by Bob Shaw
Contact!
A thousand years of alien existence, a mind dedicated to the incredible proposition that association should be substituted for competition, a being which controlled vast forces, including the power to make all men think alike, a being which immediately identified Crowley as its enemy, and which was coming to …
Retreat!
“What’s happening?” Crowley felt his mouth go dry.
‘… principle of self-establishing circuitry has disproved the a priori or ‘wired-in knowledge’ theory concerning the human brain in favour of the tabula rasa or clean slate new brain,” Browne droned on pedantically. “In our present state the hitherto indefinable quality known as ‘will’ is translated into physical reality as a higher than normal proportion of molecular amplifiers, which is the only reason you are able to impress your dreamscapes on others. But this state of affairs depends …’
“Stop mouthing for a moment—didn’t you feel anything?”
“Of course not, because I too have gained control of my amplifiers and I’m withdrawing from this particular fantasy.”
“Fantasy?” Crowley looked down at the rifle, which promptly turned into a broom and then vanished. “I’m talking about the … real world. I … I … Something is happening out there, and I’m the only one who understands. I’ve got to speak to Philp or Urquhart immediately.”
Browne looked around him, almost regretfully, at the dissolving mountains and plains of the Kingdom of Tal. ‘Be careful,” he said with a strange gentleness, ‘you could be walking into a …’
Crowley lost contact with him as the complex electrical network which simulated his personality began establishing new circuits within the compliant matrix, recreating the channels of communication with the outside world.
A Hennessy on the human reality vector:
Urquhart fixed his gaze for a moment on the wooded hill and made up his mind to waste no more time—he would go there very soon, possibly tomorrow, or maybe the next day. He picked up a plastic reference copy of a computer programme from his desk and his eyes scanned the typed words.
“I still think the risk was too great, Bryan,” he said. “A being from interstellar space which was planning to destroy the Tank, then set up a puppet dictator to rule the world by thought control! And you actually fed this mush into the Tank on the general address system?”
“I did.” Philp smiled his dazzling smile.
“You told our clients they were in imminent danger of losing their lives?”
“That’s what I told them,” Philp said comfortably. “They didn’t believe me, of course. Bill Uvarov was on the current affairs query panel at the time and according to him it lit up like a Christmas tree in less than a second. I apologised to everyone and told them part of a spoof television show had been fed in by mistake. They took it all right—but I’ll be getting sarcastic comments for the next year.”
Urquhart set the programme down. “And the only one who was taken in was Colonel Crowley.”
“Well, in bionics and biology we use the term ’cocktail party effect’ to describe the brain’s ability to pick out a single voice from the hubbub of noise made by a large group all speaking at once—and Crowley hadn’t lost that facility. He was screening out all other communications, but when I tailored a fantasy especially for him he heard me immediately.
“All I had to do was concoct a dream which was even more attractive and stimulating for him than the one in which he was living. With his background and mental make-up he couldn’t resist the idea of saving the world from interstellar socialism.”
“And you’ll be able to hold him on station until after Losane’s general election?”
“Yes—now that we know what to expect. Dorman’s team has set up an inhibitory field which will stabilise the Colonel’s molecular amplifiers at a mean output and impair his ability to drift. He’ll get away eventually, but we’re fine for a year or so …’
Urquhart sighed contentedly and returned his gaze to the hill. “So we’ve nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not too sure about that—I think we’re going to have trouble with Browne. He now says Crowley’s fantasy world wasn’t such a bad place and battling his way out of it was the first taste of genuine involvement he’d had since he was Tanked. I heard him rambling on about deliberately staged contests of will to relieve the boredom. Computerised Olympics or something.”
“Nothing too alarming in that. In fact, he might have something.”
“There’s just one other thing,” Philp said, his eyes hidden behind blazing flakes of glass. “There are bound to be other elections in Losane, and—if I know Mason Crowley—when he eventually takes off into never-never land he’ll be saving the Earth from disaster every week, now that we’ve given him the idea.”
“So?”
“So how do we lure him back next time?”
The Happiest Day of Your Life
Jean Bannion held her youngest son close to her, and blinked to ease the sudden stinging in her eyes.
The eight-year-old nestled submissively into her shoulder. His forehead felt dry and cool, and his hair was filled with the smell of fresh air, reminding her of washing newly brought in from an outdoor line. She felt her lips begin to tremble.
“Look at her’, Doug Bannion said incredulously. ‘Beginning to sniff! What’d she be like if Philip was going to be away at school for years?” Looking over her as she knelt with the boy in her arms, he patted his wife on the head, looking professorial and amused. The two older boys smiled appreciatively.
“Mother is an emotional spendthrift,” said ten-year-old Boyd.
“She has a tendency towards spiritual self-immolation,” said eleven-year-old Theodore.
