It worked out so neatly in Schwartz’s methodical mind. Since he did not want to die, he would have to leave the farm. If he stayed where he was, the Census would come, and with it, death.
Leave the farm, then. But where would he go?
There was the--what was it, a hospital?--in Chica. They had taken care of him before. And why? Because he had been a medical “case.” But wasn’t he still a case? And he could talk now; he could give them the symptoms, which he couldn’t before. He could even tell them about the Mind Touch.
Or did everyone have the Mind Touch? Was there any way he could tell?...None of the others had it. Not Arbin or Loa or Grew. He knew that. They had no way of telling where he was unless they saw or heard him. Why, he couldn’t beat Grew in chess if Grew could--
Wait, now, chess was a popular game. And it couldn’t be played if people had the Mind Touch. Not really.
So that made him a peculiarity--a psychological specimen. It might not be a particularly gay life, being a specimen, but it would keep him alive,
And suppose one considered the new possibility that had just arisen. Suppose he were not an amnesiac but a man who had stumbled through time. Why, then, in addition to the Mind Touch, he was a man from the past. He was a historical specimen, an archaeological specimen; they couldn’t kill him.
If they believed him.
Hmm, if they believed him.
That doctor would believe. He had needed a shave that morning Arbin took him to Chica. He remembered that very well. After that his hair never grew, so they must have done something to him. That meant that the doctor knew that he--he, Schwartz--had had hair on his face. Wouldn’t that be significant? Grew and Arbin never shaved. Grew had once told him that only animals had hair on their face.
So he had to get to the doctor.
What was his name? Shekt?...Shekt, that was right.
But he knew so little of this horrible world. To leave by night or cross-country would have entangled him in mysteries, would have plunged him into radioactive danger pockets of which he knew nothing. So, with the boldness of one with no choice, he struck out upon the highway in the early afternoon.
They wouldn’t be expecting him back before suppertime, and by that time he would be well away. They would have no Mind Touch to miss.
For the first half hour he experienced a feeling of elation, the first such sensation he had had since all this had started. He was finally doing something; he was making an attempt to fight back at his environment. Something with a purpose, and not mere unreasoning flight as that time in Chica.
Ah, for an old man he wasn’t bad. He’d show them.
And then he stopped--He stopped in the middle of the highway, because something obtruded itself upon his notice, something he had forgotten.
There was the strange Mind Touch, the unknown Mind Touch; the one he had detected first when he had tried to reach the shining horizon and had been stopped by Arbin; the one that had been watching from the Ministerial Ground.
It was with him now--behind him and watching.
He listened closely--or, at least, he did that which was the equivalent of listening with regard to the Mind Touch. It came no closer, but it was fastened upon himself. It had within it watchfulness and enmity, but not desperation.
Other things became clear. The follower must not lose sight of him, and the follower was armed.
Cautiously, almost automatically, Schwartz turned, picking apart the horizon with eager eyes.
And the Mind Touch changed instantly.
It became doubtful and cautious, dubious as to its own safety, and the success of its own project, whatever that was. The fact of the follower’s weapons became more prominent, as though he were speculating upon using it if trapped.
Schwartz knew that he himself was unarmed and helpless. He knew that the follower would kill him rather than allow him to get out of sight; kill him at the first false move....And he saw no one.
So Schwartz walked on, knowing that his follower remained close enough to kill him. His back was stiff in the anticipation of he knew not what. How does death feel? ...How does death feel?...The thought jostled him in time to his steps, jounced in his mind, jiggled in his subconscious, until it went nearly past endurance.
He held onto the follower’s Mind Touch as the one salvation. He would detect that instant’s increase in tension that would mean that a weapon was being leveled, a trigger being pulled, a contact being closed. At that instant he would drop, he would run
But why? If it were the Sixty, why not kill him out of hand?
The time-slip theory was fading out in his mind; amnesia again. He was a criminal, perhaps-a dangerous man, who must be watched. Maybe he had once been a high official, who could not be simply killed but must be tried. Perhaps his amnesia was the method used by his unconscious to escape the realization of some tremendous guilt.
And so now he was walking down an empty highway toward a doubtful destination, with death walking at his back.
It was growing dark, and the wind had a dying chill to it. As usual, it didn’t seem right. Schwartz judged it to be December, and certainly sunset at four-thirty was right for it, but the wind’s chill was not the iciness of a midwestern winter.
Schwartz had long decided that the reason for the prevalent mildness was that the planet (Earth?) did not depend on the sun entirely for its heat. The radioactive soil itself gave off heat, small by the square foot but huge by the million square miles.
And in the darkness the follower’s Mind Touch grew nearer. Still attentive, and keyed up to a gamble. In the darkness, following was harder. He had followed him that first night--toward the shiningness. Was he afraid to take the risk again?
“Hey! Hey, fella--”
It was a nasal, high-pitched voice. Schwartz froze.
Slowly, in one piece, he turned around. The small figure coming up to him waved its hand, but in the sunless time of day he could not make it out clearly. It approached, unhurrying. He waited.
“Hey, there. Glad to see you. It ain’t much fun beating it along the road without company. Mind if I go along with you?”
“Hello,” said Schwartz dully. It was the correct Mind Touch. It was the follower. And the face was familiar. It belonged to that hazy time, in Chica.
And then the follower gave every sign of recognition. “Say, I know you. Sure!...Don’t you remember me?”
It was impossible for Schwartz to say whether under ordinary conditions, in another time, he might or might not have believed the other to be sincere. But now how could he avoid seeing that thin, ragged layer of synthetic recognition that overlay the deep currents of a Touch that told him--shouted at him--that the little man with the very sharp eyes had known him from the start? Knew him and had a death weapon ready for him, if necessary.
Schwartz shook his head.
“Sure,” insisted the little man. “It was in the department store. I got you away from that mob.” He seemed to double up in artificial laughter. “They thought you had Radiation Fever. You remember.”
Schwartz did, too, vaguely--dimly. A man like this, for a few minutes, and a crowd, which had first stopped them and then parted for them.
“Yes,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” It wasn’t very brilliant conversation, but Schwartz could do no better, and the little man did not seem to mind.
“My name’s Natter,” he said, shoving out a limp hand at the other. “I didn’t get a chance to talk much with you that first time--overlooked it in the crisis of things, you might say--but I’m sure glad to get a second chance....Let’s have the mitt.”
“I’m Schwartz.” And he touched palms with the other, briefly.
“How come you’re walking?” asked Natter. “Going somewheres?”
Schwartz shrugged. “Just walking.”
“A hiker, huh? That’s for me too. All year round I’m on the road--puts the old kibosh on the grummlies.”
“What?”
“You know. Makes you full of life. You get to breathe that air and feel the blood pumping, hey?...Walked too far this time. Hate to get back after night by my lonesome. Always glad for the company. Where you going?”
It was the second time Natter had asked the question, and the Mind Touch made plain the importance attached to it. Schwartz wondered how long he could evade the issue. There was a questing anxiety in the follower’s mind. And no lie would do. Schwartz didn’t know enough about this new world to lie.
He said, “I’m going to the hospital.”
“The hospital? What hospital?”
“I was there when I was in Chica.”
“You mean the Institute. Ain’t that it? That’s where I took you before, that time in the department store, I mean.” Anxiety and increasing tension.
“To Dr. Shekt,” said Schwartz. “Do you know him?”
“I’ve heard of him. He’s a big shot. Are you sick?”
“No, but I’m supposed to report once in a while.” Did that sound reasonable?
“Walking?” said Natter. “Doesn’t he send a car for you?” Apparently it did not seem reasonable.
Schwartz said nothing now--a clammy silence.
Natter, however, was buoyant. “Look here, chum, soon’s I pass a public Communi-wave, I’ll order a taxi from the city. It’ll meet us on the road.”
“A Communi-wave?”
“Sure. They have ‘em all along the highway. See, there’s one.”
He took a step away from Schwartz, and the latter found himself in a sudden shriek. “Stop! Don’t move.”
Natter stopped. There was a queer coldness in his expression as he turned. “What’s eating you, bud?”
Schwartz found the new language almost inadequate for the rapidity with which he hurled words at the other. “I’m tired of this acting. I know you, and I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to call somebody to tell them I’m going to Dr. Shekt. They’ll be ready for me in the city and they’ll send out a car to pick me up. And you’ll kill me if I try to get away.”
There was a frown on Natter’s face. He muttered, “You’re sure right on the gizzbo with that last--” It was not intended for Schwartz’s ears, nor did it reach them, but the words rested lightly on the very surface of his Mind Touch.
Aloud he said, “Mister, you’ve got me confused. You’re shoving a fast one right past my nose.” But he was making room, and his hand was drifting toward his hip.
And Schwartz lost control of himself. He waved his arms in a wild fury. “Leave me alone, why don’t you? What have I done to you?...Go away! Go away/”
He ended in a voice-cracked shriek, his forehead ridged with hate and fear of the creature who stalked him and whose mind was so alive with enmity. His own emotions heaved and thrust at the Mind Touch, attempting to evade the clingingness of it, rid itself of the breath of it
And it was gone. Suddenly and completely gone. There had been the momentary consciousness of overwhelming pain--not in himself, but in the other--then nothing. No Mind Touch. It had dropped away like the grip of a fist growing lax and dead.
Natter was a crumpled smear on the darkening highway. Schwartz crept toward him. Natter was a little man, easy to turn over. The look of agony on his face might have been stamped on, deeply, deeply. The lines remained, did not relax. Schwartz felt for the heartbeat and did not find it.
He straightened in a deluge of self-horror.
He had murdered a man!
And then a deluge of amazement--
Without touching him! He had killed this man just by hating him, by striking somehow at the Mind Touch.
What other powers did he have? He made a quick decision. He searched the other’s pockets and found money. Good! He could use that. Then he dragged the corpse into the fields and let the high grass cover it.
He walked on for two hours. No other Mind Touch disturbed him.
He slept in an open field that night, and the next morning, after two hours more, reached the outskirts of Chica.
Chica was only a village to Schwartz, and by comparison with the Chicago he remembered, the motion of the populace was still thin and sporadic. Even so, the Mind Touches were for the first time numerous. They amazed and confused him.
So many! Some drifting and diffuse; some pointed and intense. There were men who passed with their minds popping in tiny explosions; others with nothing inside their skulls but, perhaps, a gentle rumination on the breakfast just completed.
At first Schwartz turned and jumped with every Touch that passed, taking each as a personal contact; but within the hour he learned to ignore them.
He was hearing words now, even when “they were not actually mouthed. This was something new, and he found himself listening. They were thin, eery phrases, disconnected and wind-whipped; far off, far off...And with them, living, crawling emotion and other subtle things that cannot be described--so that all the world was a panorama of boiling life visible to himself only.
He found he could penetrate buildings as he walked, sending his mind in as though it were something he held on a leash, something that could suck its way into crannies invisible to the eye and bring out the bones of men’s inner thoughts.
It was before a huge stone-fronted building that he halted, and considered. They (whoever they were) were after him. He had killed the follower, but there must be others--the others that the follower had wanted to call. It might be best for him to make no move for a few days, and how to do that best?...A job?...”
He probed the building before which he had stopped. In there was a distant Mind Touch that to him might mean a job. They were looking for textile workers in there--and he had once been a tailor.
He stepped inside, where he was promptly ignored by everyone. He touched someone’s shoulder.
“Where do I see about a job, please?”
“Through that door!” The Mind Touch that reached him was full of annoyance and suspicion.
Through the door, and then a thin, point-chin fellow fired questions at him and fingered the classifying machine onto which he punched the answers.
Schwartz stammered his lies and truths with equal uncertainty.
