

  The Private said, “Would you like to work with the Development Department on the thing?”

  Sure, honey. I’ll never let you down.

  “Fine,” Roan said.

  “You’ll never know—you can’t know what this really means,” said the Private. For a moment, Roan was sure he was going to clap him on the shoulder or some such unthinkable thing. “I can own up to a mistake. You should’ve been on the nuts-and-bolts end right from the start. Instead, I had you chasing inventories and consignments. Well, you’ve shown up the old man. From now on, your time’s your own. You just work on anything around here that amuses you.”

  “I couldn’t do that!”

  Yes, by God, you could! snapped the voice in his ear. And while he’s soft, hit him again. Get your own home.

  His own home! With one of those PK machines, he could go anywhere, anytime. He could take Val—and find Flower again!

  IX

  It was warm and windy and very dark. The village was asleep and only a handful of people sat around the great trestle table in the clearing. The stars watched them and the night-birds called.

  “To get grim about it,” said the old lady in a voice a good deal less than grim, “breaking up a culture isn’t something you can do on an afternoon off. You’ve got to know where it’s been and where it is, before you know where it’s going. That takes a good deal of time. Then you have to decide how much it needs changing and, after that, whether or not you were right when you decided. Then, it’s a good idea to know for sure—but for sure—that you don’t push it so far, it flops over some other gruesome way.”

  “But I was right all the same, wasn’t I?” Roan insisted.

  “Bless you, yes. You don’t know how right.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Some of it’ll hurt.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” said Flower, half-seriously. Roan took her hand in the dark, feeling, as always, the indescribable flood within him brought by the simple touch of living flesh.

  “Have to, honey,” said Granny. “Blisters’ll hurt him too, and his joints will ache at plowin’ time, but in the long run he’ll be all the better for it. Who’s there?” she called.

  A voice from the darkness answered, deep and happy, “Me, Granny. Prester.”

  “Hi, Granny,” said Val. They came into the dim, warm glow of the hurricane lamp guttering on the table. Val was wearing a very short sleeveless tunic, which looked as if a spider had spun it. She and Prester moved arm in arm like a single being. Looking at her face, Roan felt dazzled.
He squeezed Flower’s hand and found her smiling.

  “Sit down, kids. I want you to hear this, too. Roan, would you do something for me—something hard?”

  “What is it?”

  “Promise to shut up until I’ve finished, no matter what?”

  “That’s not hard.”

  “No, huh? All right, Flower, tell us all just exactly what psi powers you have.”

  Roan closed his eyes in delight, picturing again Flower’s appearance in his cubicle, her birdlike flitting about the gateway during his dream, the cup she had drawn out of thin air for him. She said, “None that I know of, Granny.”

  “What!” he exploded.

  Granny snapped, “You have promised to shut up!” To Flower, she went on, “And who’s got the most psi potential in the place, far as we know?”

  “Annie,” said Flower.

  “The fifteen-year-old I told you about,” Granny explained to Roan. “The one who can knock over a straight-edge. Shut up! Let me finish!”

  With a great effort, he subsided.

  “In a way, we’ve lied to you,” said Granny, “and, in a way, we haven’t. I once told you some of what I’ve been thinking of—the new race of people that has to be along some day, if we let it—the next step up. I believe in them, Roan; call that a dream if you like. And when you had your dream those two days, we made the dream come true for a little while. We worked that thing out like a play—I had you in the frame of that new machine of mine all the time.

  “It is a new machine, Roan, built on a new principle that the transplat boys never thought of. It’s just what I told you it was—a stationless matter transmitter—no central, no depots, no platforms. I used it on every psi incident you witnessed in those two days. Believe me?”

  “No!”

  “Val?”

  “I’d like to,” she said diffidently. “But I’ve always thought—”

  “There’s no use being tactful about this,” said Granny. “For the rest of your life, this is going to bother you, Roan, Val—and, later, a lot of other people we’ll bring in. You’ll rationalize it or you won’t, but you’ll never believe I have a new kind of machine. Shut up, Roan!

  “You two and the rest of your generation are the first group to get really efficient crèche conditioning. You don’t remember it, but ever since you were suckling babes, you’ve been forced into one or two basic convictions. Maybe we’ll find a way to pry ’em loose from you. One of these convictions is that the transplat is the absolute peak of human technology—that there’s only one way to make ’em and that there are only certain things they can do.

  “You got it more than Val did, Roan, because you males in the transplat families were the ones who might be expected to develop such a machine. That’s why, when this new one was built, women built it. Don’t fight so, son! We have it, whether you believe it or not. We always will have it from now on. I’m sorry—it hurts you even to hear about it and I know what you went through when you had to sell it to your father. You damn near choked to death!”

  Roan breathed heavily, but did not speak. Flower put her arm across his shoulders.

  “We had to do it to you, boy, we had to—you’ll see why,” said Granny, her old face pinched with worry and tenderness. “I’m coming to that part of it. Like I said, you don’t break up a culture just all at once, boom. I wanted to change it, not wreck it. Stasis is the end product of a lot of history. Human beings had clobbered themselves up so much for so long, they developed what you might call a racial phobia against insecurity. When they finally got the chance—the transplat—they locked themselves up tight with it. That isn’t what the transplat was for, originally. It was supposed to disperse humanity over the globe again, after centuries of huddling. Hah!