Jean glared at them helplessly, and they looked back at her with wise eyes full of the quality she had come to hate most since they had travelled the Royal Road—their damnable, twinkling kindness.
‘Boys!” Doug Bannion spoke sharply. “Show more respect for your mother.”
“Thanks,” Jean said without gratitude. She understood that Doug had not reprimanded his sons out of regard for her feelings, but to correct any incipient flaws which might mar their developing characters. Her arms tightened around Philip, and he began to move uneasily, reminding her that she might have been losing him in a few years anyway.
“Philip,” she whispered desperately into his cold-rimmed ear. “What did you see at the movie we went to yesterday?”
“Pinnochio.”
“Wasn’t it fun?”
“For God’s sake, Jean!” Doug Bannion separated them almost roughly. “Come on, Philip—we can’t have you being late on your one and only day at school.”
He took Philip’s hand and they walked away across the gleaming, slightly resilient floor of the Royal Road’s ice-green reception hall. Jean watched them go hand-in-hand to mingle with the groups of children and parents converging on the induction suite. Philip’s toes were trailing slightly in the way she knew so well, and she sensed—with a sudden pang of concern—that he was afraid of what lay ahead, but he did not look back at her.
“Well, there he goes,” ten-year-old Boyd said proudly. “I hope Dad brings him into the practice tomorrow—I could do with his help.”
“There’s more room in my office,” said eleven-year-old Theodore. ‘Besides, the new Fiduciary Obligations Act gets its final reading next week, and I’m going to be involved in a dozen compensation suits. So I need him more than you do.”
They both were junior partners in Doug Bannion’s law firm. Jean Bannion looked for a moment into the calm, wise faces of her children and felt afraid. She turned and walked blindly away from them, trying to prevent her features from contorting into a baby-mask of tears. All around her were groups of other parents—complacent, coolly triumphant—and the sight of them caused her control to slip even further.
Finally, she seized the only avenue of escape available. She ran into the Royal Road’s almost deserted exhibition ha
ll, where the academy’s proud history was told in glowing three-dimensional projections and bland, mechanical whispers.
The first display consisted of two groups of words; pale green letters shimmering in the air against a background of midnight blue. As the slideway carried her past them in silence, Jean read:
“Learning by study must be won;
’twas ne’er entailed from sire to son.”
Gay
“If only Gay could see us now.”
Martinelli
The next display unit showed a solid portrait of Edward Martinelli, founder of the academy and head of the scientific research team which had perfected the cortical manipulation complex. A recording of Martinelli’s own voice, made a few months before his death, began to drone in Jean’s ear with the shocking intimacy of accurately beamed sound.
“Ever since knowledge became the principal weapon in Man’s armoury, his chief ally in his battle for survival, men have sought ways to accelerate the learning process. By the middle of the Twentieth Century, the complexity of the human condition had reached the point at which members of the professional classes were required to spend a full third of their useful lives in the unproductive data-absorption phase….”
Jean’s attention wandered from the carefully modulated words—she had heard the recording twice before and its emotionless technicalities would never have any meaning for her. The complementary means the academy employed—multi-level hypnosis, psycho-neuro drugs, electron modification of the protein pathways in the brain, multiple recordings—were unimportant to her compared with the end result.
And the result was that any child, provided he had the required level of intelligence, could have all the formal knowledge—which would have been gained in ten years of conventional high school and university—implanted in his mind in a little over two hours.
To be eligible, the child had to have an IQ of not less than 140 and a family which could afford to pay, in one lump sum, an amount roughly equal to what the ten years of traditional education would have cost. This was why the faces of the parents in the reception hall had been taut with pride. This was why even Doug Bannion—who made a profession of being phlegmatic—had been looking about him with the hard, bright eyes of one who has found fulfilment.
He had fathered three flawless sons, each with an intelligence quotient in the genius class, and had successfully steered them through the selection procedures which barred the Royal Road to so many. Few men had achieved as much; few women had had the honour of sharing such an achievement….
But why, Jean wondered, did it have to happen to me? To my children? Or why couldn’t I have had a mind like Doug’s? So that the Royal Road would bring the boys closer to me, instead of …
As the slidewalk carried her on its silent rounds, the animated displays whispered persuasively of the Royal Road’s superiority to the old, prolonged, criminally wasteful system of education. They told her of young Philip’s fantastic good luck in being born at the precise moment of time in which, supported on a pinnacle of human technology, he could earn an honours law degree in two brief hours.
But, locked up tight in her prison of despair, Jean heard nothing.
Immediately the graduation ceremony was over, Jean excused herself from Doug and the two older boys. Before they could protest, she hurried out of the auditorium and went back to the car. The sun-baked plastic of the rear seat felt uncomfortably hot through the thin material of her dress.