But the personnel man began, at least, with a definite unconcern. The questions were fired rapidly: “Age?... Fifty-two? Hmm. State of health?...Married?...Experience?...Worked with textiles?...Well, what kind?...Thermoplastic? Elastomeric?...What do you mean, you think all kinds?...Whom did you work with last?... Spell his name....You’re not from Chica, are you?... Where are your papers?...You’ll have to bring them here if you want action taken....What’s your registration number?...”
Schwartz was backing away. He hadn’t foreseen this end when he had begun. And the Mind Touch of the man before him was changing. It had become suspicious to the point of single-trackedness, and cautious too. There was a surface layer of sweetness and good-fellowship that was so shallow. and which overlay animosity so thinly, as to De the most dangerous feature of all.
“I think,” said Schwartz nervously, “that I’m not suited for this job.”
“No, no, come back.” And the man beckoned at him. “We have something for you. Just let me look through the files a bit.” He was smiling, but his Mind Touch was clearer now and even more unfriendly.
He had punched a buzzer on his desk--
Schwartz, in a sudden panic, rushed for the door.
“Hold him!” cried the other instantly. dashing from behind his desk.
Schwartz struck at the Mind Touch, lashing out violently with his own mind, and he heard a groan behind him. He looked quickly over his shoulder. The personnel man was seated on the floor, face contorted and temples buried in his palms. Another man bent over him; then, at an urgent gesture, headed for Schwartz. Schwartz waited no more.
He was out on the street, fully aware now that there must be an alarm out for him with a complete description made public, and that the personnel man, at least, had recognized him.
He ran and doubled along the streets blindly. He attracted attention; more of it now, for the streets were filling up--suspicion, suspicion everywhere--suspicion because he ran--suspicion because his clothes were wrinkled and ill-fitting
In the multiplicity of Mind Touches and in the confusion of his own fear and despair. he could not identify the true enemies, the ones in which there was not only suspicion but certainty, and so he hadn’t the slightest warning of the neuronic whip.
There was only that awful pain, which descended like the whistle of a lash and remained like the crush of a rock. For seconds he coasted down the slope of that descent into agony before drifting into the black.
The grounds of the College of Ancients in Washenn are nothing if not sedate. Austerity is the key word, and there is something authentically grave about the clustered knots of novices taking their evening stroll among the trees of the Quadrangle--where none but Ancients might trespass. Occasionally the green-robed figure of a Senior Ancient might make its way across the lawn, receiving reverences graciously.
And, once in a long while, the High Minister himself might appear.
But not as now, at a half run, almost in a perspiration, disregarding the respectful raising of hands, oblivious to the cautious stares that followed him, the blank looks at one another, the slightly raised eyebrows.
He burst into the Legislative Hall by the private entrance and broke into an open run down the empty, step-ringing ramp. The door that he thundered at opened at the foot pressure of the one within, and the High Minister entered.
His Secretary scarcely looked up from behind his small, plain desk, where he hunched over a midget Field-shielded Televisor, listening intently and allowing his eyes to rove over a quire or so of official-looking communications that piled high before him.
The High Minister rapped sharply on the desk. “What is this? What is going on?”
The Secretary’s eyes flicked coldly at him, and the Televisor was put to one side. “Greetings, Your Excellency.”
“Greet me no greetings!” retorted the High Minister impatiently. “I want to know what is going on.”
“In a sentence, our man has escaped.”
“You mean the man who was treated by Shekt with the Synapsifier--the Outsider--the spy--the one on the farm outside Chica--”
It is uncertain how many qualifications the High Minister, in his anxiety, might have rattled out had not the Secretary interrupted with an indifferent “Exactly.”
“Why was I not informed? Why am I never informed?”
“Immediate action was necessary and you were engaged. I substituted, therefore, to the best of my ability.”
“Yes, you are careful about my engagements when you wish to do without me. Now, I’ll not have it. I will not permit myself to be by-passed and sidetracked. I will not--”
“We delay,” was the reply at ordinary speaking volume, and the High Minister’s half shout faded. He coughed, hovered uncertainly at further speech, then said mildly:
“What are the details, Balkis?”
“Scarcely any. After two months of patient waiting, with nothing to show for it, this man Schwartz left--was followed--and was lost.”
“How lost?”
“We are not sure, but there is a further fact. Our agent, Natter, missed three reporting periods last night. His alternates set out after him along the highway toward Chica and found him at dawn. He was in a ditch at the side of the highway--quite dead.”
The High Minister paled. “The Outsider had killed him?”
“Presumably, though we cannot say certainly. There were no visible signs of violence other than a look of agony on the dead face. There will be an autopsy, of course. He might have died of a stroke just at that inconvenient moment.”
“That would be an incredible coincidence.”
“So I think, “ was the cool response, “but if Schwartz killed him, it makes subsequent events puzzling. You see, Your Excellency, it seemed quite obvious from our previous analysis that Schwartz would make for Chica in order to see Shekt, and Natter was found dead on the highway between the Maren farm and Chica. We therefore sent out an alarm to that city three hours ago and the man was caught.”
“Schwartz?” incredulously.
“Certainly.”
“Why didn’t you say that immediately?”
Balkis shrugged. “Your Excellency, there is more important work to be done. I said that Schwartz was in our hands. Well, he was caught quickly and easily, and that fact does not seem to me to jibe very well with the death of Natter. How could he be at once so clever as to detect and kill Natter--a most capable man--and so stupid as to enter Chica the very next morning and openly enter a factory, without disguise, to find a job?’
“Is that what he did?”
“That’s what he did....There are two possible thoughts that this gives rise to, therefore. Either he has already transmitted such information as he has to Shekt or Arvardan, and has now let himself be caught in order to divert out attention, or else other agents are involved, whom we have not detected and whom he is now covering. In either case, we must not be overconfident.”
“I don’t know,” said the High Minister helplessly, his handsome face twisted into anxious lines. “It gets too deep for me.”
Balkis smiled with more than a trace of contempt and volunteered a statement. “You have an appointment four hours from now with Professor Bel Arvardan.”
“I have? Why? What am I to say to him? I don’t want to see him.”
“Relax. You must see him, Your Excellency. It seems obvious to me that since the date of commencement of his fictitious expedition is approaching, he must play out the game by asking you for permission to investigate the Forbidden Areas. Ennius warned us he would, and Ennius must know exactly the details of this comedy. I suppose that you are able to return him froth for froth in this matter and to counter pretense with pretense.”
The High Minister bowed his head. “Well, I shall try.”
Bel Arvardan arrived in good time, and was able to look about him. To a man well acquainted with the architectural triumphs of all the Galaxy, the College of Ancients could scarcely seem more than a brooding block of steel-ribbed granite, fashioned in an archaic style. To one who was an archaeologist as well, it might signify, in its gloomy, nearly savage austerity, the proper home of a gloomy, nearly savage way of life. It’s very primitiveness marked the turning back of eyes to the far past.
And Arvardan’s thoughts slipped away once again. His two-month tour about Earth’s western continents had proven not quite--amusing. That first day had ruined things. He found himself thinking back to that day at Chica.
He was instantly angry with himself for thinking about it again. She had been rude, egregiously ungrateful, a common Earthgirl. Why should he feel guilty? And yet...
Had he made allowances for her shock at discovering him to be an Outsider, like that officer who had insulted her and whose arrogant brutality he had repaid with a broken arm? After all, how could he know how much she had already suffered at the hands of Outsiders? And then to find out, like that, without any softening of the blow, that he was one.
If he had been more patient...Why had he broken it off so brutally? He didn’t even remember her name. It was Pola something. Strange! His memory was ordinarily better than that. Was it an unconscious effort to forget?
Well, that made sense. Forget! What was there to remember, anyway? An Earthgirl. A common Earthgirl.
She was a nurse in a hospital. Suppose he tried to locate the hospital. It had been just a vague blot in the night when he parted from her, but it must be in the neighborhood of that Foodomat.
He snatched at the thought and broke into a thousand angry fragments. Was he mad? What would he have gained? She was an Earthgirl. Pretty, sweet, somehow entic--
An Earthgirl!
The High Minister was entering, and Arvardan was glad. It meant relief from that day in Chica. But, deep in his mind, he knew that they would return. They--the thoughts, that is--always did.
As for the High Minister, his robe was new and glistening in its freshness. His forehead showed no trace of haste or doubt; perspiration might have been a stranger to it.
And the conversation was friendly, indeed. Arvardan was at pains to mention the well-wishings of some of the great men of the Empire to the people of Earth. The High Minister was as careful to express the thorough gratification that must be felt by all Earth at the generosity and enlightenment of the Imperial Government.
Arvardan expounded on the importance of archaeology to Imperial philosophy, on its contribution to the great conclusion that all humans of whatever world of the Galaxy were brothers--and the High Minister agreed blandly and pointed out that Earth had long held such to be the case and could only hope that the time would shortly come when the rest of the Galaxy might turn theory into practice.
Arvardan smiled very shortly at that and said, “It is for that very purpose, Your Excellency, that I have approached you. The differences between Earth and some of the Imperial Dominions neighboring it rest largely, perhaps, on differing ways of thinking. Still, a good deal of friction could be removed if it could be shown that Earthmen were not different, racially, from other Galactic citizens.”
“And how would you propose to do that, sir?”
“That is not easy to explain in a word. As Your Excellency may know, the two main currents of archaeological thinking are commonly called the Merger Theory and the Radiation Theory.”
“I am acquainted with a layman’s view of both.”
“Good. Now the Merger Theory, of course, involves the notion that the various types of humanity, evolving independently, have intermarried in the very early, scarcely documented days of primitive space travel. A conception like that is necessary to account for the fact that Humans are so alike one to the other now.”
“Yes,” commented the High Minister dryly, “and such a conception also involves the necessity of having several hundred, or thousand, separately evolved beings of a more or less human type so closely related chemically and biologically that intermarriage is possible.”
“True,” replied Arvardan with satisfaction. “You have put your finger on an impossibly weak point. Yet most archaeologists ignore it and adhere firmly to the Merger Theory, which would, of course, imply the possibility that in isolated portions of the Galaxy there might be subspecies of humanity who remained different, didn’t intermarry--”
“You mean Earth,” commented the High Minister.
“Earth is considered an example. The Radiation Theory, on the other hand--”
“Considers us all descendants of one planetary group of humans.”
“Exactly.”
“My people,” said the High Minister, “because of the evidence 0(our own history, and of certain writings which are sacred to us and cannot be exposed to the view of Outsiders, are of the belief that Earth itself is the original home of humanity.”.
“And so I believe as well, and I ask your help to prove this point to all the Galaxy.”
“You are optimistic. Just what is involved?”
“It is my conviction, Your Excellency, that many primitive artifacts and architectural remains may be located in those areas of your world which are now, unfortunately, masked by radioactivity. The age of the remains could be accurately calculated from the radioactive decay present and compared--”
But the High Minister was shaking his head.. “That is out of the question.”
“Why?” And Arvardan frowned in thorough amazement.
“For one thing,” said the High Minister, reasoning mildly, “what do you expect to accomplish? If you prove your point, even to the satisfaction of all the worlds, what does it matter that a million years ago all of you were Earthmen? After all, a billion years ago we were all apes, yet we do not admit present-day apes into the relationship.”
“Come, Your Excellency, the analogy is unreasonable.”
“Not at all, sir. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that Earthmen, in their long isolation, have so changed from their emigrating cousins, especially under the influence of radioactivity, as now to form a different race?”
Arvardan bit at his lower lip and answered reluctantly, “You argue well on the side of your enemy.”
“Because I ask myself what my enemy will say. So you will accomplish nothing, sir, except perhaps to further exacerbate the hatred against us.”