  “About the time they started deep conditioning in the crèches, walling each defenseless generation off from new thoughts, new places, new ways of life, a few of us started to fear for humanity. Stasis was the first human culture to try to make new ideas impossible. I think it might have been humanity’s first eternal culture. I really do. But I think it would also have been humanity’s worst one.

  “So along came Roan—the first of the deep-conditioned transplat executives, incapable of believing the service could be improved. There were—are—plenty more in other industries and we’re going after ’em now, but transplat is the keystone. Roan, believe it or not, you were a menace. You had to be stopped. We couldn’t have you heading the firm without introducing the new machine, yet if it weren’t introduced in your generation, it never would be.

  “Your father is the last weak link, the last with the kind of imperfect conditioning that would let him even consider an innovation—remember your suggestion for eliminating freight operators? Only he would be unconditioned just enough to put our new machine into Development before realizing that, once in use, every cubicle in the whole human structure will suddenly be open to the sky. And it’s all right—he can be trusted with it, because his ‘decency’ won’t let him abuse privacy. We’ll take care of that side of it!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about him,” said Roan miserably.

  “I’m sorry, boy. Does it do any good to tell you that subservience and blind respect for your father are conditioned, too? I wish I could help you—you’ll have that particular sore toe tramped on all your life. Anyway, enter Roan, just when we’ve perfected the new machine. There would have been no problem if we could have broken your conditioning against it, but the only alternatives seemed to be—either you’d see the machine operate and think you had lost your sanity, or you’d use your position in the firm to eliminate all trace of it.”

  He objected, “But you were wrong both ways.”

  “That’s because we discovered that the conditioning against any new transplat was against any new machine—any new device,” Granny replied. “They’d never thought of matter transmission by a method which was in no way a device!

  “Can you see now why your father was so upset when he was faced with you and your pilot model? One of the props of his decent little universe was that the conditioning would stick—that of all people on Earth, you’d be the last to even think of a new machine, let alone build one. And when at last you came out with that gobbledegook about psychic power, he recognized the rationalization for what it was and felt safe again. Stasis was secure.

  “I don’t mind telling you that you made us jump the gun a bit. Our initial plan was to recruit carefully, just the way we did you. Dreams—unexpected and high-powered appeals to everything humanity has that Stasis is crushing. Then when there were enough of us wilderness people, maybe the gates would open. But ultimately we’d win—we have all nature and God Himself on our side.

  “But you came along—what a candidate! You responded right down the line—so much that, if we’d given you your head, you’d have dynamited Stasis and probably yourself and us along with it! And you took to that psi idea the way you took to the steak we planted in your nutrient that day, testing for food preference before the dream sequence. All of a sudden, you wanted to plant our machine spang in the middle of Stasis! It was chancy, but—well, you’ve seen what happened.”

  “Can I talk now?” Roan asked uncomfortably.

  “Sure, boy.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you about the new machine—how it works, I mean. All you’ve done is given Stasis a more efficient machine. You can interfere with the new network, but you could do that anyway with the one you already had. So what’s the big advantage?”

  Granny chuckled. From a side pocket, she dug a white object and tossed it across the table. It left a powdery spoor as it rolled. “Know what that is?”

  “Chalk?” asked Val.

  “No, it isn’t,” Roan said. “It’s Lunar pumice. I’ve seen a lot of that stuff.”

  “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it,” said Granny, “though I’ll demonstrate any time you say—but I got that at 1430 this very afternoon—off the Moon, using only
the machine you saw in the lab.”

  “Off the Moon!”

  “Yup. That’s the advantage of the new machine. The transplat operates inside a spherical gravitic field, canceling matter at certain points and recreating it at others—a closed system. But the new machine operates on para-gravitic lines—straight lines of sub-spatial force which stretch from every mass in the Universe to every other. Mass canceled at one point on the line recurs at another point. Like the transplat, the new machine takes no time to cross any distance, because it doesn’t actually cover distance.

  “The range seems to be infinite—there’s a limitation on range-finding, but it’s a matter only of the distance between the two parts of the machine. I got the Moon easily with a forty-mile baseline. Put me a robot on the Moon and I can reach Mars. Set up a baseline between here and Mars and I can spit on Alpha Centauri. In other words, an open system.”

  They were silent as Roan raised his eyes and, for a dazzling moment, visualized the stars supporting a blazing network of lines stretching from each planet, each star, to all the others—a net that pulsed with the presence of a humanity unthinkably vast.

  Prester murmured, “Anybody want to buy a good spaceship?”

  “Why did you do it?” whispered Val, ever so softly, as if she were in a cathedral.

  “You mean why couldn’t I mind my own business and let the world happily dry up and blow away?” Granny chuckled. “I guess because I’ve always been too busy to sit still. No, I take that back. Say I did it because of my conscience.”

  “Conscience?”

  “It was Granny who built the first transplat,” Flower explained.

  “And you were telling her what could and couldn’t be done, Roan!” gasped Val.

  “I still say—” he objected in irritation, and then he began to laugh. “I once took a politeness-present to Granny. Knitting. Something for the old folk to do while they watch the sun sink.”

  They all laughed and Flower said, “Granny won’t knit.”