She lit a cigarette and sat staring across the arrayed, shimmering curvatures of the other cars until Doug and the three boys arrived. Doug slid into the driver’s seat and the boys got in beside him, laughing and struggling. Sitting in the back, Jean felt shut off from her family. She was unable to take her gaze away from Philip’s neat, burnished head. There was no outward sign of the changes that had been wrought in his brain—he looked like any other normal, healthy eight-year-old boy….
“Philip!” She blurted his name instinctively.
“What is it, Mother?” He turned his head and, hearing the emotion in her voice, Theodore and Boyd looked around as well. Three pink, almost-identical faces regarded her with calm curiosity.
“Nothing. I …’ Jean’s throat closed painfully, choking off the words.
“Jean!” Doug Bannion’s voice was harsh with exasperation as he hunched over the steering wheel. His knuckles glowed through the skin, the colour of old ivory.
“It’s all right, Dad,” ten-year-old Boyd said. “For most women, the severing of the psychological umbilical cord is a decidedly traumatic experience.”
“Don’t worry, mother,” Philip said. He patted Jean on the shoulder in an oddly adult gesture.
She brushed his hand away while the tears began to spill hotly down her cheeks, and this time there was no stopping them, for she knew—without looking at him—that the eyes of her eight-year-old son would be wise, and kind, and old.
The Weapons of Isher II
People sometimes ask how, as a relatively young man, I ever became managing editor of a planet-wide news service.
Usually I tell them the expected tale of determination, industry, dedication—and keep the real reason to myself. When it’s time to retire from the business I’ll write the whole thing up in my memoirs, but just at the moment it could make me seem pretty foolish if people learned that I got started on the road to the top because somebody took a shot at my grandfather’s mechanical duck.
The marksman who did it was pretty famous, in fact, probably the most famous Gun ever to stray into our strictly non-Duello sector of the galaxy, but the story could make me look ridiculous just the same.
It began one week when I was feeling bad about the way the job was going and decided to have a few days away from it all down at my family’s farm. Up until that time I had been running what amounted to a one-man show, gathering news for TV and sound transmissions covering half the continent. “Half the continent’ sounds good, but on a planet like Isher II—which has been described as a spherical paddy field—it meant that I was reaching about as many people as did any fair-sized parish magazine back on Earth. Still, I enjoyed the work, was collecting the full Galactic Union of Journalists rate, and had every expectation of landing an even better job in an area covering the more populous exporting centres.
Until Afton Reynolds showed up, that is.
Reynolds had been brought in from a mining world thirty parsecs away to take over when the editor for my area, Daddy Timmins, decided to retire while he still had strength to flick a fishing rod. Timmins had been letting me run the office single-handed for a couple of years and with a bit more seniority I might have been offered his job. Afton Reynolds, however, was a pusher on his way up, and the first thing he began to push on Isher II was me. Within a month of his arrival I had covered ten thousand miles on dead-end assignments, burned out my eyes on “Vital research projects’, and was—I suspect—twice reported to head office for passive resistance. To cap everything, thanks to Reynolds’ direction of my work and blue pencilling of the shaky stories I did collect, I clocked up precisely twelve seconds air time, and even that was on Friendly Night Owl’s Wee Small Hours news roundup—sound only.
As I said, I decided to go back home for a week or two.
By pushing my skimmer hard I made the three-hundred-mile trip from Wadhurst to the homestead in a round hundred minutes. I cut lift and let the skimmer nestle down into mud near the houses, then I realised something was wrong. My grandfather, my father, my two brothers and three of their children were grouped in the patio, and it wasn’t a welcoming party because nobody even noticed my arrival. They seemed to be arguing.
I got out of the skimmer, switched on my weather screen to keep off the fine drizzle we usually have on Isher II and sloshed towards the houses. Finally I was seen by the children, greeted hastily all round, then given what I thought for one wild second to be the news story of the century.
“There’s been a shooting,” grandfather Vogt said angrily.
“A murder! Somebody’ll pay for this!”
He was so worked up that I nearly did believe for a moment that somebody had thought out a way to beat the electro-neuro safety catch—the built-in electronic conscience which prevents any weapon on our non-Duello world being turned on a human being, except in self-defence. Not that it made much difference to anybody—most people on Isher II hadn’t even seen a gun since the old days when the planet was being opened up.
“Just a moment, Grandad. Slow down. Who got shot? Has anybody called for a doctor?”
The three children laughed uproariously at my questions, and old Vogt gave me a withering look before splashing away into the house. It was only then I noticed he was carrying something under his arm.
“It’s his duck,” brother Jeff explained as we followed the others. “The new tenant of the old Ericsson farm put a bullet through it when it was out for a test flight.”