“But,” said Arvardan, “there is still the matter of the interests of pure science, the advance of knowledge--”
The High Minister nodded gravely. “I am truly sorry to have to stand in the way of that. I speak now, sir, as one gentleman of the Empire to another. I myself would cheerfully help you, but my people are an obstinate and stiff-necked race, who over centuries have withdrawn into themselves because of the--uh--lamentable attitudes toward them in parts of the Galaxy. They have certain taboos, certain fixed Customs--which even I could not afford to violate.”
“And the radioactive areas--”
“Are one of the most important taboos. Even if I were to grant you permission, and certainly my every impulse is to do so, it would merely provoke rioting and disturbances, which would not only endanger your life and those of the members of your expedition but would, in the long run, bring down upon Earth the disciplinary action of the Empire. I would betray my position and the trust of my people if I were to allow that.”
“But I am willing to take all reasonable precautions. If you wish to send observers with me--Or, of course, I can offer to consult you before publishing any results obtained.”
The High Minister said, “You tempt me, sir. It is an interesting project. But you overestimate my power, even if we leave the people themselves out of consideration. I am not an absolute ruler. In fact, my power is sharply limited--and all matters must be submitted to the consideration of the Society of Ancients before final decisions are possible.”
Arvardan shook his head. “This is most unfortunate. The Procurator warned me of the difficulties, yet I was hoping that--When can you consult your legislature, Your Excellency?”
“The Presidium of the Society of Ancients will meet three days hence. It is beyond my power to alter the agenda, so it may be a few days more before the matter can be discussed. Say a week.”
Arvardan nodded abstractedly. “Well, it will have to do....By the way, Your Excellency--”
“Yes?”
“There is a scientist upon your planet whom I would like to meet. A Dr. Shekt at Chica. Now, I’ve been in Chica, but left before I could do much and would like to repair the omission. Since I am sure he is a busy man, I wonder if I could trouble you for a letter of introduction?”
The High Minister had stiffened visibly and for several moments said nothing. Then, “May I ask what it is you want to see him about?”
“Certainly. I have read of an instrument he has developed, which he cans a Synapsifier, I believe. It concerns the neurochemistry of the brain and could have something very interesting to do with another project of mine. I have been doing some work on the classification of humanity into encephalographic groups--brain-current types, you understand.”.
“Umm...I have heard vaguely about the device. I seem to recall that it was not a success.”
“Well, maybe not, but he is an expert in the field and could probably be very helpful to me.”
“I see. In that case a letter of introduction will be prepared immediately for you. Of course there must be no mention of your intentions with regard to the Forbidden Areas.”
“That is understood, Your Excellency.” He rose. “I thank you for your courtesy and your kind attitude and can only hope that the Council of Ancients will be liberal with respect to my project.”
The Secretary entered after Arvardan left. His lips were spread in his characteristic cold, savage smile.
“Very good,” he said. “You handled yourself well, Your Excellency. “
The High Minister looked M him somberly and said, “What was that last about Shekt?”
“You are puzzled? Don’t be. All things are working out well. You noticed his lack of heat when you vetoed his project. Was that the response of a scientist whose heart is set upon something withdrawn from his grasp for no apparent reason? Or is it the response of one who is playing a part and is relieved to be well rid of it?”
“And again we have a queer coincidence. Schwartz escapes and makes his way to Chica. The very next day Arvardan appears here and, after a lukewarm rigmarole about his expedition, mentions casually that he is going to Chica to see Shekt.”
“But why mention it, Balkis? It seems foolhardy.”
“Because you are straightforward. Put yourself in his position. He imagines we suspect nothing. In such a case it is audacity that wins. He’s going to see Shekt. Good! He mentions it frankly. He even asks for a letter of introduction. What better guarantee of honest and innocent intentions can he present? And that brings up another point. Schwartz may have discovered that he was being watched. He may have killed Natter. But he has had no time to warn the others, or this comedy could not have played itself out in just this fashion.”
The Secretary’s eyes were half lidded as he spun his spider web. “There is no way of telling how long it will be before Schwartz’s absence becomes suspicious for them, but it is at least safe to allow sufficient time for Arvardan to meet Shekt. We’ll catch them together; there will be that much less they can deny.”
“How much time do we have?” demanded the High Minister.
Balkis looked up thoughtfully. “The schedule is fluid, and ever since we uncovered Shekt’s treason they’ve been on triple shift--and things are proceeding well. We await only the mathematical computations for the necessary orbits. What holds us up there is the inadequacy of our computers. Well...it may be only a matter of days now.”
“Days!” It was said in a tone queerly compounded of triumph and horror.
“Days!” repeated the Secretary. “But remember--one bomb even two seconds before zero time will be enough to stop us. And even afterward there will be a period of from one to six months when reprisals can be taken. So we are not yet entirely safe.”
Days! And then the most incredibly one-sided battle in the history of the Galaxy would be joined and Earth would attack all the Galaxy.
The High Minister’s hands were trembling gently.
Arvardan was seated in a stratoplane again. His thoughts were savage ones. There seemed no reason to believe that the High Minister and his psychopathic subject population would allow an official invasion of the radioactive areas. He was prepared for that. Somehow he wasn’t even sorry about it. He could have put up a better fight--if he had cared more.
As it was, by the Galaxy, there would be illegal entry. He would arm his ship and fight it out, if necessary. He would rather.
The bloody fools!
Who the devil did they think they were?
Yes, yes, he knew. They thought they were the original humans, the inhabitants of the planet
The worst of it was he knew that they were right.
Well...The ship was taking off. He felt himself sinking back into the soft cushion of his seat and knew that within the hour he’d be seeing Chica.
Not that he was eager to see Chica, he told himself, but the Synapsifier thing could be important, and there was no use being on Earth if he didn’t take advantage of it. He certainly never intended to return once he left.
Rathole!
Ennius was right.
This Dr. Shekt, however...He fingered his letter of introduction, heavy with official formality
And then he sat bolt upright--or tried to, struggling bitterly against the forces of inertia that were compressing him down into his seat as the Earth still sank away and the blue of the sky was deepened into a rich purple.
He remembered the girl’s name. It was Pola Shekt.
Now why had he forgotten? He felt angry and cheated. His mind was plotting against him, holding back the last name till it was too late.
But, deep underneath, something was rather glad of it.
In the two months that had elapsed from the day that Dr. Shekt’s Synapsifier had been used on Joseph Schwartz, the physicist had changed completely. Physically not so much, though perhaps he was a thought more stooped, a shade thinner. It was his manner--abstracted, fearful. He lived in an inner communion, withdrawn from even his closest colleagues, and from which he emerged with a reluctance that was plain to the blindest.
Only to Pola could he unburden himself, perhaps because she, too, had been strangely withdrawn those two months.
“They’re watching me,” he would say. “I feel it somehow. Do you know what the feeling is like?...There’s been a turnover in the Institute in the last month or so, and it’s the ones I like and feel I can trust that go....I never get a minute to myself. Always someone about. They won’t even let me write reports.”
And Pola would alternately sympathize with him and laugh at him, saying over and over again, “But what can they possibly have against you to do all this? Even if you did experiment on Schwartz, that’s not such a terrible crime. They’d have just called you on the carpet for it.”
But his face was yellow and thin as he muttered, “They won’t let me live. My Sixty is coming and they won’t let me live.”
“After all you’ve done. Nonsense!”
“I know too much, Pola, and they don’t trust me.”
“Know too much about what?”
He was tired that night, aching to remove the load. He told her. At first she wouldn’t believe him, and finally, when she did, she could only sit there, in cold horror.
Pola called up the State House the next day from a public Communi-wave at the other end of town. She spoke through a handkerchief and asked for Dr. Bel Arvardan.
He wasn’t there. They thought he might be in Bonair, six thousand miles away, but he hadn’t been following his scheduled itinerary very closely. Yes, they did expect him back in Chica eventually, but they didn’t know exactly when. Would she leave her name? They would try to find out.
She broke connections at that and leaned her soft cheek against the glass enclosure, grateful for the coolness thereof. Her eyes were deep with unshed tears and liquid with disappointment.
Fool. Fool!
He had helped her and she had sent him away in bitterness. He had risked the neuronic whip and worse to save the dignity of a little Earthgirl against an Outsider and she had turned on him anyway.
The hundred credits she had sent to the State House the morning after that incident had been returned without comment. She had wanted then to reach him and apologize, but she had been afraid. The State House was for Outsiders only, and how could she invade it? She had never even seen it, except from a distance.
And now--She’d have gone to the palace of the Procurator himself to--to--
Only he could help them now. He, an Outsider who could talk with Earthmen on a basis of equality. She had never guessed him to be an Outsider until he had told her. He was so tall and self-confident. He would know what to do.
And someone had to know, or it would mean the ruin of all the Galaxy.
Of course so many Outsiders deserved it--but did all of them? The women and children and sick and old? The kind and the good? The Arvardans? The ones who had never heard of Earth? And they were humans, after all. Such a horrible revenge would for all time drown whatever justice might be--no, was--in Earth’s cause in an endless sea of blood and rotting flesh.
And then, out of nowhere, came the call from Arvardan. Dr. Shekt shook his head. “I can’t tell him.”
“You must,” said Pola savagely.
“Here? It is impossible--it would mean ruin for both.”
“Then turn him away. I’ll take care of it.”
Her heart was singing wildly. It was only because of this chance to save so many countless myriads of humans, of course. She remembered his wide, white smile. She remembered how he had calmly forced a colonel of the Emperor’s own forces to turn and bow his head to her in apology--to her, an Earthgirl, who could stand there and forgive him.
Bel Arvardan could do anything!
Arvardan could, of course, know nothing of all this. He merely took Shekt’s attitude for what it seemed--an abrupt and odd rudeness, of a piece with everything else he had experienced on Earth.
He felt annoyed, there in the anteroom of the carefully lifeless office, quite obviously an unwelcome intruder.
He picked his words. “I would never have dreamed of imposing upon you to the extent of visiting you, Doctor, were it not that I was professionally interested in your Synapsifier. I have been informed that, unlike many Earthmen, you are not unfriendly to men of the Galaxy.”
It was apparently an unfortunate phrase, for Dr. Shekt jumped at it. “Now, whoever your informant is, he does wrong to impute any especial friendliness to strangers as such. I have no likes and dislikes. I am an Earthman--”
Arvardan’s lips compressed and he half turned.
“You understand, Dr. Arvardan “--the words were hurried and whispered--”I am sorry if I seem rude, but I really cannot--”
“I quite understand,” the archaeologist said coldly, though he did not understand at all. “Good day, sir.”
Dr. Shekt smiled feebly. “The pressure of my work--”
“I am very busy too, Dr. Shekt.”
He turned to the door, raging inwardly at all the tribe of Earthmen, feeling within him, involuntarily, some of the catchwords that were bandied so freely on his home world. The proverbs, for instance: “Politeness on Earth is like dryness in the ocean” or “An Earthman will give you anything as long as it costs nothing and is worth less.”
His arm had already broken the photoelectric beam that opened the front door when he heard the flurry of quick steps behind him and a hist of warning in his ear. A piece of paper was thrust in his hand, and when he turned there was only a flash of red as a figure disappeared.
He was in his rented ground car before he unraveled the paper in his hand. Words were scrawled upon it:
“Ask your way to the Great Playhouse at eight this evening. Make sure you are not followed.”
He frowned ferociously at it and read it over five times, then stared all over it, as though expecting invisible ink to bound into visibility. Involuntarily, he looked behind him. The street was empty. He half raised his hand to throw the silly scrap out of the window, hesitated, then stuffed it into his vest pocket.
Undoubtedly, if he had had one single thing to do that evening other than what the scrawl had suggested, that would have been the end of it, and, perhaps, of several trillions of people. But, as it turned out, he had nothing to do.
And, as it turned out, he wondered if the sender of the note had been
At eight o’clock he was making his slow way as part of a long line of ground cars along the serpentine way that apparently led to the Great Playhouse. He had asked only once, and the passerby questioned had stared suspiciously at him (apparently no Earthman was ever free of that all-pervasive suspicion) and had said curtly, “You just follow all the rest of the cars.”
It seemed that all the rest of the cars were indeed going to the Playhouse, for when he got there he found all being swallowed, one by one, into the gaping maw of the underground parking lot. He swung out of line and crawled past the Playhouse, waiting for he knew not what.
A slim figure dashed down from the pedestrian ramp and hung outside his window. He stared at it, startled, but it had the door open and was inside in a single gesture.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but--”
“Ssh!” The figure was hunched down low in the seat. “Were you followed?”
“Should I have been?”
“Don’t be funny. Go straight ahead. Turn when I tell you....My goodness, what are you waiting for?”
He knew the voice. A hood had shifted down to the shoulders, and light brown hair was showing. Dark eyes were gazing at him.
“You’d better move on,” she said softly.
He did, and for fifteen minutes, except for an occasional muffled but curt direction, she said nothing. He stole glances at her and thought, with a sudden pleasure, that she was even prettier than he had remembered her. Strange that now he felt no resentment.
They stopped--or Arvardan did, at the girl’s direction--at the corner of an unpeopled residential district. After a careful pause the girl motioned him ahead once more and they inched down a drive that ended in the gentle ramp of a private garage.
The door closed behind them and the light in the car was the only source of illumination.
And now Pola looked at him gravely and said, “Dr. Arvardan, I’m sorry that I had to do this in order to speak to you privately. I know that I have no standing in your good opinion to lose--”
“Don’t think that,” he said awkwardly.
“I must think that. I want you to believe that I fully realize how small and vicious I was that night. I don’t have the proper words to apologize--”
“Please don’t.” He glanced away from her. “I might have been a little more diplomatic.”
“Well...” Pola paused a few moments to regain a certain minimal composure. “It’s not what I’ve brought you here for. You’re the only Outsider I’ve ever met that could be kind and noble--and I need your help.”
A cold pang shot through Arvardan. Was this what it was all about? He packed that thought into a cold “Oh?”
And she cried, “No,” in return. “It is not for me, Dr. Arvardan. It is for all the Galaxy. Nothing for myself. Nothing!”
“What is it?”
“First--I don’t think anyone followed us, but if you hear any noise at all, would you--would you”--her eyes dropped--”put your arms about me, and--and--you know.”
He nodded his head and said dryly, “I believe I can improvise without any trouble. Is it necessary to wait for noise?”
Pola reddened. “Please don’t joke about it, or mistake my intentions. It would be the only way of avoiding suspicion of our real intentions. It is the one thing that would be convincing.”
Arvardan said softly, “Are things that serious?”
He looked at her curiously. She seemed so young and so soft. In a way he felt it to be unfair. Never in his life did he act unreasoningly. He took pride in that. He. was a man of strong emotions, but he fought them and beat them. And here, just because a girl seemed weak, he felt the unreasoning urge to protect her.
She said, “Things are that serious. I’m going to tell you something, and I know you won’t believe it at first. But I want you to try to believe it. I want you to make up your mind that I’m sincere. And most of all I want you to decide that you will stick with us after I tell you and see it through. Will you try? I’ll give you fifteen minutes, and if you think at the end of that time that I’m not worth trusting or bothering with, I’ll leave, and that’s the end of it.”
“Fifteen minutes?” His lips quirked in an involuntary smile, and he removed his wrist watch and put it before him. “ All right.”
She clasped her hands in her lap and looked firmly ahead through the windshield that afforded a view only of the blank wall of the garage ahead.
He watched her thoughtfully--the smooth, soft line of her chin, belying the firmness into which she was attempting to force it, the straight and thinly drawn nose, the peculiarly rich overtone to the complexion, so characteristic of Earth.
He caught the corner of her eye upon him. It was hastily withdrawn.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She turned to him and caught her underlip in two teeth. “I was watching you.”
“Yes, I could see that. Smudge on my nose?”
“No.” She smiled tinily, the first since she had entered his car. He was becoming absurdly conscious of little things about her: the way her hair seemed to hover and float gently each time she shook her head. “It’s just that I’ve been wondering ever since--that night--why you don’t wear that lead clothing, if you’re an Outsider. That’s what fooled me. Outsiders generally look like sacks of potatoes.”
“And I don’t?”
“Oh no”--and there was a sudden tinge of enthusiasm in her voice--”you look--you look quite like an ancient marble statue, except that you’re alive and warm....I’m sorry. I’m being impertinent.”
“You mean you think that it’s my opinion you’re an Earthgirl who doesn’t know your place. You’ll have to stop thinking that of me, or we can’t be friendly....I don’t believe in the radioactivity superstition. I’ve measured the atmospheric radioactivity of Earth and I’ve conducted laboratory experiments on animals. I’m quite convinced that under ordinary circumstances the radiations won’t hurt me. I’ve been here two months and I don’t feel sick yet. My hair isn’t falling out”--he pulled at it--”my stomach isn’t in knots. And I doubt that my fertility is being endangered, though I will admit to taking slight precautions in that respect. But lead-impregnated shorts, you see, don’t show.”
He said that gravely, and she was smiling again. “You’re slightly mad, I think,” she said.
“Really? You’d be surprised how many very intelligent and famous archaeologists have said that--and in long speeches, too.”
And she said suddenly, “Will you listen to me now? The fifteen minutes are up.”
“What do you think?”
“Why, that you might be. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t still be sitting here. Not after what I’ve done.”
He said softly, “Are you under the impression that I have to force myself very hard to sit here next to you? If you do, you’re wrong....Do you know, Pola, I’ve never seen, I really believe I’ve never seen, a girl quite as beautiful as yourself.”
She looked up quickly, with fright in her eyes. “Please don’t. I’m not trying for that. Don’t you believe me?”
“Yes, I do, Pola. Tell me whatever it is you want to. I’ll believe it and I’ll help you.” He believed himself, implicitly. At the moment Arvardan would cheerfully have undertaken to unseat the Emperor. He had never been in love before, and at that point he ground his thoughts to a halt. He had not used that word before.
Love? With an Earthgirl?
“You’ve seen my father, Dr. Arvardan?”
“Dr. Shekt is your father?...Please call me Bel. I’ll call you Pola.”
“If you want me to, I’ll try. I suppose you were pretty angry with him.”
“He wasn’t very polite.”
“He couldn’t be. He’s being watched. In fact, he and I arranged in advance that he was to get rid of you and I was to see you here. This is our house, you know.... You see”--her voice dropped to a tight whisper--”Earth is going to revolt.”
Arvardan couldn’t resist a moment of amusement.
“No!” he said, opening his eyes wide. “All of it?”
But Pola flared into instant fury. “Don’t laugh at me. You said you would listen and believe me. Earth is going to revolt, and it is serious, because Earth can destroy all the Empire.”
“Earth can do that?” Arvardan struggled successfully against a burst of laughter. He said gently, “Pola, how well do you know your Galactography?”
“As well as anybody, teacher, and what has that to do with it, anyway?”
“It has this to do with it. The Galaxy has a volume of several million cubic light-years. It contains two hundred million inhabited planets and an approximate population of five hundred quadrillion people. Right?”
“I suppose so, if you say so.”
“It is, believe me. Now Earth is one planet, with a population of twenty millions, and no resources besides. In other words, there are twenty-five billion Galactic citizens for every single Earthman. Now what harm can Earth do against odds of twenty-five billion to one?”
For a moment the girl seemed to sink into doubt, then she emerged. “Bel, “ she said firmly, “I can’t answer that, but my father can. He has not told me the crucial details. because he claims that that would endanger my life. But he will now, if you come with me. He’s told me that Earth knows a way by which it can wipe out all life outside Earth, and he must be right. He’s always been right before.”
Her cheeks were pink with earnestness, and Arvardan longed to touch them. (Had he ever before touched her and felt horrified at it? What was happening to him?)
“Is it after ten?” asked Pola.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Then he should be upstairs now--if they haven’t caught him.” She looked about with an involuntary shudder. “We can get into the house directly from the garage now. and if you’ll come with me--”
She had her hand on the knob that controlled the car door, when she froze. Her voice was a husky whisper: “There’s someone coming...Oh, quick--”
The rest was smothered. It was anything but difficult for Arvardan to remember her original injunction. His arms swept about her with an easy motion, and, in an instant, she was warm and soft against him. Her lips trembled upon his and were limitless seas of sweetness...
For about ten seconds he swiveled his eyes to their extremes in an effort to see that first crack of light or hear that first footstep, but then he was drowned and swept under by the excitement of it all. Blinded by stars, deafened by his own heartbeat.
Her lips left his, but he sought them again, frankly, and found them. His arms tightened, and she melted within them until her own heartbeat was shaking him in time to his own.
It was quite a while before they broke apart, and for a moment they rested, cheek against cheek.
Arvardan had never been in love before, and this time he did not start at the word.
What of it? Earthgirl or not, the Galaxy could not produce her equal.
He said, with a dreamy pleasure, “It must have been only a traffic noise.”
“It wasn’t,” she whispered. “I didn’t hear any noise.”
He held her at arm’s distance, but her eyes did not falter. “You devil. Are you serious?”
Her eyes sparkled. “I wanted you to kiss me. I’m not sorry.”
“Do you think I am? Kiss me again, then, for no reason but that I want to this time.”
Another long, long moment and she was suddenly away from him, arranging her hair and adjusting the collar of her dress with prim and precise gestures. “I think we had better go into the house now. Put out the car light. I’ve got a pencil flash.”
He stepped out of the car after her, and in the new darkness she was the vaguest shadow in the little pockmark of light that came from her pencil flash.
She said, “You’d better hold my hand. There’s a flight of stairs we must go up.”
His voice was a whisper behind her. “I love you, Pola.” It came out so easily--and it sounded so right. He said it again. “I love you, Pola.”
She said softly, “You hardly know me.”
“No. All my life. I swear! All my life. Pola, for two months I’ve been thinking and dreaming of you. I swear it.”
“I am an Earthgirl, sir.”
“Then I will be an Earthman. Try me.”
He stopped her and bent her hand up gently until the pocket flash rested upon her flushed, tear-marked face. “Why are you crying?”
“Because when my father tells you what he knows, you’ll know that you cannot love an Earthgirl.”
“Try me on that too.”
Arvardan and Shekt met in a back room on the second story of the house, with the windows carefully polarized to complete opaqueness. Pola was downstairs, alert and sharp-eyed in the armchair from which she watched the dark and empty street.
Shekt’s stooped figure wore somehow an air different from that which Arvardan had observed some ten hours previously. The physicist’s face was still haggard, and infinitely weary, but where previously it had seemed uncertain and timorous, it now bore an almost desperate defiance.
“Dr. Arvardan,” he said, and his voice was firm, “I must apologize for my treatment of you in the morning. I had hoped you would understand--”
“I must admit I didn’t, sir, but I believe I do now.”
Shekt seated himself at the table and gestured toward the bottle of wine. Arvardan waved his hand in a deprecating motion. “If you don’t mind, I’ll have some of the fruit instead....What is this? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”
“It’s a kind of orange,” said Shekt. “I don’t believe it grows outside Earth. The rind comes off easily.” He demonstrated, and Arvardan, after sniffing at it curiously, sank his teeth into the winy pulp. He came up with an exclamation.
“Why, this is delightful, Dr. Shekt! Has Earth ever tried to export these objects?”
“The Ancients,” said the biophysicist grimly, “are not fond of trading with the Outside. Nor are our neighbors in space fond of trading with us. It is but an aspect of our difficulties here.”
Arvardan felt a sudden spasm of annoyance seize him. “That is the most stupid thing yet. I tell you that I could despair of human intelligence when I see what can exist in men’s minds.”
Shekt shrugged with the tolerance of lifelong use. “It is part of the nearly insoluble problem of anti-Terrestrianism, I fear.”
“But what makes it so nearly insoluble,” exclaimed the archaeologist, “is that no one seems to really want a solution! How many Earthmen respond to the situation by hating all Galactic citizens indiscriminately? It is an almost universal disease--hate for hate. Do your people really want equality, mutual tolerance? No! Most of them want only their own turn as top dog.”
“Perhaps there is much in what you say,” said Shekt sadly. “I cannot deny it. But that is not the whole story. Give us but the chance, and a new generation of Earthmen would grow to maturity, lacking insularity and believing wholeheartedly in the oneness of Man. The Assimilationists, with their tolerance and belief in wholesome compromise, have more than once been a power on Earth. I am one. Or, at least, I was one once. But the Zealots rule all Earth now. They are the extreme nationalists, with their dreams of past rule and future rule. It is against them that the Empire must be protected.”
Arvardan frowned. “You refer to the revolt Pola spoke of?”
“Dr. Arvardan,” Shekt said grimly, “it’s not too easy a job to convince anyone of such an apparently ridiculous possibility as Earth conquering the Galaxy, but it’s true. I am not physically brave, and I am most anxious to live. You can imagine, then, the immense crisis that must now exist to force me to run the risk of committing treason with the eye of the local administration already upon me.”
“Well,” said Arvardan, “if it is that serious, I had better tell you one thing immediately. I will help you all I can, but only in my own capacity as a Galactic citizen. I have no official standing here, nor have I any particular influence at the Court or even at the Procurator’s Palace. I am exactly what I seem to be--an archaeologist on a scientific expedition which involves only my own interests. Since you are prepared to risk treason, hadn’t you better see the Procurator about this? He could really do something.”
“That is exactly what I cannot do, Dr. Arvardan. It is that very contingency against which the Ancients guard me. When you came to my house this morning I even thought you might be a go-between. I thought that Ennius suspected.”
“He may suspect--I cannot answer for that. But I am not a go-between. I’m sorry. If you insist on making me your confidant, I can promise to see him for you.”
“Thank you. It is all I ask. That--and to use your good offices to intercede for Earth against too strong a reprisal.”
“Of course.” Arvardan was uneasy. At the moment he was convinced that he was dealing with an elderly and eccentric paranoiac, perhaps harmless, but thoroughly cracked. Yet he had no choice but to remain, to listen, and to try to smooth over the gentle insanity--for Pola’s sake.
Shekt said, “Dr. Arvardan, you have heard of the Synapsifier? You said so this morning.”
“Yes, I did. I read your original article in Physical Reviews. I discussed the instrument with the Procurator and with the High Minister.”
“With the High Minister?”
“Why, certainly. When I obtained the letter of introduction that you--uh--refused to see, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry for that. But I wish you had not--What is the extent of your knowledge concerning the Synapsifier?”
“That it is an interesting failure. It is designed to improve learning capacity. It has succeeded to some extent on rats, but has failed on human beings.”
Shekt was chagrined. “Yes, you could think nothing else from that article. It was publicized as a failure, and the eminently successful results have been suppressed, deliberately.”
“Hmp. A rather unusual display of scientific ethics, Dr. Shekt.”
“I admit it. But I am fifty-six, sir, and if you know anything of the customs of Earth, you know that I haven’t long to live.”
“The Sixty. Yes, I have heard of it--more than I would have liked, in fact.” And he thought wryly of that first trip on a Terrestrian stratoliner. “Exceptions are made for noted scientists, among others, I have heard.”
“Certainly. But it is the High Minister and the Council of Ancients who decide on that, and there is no appeal from their decisions, even to the Emperor. I was told that the price of life was secrecy concerning the Synapsifier and hard work for its improvement.” The older man spread his hands helplessly. “Could I know then of the outcome, of the use to which the machine would be put?”
“And the use?” Arvardan extracted a cigarette from his shirt-pocket case and offered one to the other, which was refused.
“If you’ll wait a moment--One by one, after my experiments had reached the point where I felt the instrument might be safely applied to human beings, certain of Earth’s biologists were treated. In each case they were men I knew to be in sympathy with the Zealots--the extremists, that is. They all survived, though secondary effects made themselves shown after a time. One of them was brought back for treatment eventually. I could not save him. But, in his dying delirium, I found out.”
It was close upon midnight. The day had been long and much had happened. But now something stirred within Arvardan. He said tightly, “I wish you’d get to the point.”
Shekt said, “I beg your patience. I must explain thoroughly, if you’re to believe me. You, of course, know of Earth’s peculiar environment--its radioactivity--”
“Yes, I have a fair knowledge of the matter.”
“And of the effect of this radioactivity upon Earth and its economy?”
“Yes.”
“Then I won’t belabor the point. I need only say that the incidence of mutation on Earth is greater than in the rest of the Galaxy. The idea of our enemies that Earthmen are different thus has a certain basis of physical truth. To be sure, the mutations are minor, and most possess no survival value. If any permanent change has occurred in Earthmen, it is only in some aspects of their internal chemistry which enables them to display greater resistance to their own particular environment. Thus they show greater resistance to radiation effects, more rapid healing of burned tissues--”
“Dr. Shekt, I am acquainted with all you say.”
“Then has it ever occurred to you that these mutational processes occur in living species on Earth other than human?”
There was a short silence, and then Arvardan said, “Why, no, it hasn’t, though, of course, it is quite inevitable, now that you mention it.”
“That is so. It happens. Our domestic animals exist in greater variety than on any other inhabited world. The orange you ate is a mutated variety, which exists nowhere else. It is this, among other things, which makes the orange so unacceptable for export. Outsiders suspect it as they suspect us--and we ourselves guard it as a valuable property peculiar to ourselves. And of course what applies to animals and plants applies also to microscopic life.”
And now, indeed, Arvardan felt the thin pang of fear enter.
He said, “You mean--bacteria?”
“I mean the whole domain of primitive life. Protozoa, bacteria, and the self-reproducing proteins that some people call viruses. “
“And what are you getting at?”
“I think you have a notion of that, Dr. Arvardan. You seem suddenly interested. You see, there is a belief among your people that Earthmen are bringers of death, that to associate with an Earthman is to die, that Earthmen are the bearers of misfortune, possess a sort of evil eye--”
“I know all that. It is merely superstition.”
“Not entirely. That is the dreadful part. Like all common beliefs, however superstitious, distorted, and perverted, it has a speck of truth at bottom. Sometimes, you see, an Earthman carries Within his body some mutated form of microscopic parasite which is not quite like any known elsewhere, and to which, sometimes, Outsiders are not particularly resistant. What follows is simple biology, Dr. Arvardan. “
Arvardan was silent.
Shekt went on, “We are caught sometimes, too, of course. A new species of germ will make its way out of the radioactive mists and an epidemic will sweep the planet, but, by and large, Earthmen have kept pace. For each variety of germ and virus, we build our defense over the generations, and we survive. Outsiders don’t have the opportunity.”
“Do you mean,” said Arvardan with a strangely faint sensation, “that contact with you now--” He pushed his chair back. He was thinking of the evening’s kisses.
Shekt shook his head. “Of course not. We don’t create the disease; we merely carry it. And even such carriage occurs very rarely. If I lived on your world, I would no more carry the germ than you would; I have no special affinity for it. Even here it is only one out of every quadrillion germs, or one out of every quadrillion of quadrillions, that is dangerous. The chances of your infection right now are less than that of a meteorite penetrating the roof of this house and hitting you. Unless the germs in question are deliberately searched for, isolated, and concentrated.”
Again a silence, longer this time. Arvardan said in a queer, strangled voice, “Have Earthmen been doing that?”
He had stopped thinking in terms of paranoia. He was ready to believe.
“Yes. But for innocent reasons, at first. Our biologists are, of course, particularly interested in the peculiarities of Earth life, and, recently, isolated the virus of Common Fever.”
“What is Common Fever?”
“A mild endemic disease on Earth. That is, it is always with us. Most Earthmen have it in their childhood, and its symptoms are not very severe. A mild fever, a transitory rash, and inflammation of the joints and of the lips, combined with an annoying thirst. It runs its course in four to six days, and the subject is thereafter immune. I’ve had it. Pola has had it. Occasionally there is a more virulent form of this same disease--a slightly different strain of virus is concerned, presumably--and then it is called Radiation Fever.”
“Radiation Fever. I’ve heard of it,” said Arvardan.
“Oh, really? It is called Radiation Fever because of the mistaken notion that it is caught after exposure to radioactive areas. Actually, exposure to radioactive areas is often followed by Radiation Fever, because it is in those areas that the virus is most apt to mutate to dangerous forms. But it is the virus and not the radiation which does it. In the case of Radiation Fever, symptoms develop in a matter of two hours. The lips are so badly affected that the subject can scarcely talk, and he may be dead in a matter of days.
“Now, Dr. Arvardan, this is the crucial point. The Earthman has adapted himself to Common Fever and the Outsider has not. Occasionally a member of the Imperial garrison is exposed to it, and, in that case, he reacts to it as an Earthman would to Radiation Fever. Usually he dies within twelve hours. He is then burned--by Earthmen--since any other soldier approaching also dies.
“The virus, as I say, was isolated ten years ago. It is a nucleoprotein, as are most filtrable viruses, which, however, possesses the remarkable property of containing an unusually high concentration of radioactive carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus. When I say unusually high I mean that fifty per cent of its carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus is radioactive. It is supposed that the effects of the organism on its host is largely that of its radiations, rather than of its toxins. Naturally it would seem logical that Earthmen, who are adapted to gamma radiations, are only slightly affected. Original research in the virus centered at first about the method whereby it concentrated its radioactive isotopes. As you know, no chemical means can separate isotopes except through very long and tedious procedures. Nor is any organism other than this virus known which can do so. But then the direction of research changed.
“I’ll be short, Dr. Arvardan. I think you see the rest. Experiments might be conducted on animals from outside Earth, but not on Outsiders themselves. The numbers of Outsiders on Earth were too few to allow several to disappear without notice. Nor could premature discovery of their plans be allowed. So it was a group of bacteriologists that was sent to the Synapsifier.. to return with insights enormously developed. It was they who developed a new mathematical attack on protein chemistry and on immunology, which enabled them finally to develop an artificial strain of virus that was designed to affect Galactic human beings--Outsiders--only. Tons of the crystallized virus now exist.”
Arvardan was haggard. He felt the drops of perspiration glide sluggishly down his temple and cheek.
“Then you are telling me,” he gasped, “that Earth intends to set loose this virus on the Galaxy; that they will initiate a gigantic bacteriological warfare--”
“Which we cannot lose and you cannot win. Exactly. Once the epidemic starts, millions will die each day, and nothing will stop it. Frightened refugees fleeing across space will carry the virus with them, and if you attempt to blow up entire planets, the disease can be started again in new centers. There will be no reason to connect the matter with Earth. By the time our own survival becomes suspicious, the ravages will have progessed so far, the despair of the Outsiders will be so deep, that nothing will matter to them.”
“And all will die?” The appalling horror did not penetrate--could not.
“Perhaps not. Our new science of bacteriology works both ways. We have the antitoxin as well, and the means of production thereof. It might be used in case of early surrender. Then there may be some out-of-the-way eddies of the Galaxy that could escape, or even a few cases of natural immunity.”
In the horrible blankness that followed--during which Arvardan never thought of doubting the truth of what he had heard, the horrible truth which at a stroke wiped out the odds of twenty-five billion to one--Shekt’s voice was small and tired.
“It is not Earth that is doing this. A handful of leaders, perverted by the gigantic pressure that excluded them from the Galaxy, hating those who keep them outside, wanting to strike back at any cost, and with insane intensity--
Once they have begun, the rest of Earth must follow. What can it do? In its tremendous guilt, it will have to finish what it started. Could it allow enough of the Galaxy to survive and thus risk a later punishment?
“Yet before I am an Earthman, I am a man. Must trillions die for the sake of millions? Must a civilization spreading over a Galaxy crumble for the sake of the resentment, however justified, of a single planet? And will we be better off for all that? The power in the Galaxy will reside still on those worlds with the necessary resources--and we have none. Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth.
“And besides, is there an advantage to Humanity to exchange the tyranny of a Galaxy for the tyranny of Earth? No--no--There must be a way out for all men, a way to justice and freedom.”
His hands stole to his face, and behind their gnarled fingers he rocked gently to and fro.
Arvardan had heard all this in a numbed haze. He mumbled, “There is no treason in what you have done, Dr. Shekt. I will go to Everest immediately. The Procurator will believe me. He must believe me.”
There was the sound of running footsteps, the flash of a frightened face into the room, the door left swinging open.
“Father--Men are coming up the walk.”
Dr. Shekt went gray. “Quickly, Dr. Arvardan, through the garage.” He was pushing violently. “Take Pola, and don’t worry about me. I’ll hold them back.”
But a man in a green robe waited for them as they turned. He wore a thin smile and carried, with a casual ease, a neuronic whip. There was a thunder of fists at the main door, a crash, and the sound of pounding feet.
“Who are you?” demanded Arvardan in a feeble defiance of the armed green-robe. He had stepped before Pola.
“I?” said Green-robe harshly. “I am merely the humble Secretary of His Excellency, the High Minister.” He advanced. “I almost waited too long. But not quite. Hmm, a girl, too. Injudicious--”
Arvardan said evenly, “I am a Galactic citizen, and I dispute your right to detain me--or, for that matter, to enter this house--without legal authority.”
“I”--and the Secretary tapped his chest gently with his free hand--”am all the right and authority on this planet. Within a short time I will be all the right and authority on the Galaxy. We have all of you, you know--even Schwartz.”
“Schwartz!” cried Dr. Shekt and Pola, nearly together.
“You are surprised? Come, I will bring you to him.”
The last thing Arvardan was conscious of was that smile, expanding--and the flash of the whip. He toppled through a crimson sear of pain into unconsciousness.
For the moment Schwartz was resting uneasily on a hard bench in one of the small sub-basement rooms of the Chica “Hall of Correction.”
The Hall, as it was commonly termed, was the great token of the local power of the High Minister and those surrounding him. It lifted its gloominess in a rocky, angular height that overshadowed the Imperial barracks beyond it, just as its shadow clutched at the Terrestrial malefactor far more than did the unexerted authority of the Empire.
Within its walls many an Earthman in past centuries had waited for the judgment that came to one who falsified or evaded the quotas of production, who lived past his time, or connived at another’s such crime, or who was guilty of attempting subversion of the local government. Occasionally, when the petty prejudices of Terrestrial justice made particularly little sense to the sophisticated and usually blasé Imperial government of the time, a conviction might be set aside by the Procurator, but this meant insurrection, or, at the very least, wild riots.
Ordinarily, where the Council demanded death, the Procurator yielded. After all. it was only Earthmen who suffered--
Of all this, Joseph Schwartz, very naturally, knew nothing. To him, immediate optical awareness consisted of a small room, its walls transfused with but a dim light, its furniture consisting of two hard benches and a table, plus a small recess in the wall that served as washroom and sanitary convenience combined. There was no window for a glimpse of sky, and the drift of air into the room through the ventilating shaft was feeble.
He rubbed the hair that circled his bald spot and sat up ruefully. His attempt to escape to nowhere (for where on Earth was he safe?) had been short, not sweet, and had ended here.
At least there was the Mind Touch to play with.
But was that bad or good?
At the farm it had been a queer, disturbing gift, the nature of which he did not know, the possibilities of which he did not think of. Now it was a flexible gift to be investigated.
With nothing to do for twenty-four hours but brood on imprisonment, he could have been courting madness. As it was, he could Touch the jailers as they passed, reach out for guardsmen in the adjacent corridors, extend the furthest fibrils of his mind even to the Captain of the Hall in his distant office.
He turned the minds over delicately and probed them. They fell apart like so many walnuts--dry husks out of which emotions and notions fell in a sibilant rain.
He learned much in the process of Earth and Empire--more than he had, or could have, in all two months on the farm.
Of course one of the items that he learned, over and over again, beyond any chance of mistaking, was just this:
He was condemned to death!
There was no escape, no doubt, no reservation.
It might be today; it might be tomorrow. But he would diet
Somehow it sank in and he accepted it almost gratefully.
The door opened, and he was on his feet, in tense fear. One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason. This was it!
No--it wasn’t. The entering Mind Touch held nothing of death in it. It was a guard with a metal rod held ready in his hand. Schwartz knew what it was.
“Come with me,” he said sharply.
Schwartz followed him, speculating on this odd power of his. Long before his guard could use his weapon, long before he could possibly know he should, he could be struck down without a sound, without a giveaway moment. His Mind was in Schwartz’s mental hands. A slight squeeze and it would be over.
But why? There would be others. How many could he handle at once? How many pairs of hands were in his mind?
He followed, docilely.
It was a large, large room that he was brought into. Two men and a girl occupied it, stretched out corpsewise on high, high benches. Yet not corpses--since three active minds were much in evidence.
Paralyzed! Familiar?...Were they familiar?
He was stopping to look, but the guard’s hard hand was on his shoulder. “Get on.”
There was a fourth slab, empty. There was no death in the guard’s mind, so Schwartz climbed on. He knew what was coming.
The guard’s steely rod touched each of his limbs. They tingled and left him, so that he was nothing but a head, floating on nothingness.
He turned it.
“Pola,” he cried. “You’re Pola, aren’t you? The girl who--”
She was nodding. He hadn’t recognized her Touch as such. He had never been aware of it that time two months ago. At that time his mental progression had reached only the stage of sensitivity to “atmosphere.” In the brilliance of hindsight, he remembered that well.
But from the contents he could still learn much. The one past the girl was Dr. Shekt; the one furthest of all was Dr. Bel Arvardan. He could filch their names, sense their despair, taste the last dregs of horror and fright in the young girl’s mind.
For a moment he pitied them, and then he remembered who they were and what they were. And he hardened his heart.
Let them die!
The other three had been there for the better part of an hour. The room in which they were left was evidently one used for assemblies of several hundred. The prisoners were lost and lonely in its size. Nor was there anything to say. Arvardan’s throat bummed dryly and he turned his head from side to side with a futile restlessness. It was the only part of his body that he could move.
Shekt’s eyes were closed and his lips were colorless and pinched.
Arvardan whispered fiercely, “Shekt. Shekt, I say!”
“What?...What?” A feeble whisper at best.
“What are you doing? Going to sleep? Think, man, think!”
“Why? What is there to think of?”
“Who is this Joseph Schwartz?”
Pola’s voice sounded, thin and weary. “Don’t you remember, Bel? That time in the department store, when I first met you--so long ago?”
Arvardan wrenched wildly and found he could lift his head two aching inches. A bit of Pola’s face was just visible.
“Pola! Pola!” If he could have moved toward her--as for two months he might have and hadn’t. She was looking at him, smiling so wanly that it might be a statue’s smile, and he said, “We’ll win out yet. You’ll see.”
But she was shaking her head--and his neck gave way, its tendons in panging agony.
“Shekt,” he said again. “Listen to me. How did you meet this Schwartz? Why was he a patient of yours?”
“The Synapsifier. He came as a volunteer.”
“And was treated?”
“Yes.”
Arvardan revolved that in his mind. “What made him come to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“But then--Maybe he is an Imperial agent.”
(Schwartz followed his thought well and smiled to himself. He said nothing, and he meant to keep on saying nothing.)
Shekt stirred his head. “ An Imperial agent? You mean because the High Priest’s Secretary says he is. Oh, nonsense. And what difference does it make? He’s as helpless as we....Listen, Arvardan, maybe, if we tell some sort of concerted story, they might wait. Eventually we might--”
The archaeologist laughed hollowly, and his throat burned at the friction. “We might live, you mean. With the Galaxy dead and civilization in ruins? Live? I might as well die!”
“I’m thinking of Pola,” muttered Shekt.
“I am too,” said the other. “Ask her....Pola, shall we surrender? Shall we try to live?”
Pola’s voice was firm. “I have chosen my side. I don’t want to die, but if my side dies, I’ll go with it.”
Arvardan felt somehow triumphant. When he brought her to Sirius, they might call her an Earthgirl, but she was their equal, and he would, with a great and good pleasure, smash teeth into the throat of any--
And he remembered that he wasn’t likely to bring her to Sirius--to bring anyone to Sirius. There wasn’t likely to be a Sirius.
Then, as though to escape from the thought, to escape anywhere, he shouted, “You! Whatchername! Schwartz!”
Schwartz raised his head for a moment and allowed a glance to ooze out toward the other. He still said nothing.
“Who are you?” demanded Arvardan. “How did you get mixed up in this? What’s your part in it?”
And at the question, all the injustice of everything descended on Schwartz. All the harmlessness of his past, all the infinite horror of the present burst in upon him, so that he said in a fury, “1? How did I get mixed up in it? Listen. I was once a nobody. An honest man, a hard-working tailor. I hurt nobody, I bothered nobody, I took care, of my family. And then, for no reason, for no reason--I came here.”
“To Chica?” asked Arvardan, who did not quite follow.
“No, not to Chica!” shouted Schwartz in wild derision. “I came to this whole mad world....Oh, what do I care if you believe me or not? My world is in the past. My world had land and food and two billion people, and it was the only world.”
Arvardan fell silent before the verbal assault. He turned to Shekt. “Can you understand him?”
“Do you realize,” said Shekt in feeble wonder, “that he has a vermiform appendix, which is three and a half inches long? Do you remember, Pola? And wisdom teeth. And hair on his face.”
“Yes, yes,” shouted Schwartz defiantly. ‘.And I wish I had a tail I could show you. I’m from the past. I traveled through time. Only I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. Now leave me alone.” He added suddenly, “They will soon be here for us. This wait is just to break us.”
Arvardan said suddenly, “Do you know that? Who told you?”
Schwartz did not answer.
“Was it the Secretary? Stocky man with a pug nose?” Schwartz had no way of telling the physical appearance of those he Touched only by mind, but--secretary? There had been just a glimpse of a Touch, a powerful one of a man of power, and it seemed he had been a secretary.
“Balkis?” he asked in curiosity.
“What?” said Arvardan, but Shekt interrupted, “That’s the name of the Secretary.”
“Oh--What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything,” said Schwartz. “I know. It’s death for an of us, and there’s no way out.”
Arvardan lowered his voice. “He’s mad, wouldn’t you say?”
“I wonder....His skull sutures, now. They were primitive, very primitive.”
Arvardan was amazed. “You mean--Oh, come, it’s impossible.”
“I’ve always supposed so.” For the moment Shekt’s voice was a feeble imitation of normality, as though the presence of a scientific problem had switched his mind to that detached and objective groove in which personal matters disappeared. “They’ve calculated the energy required to displace matter along the time axis and a value greater than infinity was arrived at, so the project has always been looked upon as impossible. But others have talked of the possibility of ‘time faults,’ analogous to geological faults, you know. Space ships have disappeared, for one thing, almost in fun view. There’s the famous case of Hor Devallow in ancient times, who stepped into his house one day and never came out, and wasn’t inside, either....And then there’s the planet, which you’ll find in the Galactography books of the last century, which was visited by three expeditions that brought back fun descriptions--and then was never seen again.
“Then there are certain developments in nuclear chemistry that seem to deny the law of conservation of mass-energy. They’ve tried to explain that by postulating the escape of some mass along the time axis. Uranium nuclei, for instance, when mixed with copper and barium in minute but definite proportions, under the influence of light gamma irradiation, set up a resonating system--”
“Father,” said Pola, “don’t! There’s no use--”
But Arvardan’s interruption was peremptory. “Wait, now. Let me think. I’m the one who can settle this. Who better? Let me ask him a few questions....Look, Schwartz.”
Schwartz looked up again.
“Yours was the only world in the Galaxy?”
Schwartz nodded, then said dully, “Yes.”
“But you only thought that. I mean you didn’t have space travel, so you couldn’t check up. There might have been many other inhabited worlds.”
“I have no way of telling that.”
“Yes, of course. A pity. What about atomic power?”
“We had an atomic bomb. Uranium--and plutonium--I guess that’s what made this world radioactive. There must have been another war after all--after I left....Atomic bombs.” Somehow Schwartz was back in Chicago, back in his old world, before the bombs. And he wits sorry. Not for himself, but for that beautiful world....
But Arvardan was muttering to himself. Then, “ All right. You had a language, of course.”
“Earth? Lots of them.”
“How about you?”
“English--after I was a grown man.”
“Well, say something in it.”
For two months or more Schwartz had said nothing in English. But now, with lovingness, he said slowly, “I want to go home and be with my own people.”
Arvardan spoke to Shekt. “18 that the language he used when he was Synapsified, Shekt?”
“I can’t tell,” said Shekt, in mystification. “Queer sounds then and queer sounds now. How can I relate them?”
“Well, never mind....What’s your word for ‘mother’ in your language, Schwartz?”
Schwartz told him.
“Uh-huh. How about ‘father’.. . ‘brother’...’one’--the numeral, that is…’two’…’three’…’house’…’man’…’wife’…”
This went on and on, and when Arvardan paused for breath his expression was one of awed bewilderment.
“Shekt,” he said, “either this man is genuine or I’m the victim of as wild a nightmare as can be conceived. He’s speaking a language practically equivalent to the inscriptions found in the fifty-thousand-year-old strata on Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, and twenty others. He speaks it. The language has only been deciphered in the last generation, and there aren’t a dozen men in the Galaxy besides myself who can understand it.”
“Are you sure of this?”
“Am I sure? Of course I’m sure. I’m an archaeologist. It’s my business to know.”
For an instant Schwartz felt his armor of aloofness cracking. For the first time he felt himself regaining the individuality he had lost. The secret was out; he was a man from the past, and they accepted it. It proved him sane, stilled forever that haunting doubt, and he was grateful. And yet he held aloof.
“I’ve got to have him.” It was Arvardan again, burning in the holy flame of his profession. “Shekt, you have no idea what this means to archaeology. Shekt--it’s a man from the past. Oh, Great Space!...Listen, we can make a deal. This is the proof Earth is looking for. They can have him. They can--”
Schwartz interrupted sardonically. “I know what you’re thinking. You think that Earth will prove itself to be the source of civilization through me and that they will be grateful for it. I tell you, no! I’ve thought of it and I would have bartered for my own life. But they won’t believe me--or you.”
“There’s absolute proof.”
“They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.”
“Bel,” said Pola, “I think he’s right.”
Arvardan ground his teeth. “We could try.”
“We would fail,” insisted Schwartz.
“How can you know?”
“I know!” And the words fell with such oracular insistence that Arvardan was silent before them.
It was Shekt who was looking at him now with a strange light in his tired eyes.
He asked softly, “Have you felt any bad effects as a result of the Synapsifier?”
Schwartz didn’t know the word but caught the meaning. They had operated, and on his mind. How much he was learning!
He said, “No bad effects.”
“But I see you learned our language rapidly. You speak it very well. In fact, you might be a native. Doesn’t it surprise you?”
“I always had a very good memory,” was the cold response.
“And so you feel no different now than before you were treated?”
“That’s right.”
Dr. Shekt’s eyes were hard now, and he said, “Why do you bother? You know that I’m certain you know what I’m thinking.”
Schwartz laughed shortly. “That I can read minds? Well. what of it?”
But Shekt had dropped him. He had turned his white, helpless face to Arvardan. “He can sense minds, Arvardan. How much I could do with him. And to be here--to be helpless...”
“What--what--what--” Arvardan popped wildly.
And even Pola’s face somehow gained interest. “Can you really?” she asked Schwartz.
He nodded at her. She had taken care of him. and now they would kill her. Yet she was a traitor.
Shekt was saying, “ Arvardan, you remember the bacteriologist I told you about, the one who died as a result of the effects of the Synapsifier? One of the first symptoms of mental breakdown was his claim that he could read minds. And he could. I found that out before he died, and it’s been my secret. I’ve told no one--but it’s possible, Arvardan, it’s possible. You see, with the lowering of brain-cell resistance, the brain may be able to pick up the magnetic fields induced by the microcurrents of other’s thoughts and reconvert it into similar vibrations in itself. It’s the same principle as that of any ordinary recorder. It would be telepathy in every sense of the word--”
Schwartz maintained a stubborn and hostile silence as Arvardan turned slowly in his direction. “If this is so, Shekt, we might be able to use him.” The archaeologist’s mind was spinning wildly, working out impossibilities. “There may be a way out now. There must be a way out. For us and the Galaxy.”
But Schwartz was cold to the tumult in the Mind Touch he sensed so clearly. He said, “You mean by my reading their minds? How would that help? Of course I can do more than read minds. How’s that, for instance?”
It was a light push, but Arvardan yelped at the sudden pain of it..
“I did that,” said Schwartz. “Want more?”
Arvardan gasped, “You can do that to the guards? To the Secretary? Why did you let them bring you here? Great Galaxy, Shekt, there’ll be no trouble. Now, listen, Schwartz--”
“No,” said Schwartz, “you listen. Why do I want to get out? Where will I be? Still on this dead world. I want to go home, and I can’t go home. I want my people and my world, and I can’t have them. And I want to die.”
“But it’s a question of all the Galaxy, Schwartz. You can’t think of yourself.”
“Can’t I? Why not? Must I worry about your Galaxy now? I hope your Galaxy rots and dies. I know what Earth is planning to do, and I am glad. The young lady said before she had chosen her side. Well, I’ve chosen my side, and my side is Earth.”
“What?”
“Why not? I’m an Earthman!”
An hour had passed since Arvardan had first waded thickly out of unconsciousness to find himself slabbed like a side of beef awaiting the cleaver. And nothing had happened. Nothing but this feverish, inconclusive talk that unbearably passed the unbearable time.
None of it lacked purpose. He knew that much. To lie prone, helpless, without even the dignity of a guard, without even that much concession to a conceivable danger, was to become conscious of overwhelming weakness. A stubborn spirit could not survive it, and when the inquisitor did arrive there would be little defiance, or none, for him to be presented with.
Arvardan needed a break in the silence. He said, “I suppose this place is Spy-waved. We should have talked less.”
“It isn’t,” came Schwartz’s voice flatly. “There’s nobody listening.”
The archaeologist was ready with an automatic “How do you know?” but never said it.
For a power like that to exist! And not for him, but for a man of the past who called himself an Earthman and wanted to die!
Within optical sweep was only a patch of ceiling. Turning, he could see Shekt’s angular profile; the other way, a blank wall. If he lifted his head he could make out, for a moment, Pola’s pale, worn expression.
Occasionally there was the burning thought that he was a man of the Empire--of the Empire, by the Stars; a Galactic citizen--and that there was a particularly vile injustice in his imprisonment, a particularly deep impurity in the fact that he had allowed Earthmen to do this to him.
And that faded too.
They might have put him next to Pola...No, it was better this way. He was not an inspiring sight.
“Bel?” The word trembled into sound and was strangely sweet to Arvardan, coming as it did in this vortex of coming death.
“Yes, Pola?”
“Do you think they’ll be much longer?”
“Maybe not, darling....It’s too bad. We wasted two months, didn’t we?”
“My fault,” she whispered. “My fault. We might have had these last few minutes, though. It’s so--unnecessary.”
Arvardan could not answer. His mind whirred in circles of thought, lost on a greased wheel. Was it his imagination, or did he feel the hard plastic on which he was so stiffly laid? How long would the paralysis last?
Schwartz must be made to help. He tried guarding his thoughts--knew it to be ineffective.
He said, “Schwartz--”
Schwartz lay there as helpless, and with an added, uncalculated refinement to his suffering. He was four minds in one.
By himself he might have maintained his own shrinking eagerness for the infinite peace and quiet of death, fought down the last remnants of that love of life which even as recently as two days previously--three?--had sent him reeling away from the farm. But how could he? With the poor, weak horror of death that hung like a pall over Shekt; with the strong chagrin and rebellion of Arvardan’s hard, vital mind; with the deep and pathetic disappointment of the young girl.
He should have closed his own mind. What did he need to know of the sufferings of others? He had his own life to live, his own death to die.
But they battered at him, softly, incessantly--probing and sifting through the crannies.
And Arvardan said, “Schwartz,” then, and Schwartz knew that they wanted him to save them. Why should he? Why should he?
“Schwartz,” repeated Arvardan insinuatingly, “you can live a hero. You have nothing to die for here--not for those men out there.”
But Schwartz was gathering the memories of his own youth, clutching them desperately to his wavering mind. It was a queer amalgamation of past and present that finally brought forth his indignation.
But he spoke calmly, restrainedly. “Yes, I can live a hero--and a traitor. They want to kill me, those men out there. You call them men, but that was with your tongue; your mind called them something I didn’t get, but it was vile. And not because they were vile, but because they were Earthmen.”
“That’s a lie,” hotly.
“That is not a lie,” as hotly, “and everyone here knows that. They want to kill me, yes--but that is because they think I’m one of your kind of people, who can condemn an entire planet at a stroke and drench it with your contempt, choke it slowly with your insufferable superiority. Well, protect yourself against these worms and vermin who are somehow managing to threaten their Godlike overlords. Don’t ask for the help of one of them.”
“You talk like a Zealot,” said Arvardan with amazement. “Why? Have you suffered? You were a member of a large and independent planet, you say. You were an Earthman when Earth was the sole repository of life. You’re one of us, man; one of the rulers. Why associate yourself with a desperate remnant? This is not the planet you remember. My planet is more like the old Earth than is this diseased world.”
Schwartz laughed. “I’m one of the rulers, you say? Well, we won’t go into that. It isn’t worth explaining. Let’s take you instead. You’re a fine sample of the product sent us by the Galaxy. You are tolerant and wonderfully bighearted, and admire yourself because you treat Dr. Shekt as an equal. But underneath--yet not so far underneath that I can’t see it plainly in your mind--you are uncomfortable with him. You don’t like the way he talks or the way he looks. In fact, you don’t like him, even though he is offering to betray Earth....Yes, and you kissed a girl of Earth recently and look back upon it as a weakness. You’re ashamed of it--”
“By the Stars, I’m not....Pola,” desperately, “don’t believe him. Don’t listen to him.”
Pola spoke quietly. “Don’t deny it, or make yourself unhappy about it, Bel. He’s looking below the surface to the residue of your childhood. He would see the same if he looked into mine. He would see things similar if he could look into his own in as ungentlemanly a fashion as he probes ours.”
Schwartz felt himself reddening.
Pola’s voice did not rise in pitch or intensity as she addressed him directly. “Schwartz, if you can sense minds, investigate mine. Tell me if I intend treason. Look at my father. See if it is not true that he could have avoided the Sixty easily enough if he had co-operated with the madmen who will ruin the Galaxy. What has he gained by his treason?...And look again, see if any of us wish to harm Earth or Earthmen.
“You say you have caught a glimpse of Balkis’s mind. I don’t know what chance you have had to poke through its dregs. But when he’s back, when it’s too late, sift it, strain his thoughts. Find out that he’s a madman--Then, die!”
Schwartz was silent.
Arvardan broke in hurriedly, “All right. Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can’t help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could.
“Schwartz, you don’t know our history! You don’t know of the thousands and tens of thousands of years in which Man spread through the Galaxy--of the wars and misery. You don’t know of the first centuries of the Empire, when still there was merely a confusion of alternating despotism and chaos. It is only in the last two hundred ‘years, now, that our Galactic government has become a representative one. Under it the various worlds are allowed their cultural autonomy--have been allowed to govern themselves--have been allowed voices in the common rule of all.
“At no time in history has Humanity been as free from war and poverty as now; at no time has Galactic economy been so wisely adjusted; at no time have prospects for the future been as bright. Would you destroy it and begin all over? And with what? A despotic theocracy with only the unhealthy elements of suspicion and hatred in it.
“Earth’s grievance is legitimate and will be solved someday, if the Galaxy lives. But what they will do is no solution. Do you know what they intend doing?”
If Arvardan had had the ability that had come to Schwartz, he would have detected the struggle in Schwartz’s mind. Intuitively, however, he knew the time had come to halt for a moment.
Schwartz was moved. All those worlds to die--to fester and dissolve in horrible disease...Was he an Earthman after all? Simply an Earthman? In his youth he had left Europe and gone to America, but was he not the same man despite that? And if after him men had left a torn and wounded earth for the worlds beyond the sky, were they less Earthmen? Was not all the Galaxy his? Were not they all--all--descended from himself and his brothers?
He said heavily, “All right, I’m with you. How can I help?”
“How far out can you reach for minds?” asked Arvardan eagerly, with a hastening quickness as though afraid still of a last change of mind.
“I don’t know. There are minds outside. Guards, I suppose. I think I can reach out into the street even, but the further I go, the less sharp it becomes.”
“Naturally,” said Arvardan. “But how about the Secretary? Could you identify his mind?”
“I don’t know,” mumbled Schwartz.
A pause...The minutes stretched by unbearably.
Schwartz said, “Your minds are in the way. Don’t watch me. Think of something else.”
They tried to. Another pause. Then, “No--I can’t--I can’t.”
Arvardan said with a sudden intensity, “I can move a bit--Great Galaxy, I can wiggle my feet....Ouch!” Each motion was a savage twinge.
He said, “How hard can you hurt someone, Schwartz? Can you do it harder than the way you hurt me a while back I mean?”
“I’ve killed a man.”
“You have? How did you do that?”
“I don’t know. It just gets done. It’s--it’s--” Schwartz looked almost comically helpless in his effort to put the wordless into words.
“Well, can you handle more than one at a time?”
“I’ve never tried, but I don’t think so. I can’t read two minds at one time.”
Pola interrupted. “You can’t have him kill the Secretary, Bel. It won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“How will we get out? Even if we caught the Secretary alone and killed him, there would be hundreds waiting for us outside. Don’t you see that?”
But Schwartz broke in, huskily, “I’ve got him.”
“Whom?” It came from all three. Even Shekt was staring wildly at him.
“The Secretary. I think it’s his Mind Touch.”
“Don’t let him go.” Arvardan almost rolled over in his attempts at exhortation, and tumbled off the slab, thumping to the floor with one half-paralyzed leg working futilely to wedge underneath his body and lift.
Pola cried, “You’re hurt!” and suddenly found the hinges of her arm uncreaking as she tried to lift her elbow.
“No, it’s all right. Suck him dry, Schwartz. Get all the information you can.”
Schwartz reached out until his head ached. He clutched and clawed with the tendrils of his own mind, blindly, clumsily--like an infant thrusting out fingers it can’t quite handle for an object it can’t quite reach. Until now he had taken whatever he could find, but now he was looking--looking--
Painfully, he caught wisps. “Triumph! He’s sure of the results....Something about space bullets. He’s started them....No, not started. Something else....He’s going to start them.”
Shekt groaned. “They’re automatically guided missiles to carry the virus, Arvardan. Aimed at the various planets.”
“But where are they kept, Schwartz?” insisted Arvardan. “Look, man, look--”
“There’s a building I--can’t--quite--see....Five points--a star--a name; Sloo, maybe--”
Shekt broke in again. “That’s it. By all the stars in the Galaxy, that’s it. The Temple of Senloo. It’s surrounded by radioactive pockets on all sides. No one would ever go there but the Ancients. Is it near the meeting of two large rivers, Schwartz?”
“I can’t--Yes--yes--yes.”
“When, Schwartz, when? When will they be set off?”
“I can’t see the day, but soon--soon. His mind is bursting with that--It will be very soon.” His own head seemed bursting with the effort.
Arvardan was dry and feverish as he raised himself finally to his hands and knees, though they wobbled and gave under him. “Is he coming?”
“Yes. He’s at the door.”
His voice sank and stopped as the door opened.
Balkis’s voice was one of cold derision as he filled the room with success and triumph. “Dr. Arvardan! Had you not better return to your seat?”
Arvardan looked up at him, conscious of the cruel indignity of his own position, but there was no answer to make, and he made none. Slowly he allowed his aching limbs to lower him to the ground. He waited there, breathing heavily. If his limbs could return a bit more, if he could make a last lunge, if he could somehow seize the other’s weapons
That was no neuronic whip that dangled so gently from the smoothly gleaming Flexiplast belt that held the Secretary’s robe in place. It was a full-size blaster that could shred a man to atoms in an instantaneous point of time.
The Secretary watched the four before him with a savage sense of satisfaction. The girl he tended to ignore, but otherwise it was a clean sweep. There was the Earthman traitor; there the Imperial agent; and there the mysterious creature they had been watching for two months. Were there any others?
To be sure, there was still Ennius, and the Empire. Their arms, in the person of these spies and traitors, were pinioned, but there remained an active brain somewhere--perhaps to send out other arms.
The Secretary stood easily, hands clasped in contemptuous disregard of any possible necessity of quickly reaching his weapon. He spoke quietly and gently. “Now it is necessary to make things absolutely clear. There is war between Earth and the Galaxy--undeclared as yet, but, nevertheless, war. You are our prisoners and will be treated as will be necessary under the circumstances. Naturally the recognized punishment for spies and traitors is death--”
“Only in the case of legal and declared war,” broke in Arvardan fiercely.
“Legal war?” questioned the Secretary with more than a trace of a sneer. “What is legal war? Earth has always been at war with the Galaxy, whether we made polite mention of the fact or not.”
“Don’t bother with him,” said Pola to Arvardan softly. “Let him have his say and finish with it.”
Arvardan smiled in her direction. A queer, spasmodic smile, for it was with a vast strain that he staggered to his feet and remained there, gasping.
Balkis laughed softly. With unhurried steps he shortened the distance between himself and the Sirian archaeologist to nothing. With an equally unhurried gesture he rested a soft hand upon the broad chest of the other and shoved.
With splintering arms that would not respond to Arvardan’s demand for a warding motion, with stagnant trunk muscles that could not adjust the body’s balance at more than snail speed, Arvardan toppled.
Pola gasped. Lashing her own rebellious flesh and bone, she descended from her particular bench slowly--so slowly.
Balkis let her crawl toward Arvardan.
“Your lover,” he said. “Your strong Outsider lover. Run to him, girl! Why do you wait? Clasp your hero tightly and forget in his arms that he steams in the sweat and blood of a billion martyred Earthmen. And there he lies, bold and valiant--brought to Earth by the gentle push of an Earthman’s hand.”
Pola was on her knees beside him now, her fingers probing beneath the hair for blood or the deadly softness of crushed bone. Arvardan’s eyes opened slowly and his lips formed a “Never mind!”
“He’s a coward,” said Pola, “who would fight a paralyzed man and boast his victory. Believe me, darling, few Earthmen are like that.”‘
“I know it, or you would not be an Earthwoman.”
The Secretary stiffened. “ As I said, all lives here are forfeit, but, nevertheless, can be bought. Are you interested in the price?”
Pola said proudly, “In our case, you would be. That I know.”
“Ssh, Pola.” Arvardan had not yet recovered his breath entirely. “What are you proposing?”
“Oh,” said Balkis, “you are willing to sell yourself? As I would be, for instance? I, a vile Earthman?”
“You know best what you are,” retorted Arvardan. “As for the rest, I am not selling myself; I am buying her.”
“I refuse to be bought,” said Pola.
“Touching,” grated the Secretary. “He stoops to our females, our Earthie-squaws--and can still play-act at sacrifice.”
“What are you proposing?” demanded Arvardan.
“This. Obviously, word of our plans has leaked out. How it got to Dr. Shekt is not difficult to see, but how it got to the Empire is puzzling. We would like to know, therefore, just what the Empire does know. Not what you have learned, Arvardan, but what the Empire now knows.”
“I am an archaeologist and not a spy,” bit out Arvardan. “I don’t know anything at all about what the Empire knows --but I hope they know a damned lot.”
“So I imagine. Well, you may change your mind. Think, all of you.”
Throughout, Schwartz had contributed nothing; nor had he raised his eyes.
The Secretary waited, then said, perhaps a trifle savagely, “Then I’ll outline the price to you of your non-co-operation. It will not be simply death, since I am quite certain that all of you are prepared for that unpleasant and inevitable eventuality. Dr. Shekt and the girl, his daughter, who, unfortunately for herself, is implicated to a deadly extent, are citizens of Earth. Under the circumstances, it will be most appropriate to have both subjected to the Synapsifier. You understand, Dr. Shekt?”
The physicist’s eyes were pools of pure horror.
“Yes, I see you do,” said Balkis. “It is, of course, possible to allow the Synapsifier to damage brain tissue just sufficiently to allow the production of an acerebral imbecile. It is a most disgusting state: one in which you will have to be fed, or starve; be cleaned, or live in dung; be shut up, or remain a study in horror to all who see. It may be a lesson to others in the great day that is coming.
“As for you”--and the Secretary turned to Arvardan--”and your friend Schwartz, you are Imperial citizens, and therefore suitable for an interesting experiment. We have never tried our concentrated fever virus on you Galactic dogs. It would be interesting to show our calculations correct.
A small dose, you see, so that death is not quick. The disease might work its way to the inevitable over a period of a week, if we dilute the injection sufficiently. It will be very painful.”
And now he paused and watched them through slitted eyes. II All that,” he said, “is the alternative to a few well-chosen words at the present time. How much does the Empire know? Have they other agents active at the present moment? What are their plans, if any, for counteraction?”
Dr. Shekt muttered, “How do we know that you won’t have us killed anyway, once you have what you want of us?”
“You have my assurance that you will die horribly if you refuse. You will have to gamble on the alternative. What do you say?”
“Can’t we have time?”
“Isn’t that what I’m giving you now? Ten minutes have passed since I entered, and I am still listening....Well. have you anything to say? What, nothing? Time will not endure forever, you must realize. Arvardan, you still knot your muscles. You think perhaps you can reach me before I can draw my blaster. Well, what if you can? There are hundreds outside, and my plans will continue without me. Even your separate modes of punishment will continue without me.
“Or perhaps you, Schwartz. You killed our agent. It was you, was it not? Perhaps you think you can kill me?”
For the first time Schwartz looked at Balkis. He said coldly, “I can, but I won’t.”
“That is kind of you.”
“Not at all. It is very cruel of me. You say yourself that there are things worse than simple death.”
Arvardan found himself suddenly staring at Schwartz in a vast hope.