XXII
Twelve hours later Conrad sat moodily in the hot sun, a piece of unsalvaged scrap of indeterminate purpose serving as a stool, and tossed pebbles from hand to hand.
It wasn’t that he had meant to be rude to Nestamay, he explained furiously to himself. It was just—
Well, over there, for example: Yanderman talking intently to Maxall, being fluent and knowledgeable about things of which he had no direct experience, making a tremendous impression on the old man as he had already done on Keefe, Egrin and all the others. It wasn’t
fair.
The clues and hints he was drawing on were taken from him, Conrad, the one with the gift of seeing into the past—and Conrad himself couldn’t make use of them.
Yanderman’s explanation of why not was very convincing. It was perfectly true that his visions had always had a dreamlike quality which rendered them difficult to recapture. But being right on that score didn’t make him right on everything!
With a rebellious expression Conrad flung his pebbles into a patch of dust.
Why should his feeling of having seen all this before be a mere illusion? Yanderman was willing enough to accept that his visions of the barrenland before it was barren corresponded to a past reality; wasn’t there room in a span of four and a half centuries for a whole lot of true visions? The more he thought about it, the more Conrad came to the conclusion that he really had visualised parts of this area around the so-called Station in the brief period following the arrival of the “devil”—Nestamay’s father—at Lagwich. He hadn’t been interested in things like that for long. Other visions, those in which he dreamed of a prosperous and fertile landscape populated by marvellous people with astonishing powers, offered a more attractive contrast to the boredom and depression of reality.
The haunting, disquieting sensation of almost remembering had come and gone during the whole of this morning. Every now and again it had become acute—when Maxall was showing them the device which maintained their clothing, for example, and again when he showed off the solar power accumulators and the heatbeams which had drained them yesterday.
It was terrifying, Conrad reflected in passing, how narrow a margin these people had between survival and extinction. A single
thing
as big and dangerous as yesterday’s not only did extensive damage—a working party had been busy since dawn assessing the result of its blind passage to the outside from its point of emergence in the dome—but also wasted their stored power so that everything depending on it failed. Today was bright and sunny, so the recharging would proceed quickly. But on an overcast day it would be fearful, having to wait and watch the power supplies creep back to a useful level, knowing that at any moment the alarm might signal a vicious monster and the heatbeams were temporarily out of service—
Wait a second.
Conrad turned and stared towards the broken whaleback of the gigantic dome. He didn’t know much about the storage or use of this hard-to-conceive energy; in Lagwich, things like cornmills and looms were driven by inefficient single-cylinder steam-engines, but that was about the most advanced machinery he had ever come in direct contact with. Nonetheless, out of the mist of half-memory which this place evoked in his mind a few vague concepts were beginning to emerge.
It seemed logical that if everything else which still operated here at the Station, like the clothing machine, the ovens, and the heatbeams, required a supply of power, then the mysterious, capricious entity supposed to be screened by the dome and the impenetrable jungle of alien vegetation would require power also. Where was it coming from? Presumably, from the same source—the solar accumulators. The … the production … no, the transport of
things
from their own worlds (Conrad was struggling now) must involve effort of some sort. Was this a fact he had recalled from a scene in one of his visions, or a simple exercise in deduction? He couldn’t decide, but there was a feeling of rightness about the idea.
He glanced round, half-intending to go at once to Yanderman and put the suggestion to him. But Yanderman and Maxall, lost in discussion, were strolling away from him and around the curve of the dome.
Conrad hesitated. Then he made up his mind. Until last night’s conversation with Yanderman he had been half-afraid of the offhand manner in which the older man could put him in touch, as it were, with his incomprehensible visions. He had assumed there was something almost magical about the crystal ball Yanderman employed. But if it was true that the tip of a finger would have served equally well, and if it was also true that sitting relaxed and staring fixedly at a mere pebble on the ground was a path into trance, why should he not attempt it himself? Not this time as a simple escape from boredom and misery, but with a deliberate purpose: to recapture the elusive visions now plaguing him with the sensation of having been here before.
Conrad took a deep breath. He shifted his position on his uncomfortable perch and looked along the vast curve of the dome, trying to get straight in his mind what aspects seemed most familiar. He had only one incontestable point of recollection so far: the resemblance between Nestamay and his little carving. Was there anything else which struck him?
The dome itself? He couldn’t be sure. And its most remarkable single feature—the tangle of unhealthy-looking vegetation spreading over the nearby ground and swarming up through gashes in the roof—had been so imprinted on his mind yesterday when the pitiable Jasper had emerged from it as a condemned victim that there was little point in trying to separate direct experience from apparent memory.
Beyond that screen of leaves and stems, though, there was this half-godlike, half-demonic master of the Station’s fate: the organochemic cortex. What must it be like? Something which thought, presumably, after a fashion of its own. In his commonest visions he had encountered machines endowed not only with mobility but even with the ability to make decisions, designed to save their masters the trouble of attending to repetitive tasks varying only in minor detail. Conrad had no idea how such a machine could be arranged, yet it was comparatively easy to accept the concept if one had already agreed that it was possible to walk to other worlds. And even the knowledgeable Yanderman had been forced to give in on that score.
So—the heart of the problem. Conrad stared with aching eyes at the masking foliage, hardly seeing that members of the daily working party were approaching from the southern side, spotting the deadly blackish forms of the plants’ seed-masses and either reaching up with long poles to smash them or trying to burn them with the feeble power available to the heatbeams.
The thinking machine hidden in there … what must it be
like?
Anything like an ordinary human brain? Why not? Consider the long poles with which that working party was destroying the seed-masses. You want to reach something further away than you can grasp it, so you pick up a stick; your arm is a little like a stick, long and straight, so what you’re doing is making your arm longer. You want to go somewhere faster than you can walk; you get on a horse, which has four legs to your two and is stronger into the bargain. You start by looking for something which already does the same job, but more efficiently. If it comes to the job of thinking, why not start with the human brain as a pattern? Nothing else would be handy which was better at the job …
Conrad gasped. For one ultimately shocking instant he had had the impression that he was no longer here, sitting on a chunk of scrap and staring at the dome, but in the dome and aware of looking at Conrad, and at Yanderman, and at Maxall, and at Nestamay and Keefe and Egrin and everybody and at the same time aware of what he was seeing and what Yanderman was seeing and Maxall and Nestamay and Keefe and Egrin and not only that but aware of things in the dome and
beyond
the dome not in any ordinary direction but as though the interior of the dome had become the mouth of an infinity of tunnels—help me!—reaching to an infinity of hells—
help me
!—through which a lost soul wandered—HELP ME!
HELP ME!
HELP ME!
HELP ME!
The moment wasn’t over. The moment was as infinite as that countless cluster of tunnels-through-nowhere, stretching forward and dominating his thinking as though a mould had been placed on his mind and squeezed tight for an infinitesimal quantum of time, leaving him helplessly altered. Subjectively it was like being tossed leafwise on a torrential river, battered by waves of concepts and impressions and deafened by a shriek saying HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME!
Conrad moaned and clutched his temples, crazily fearing the blasting of the mental imagery now overwhelming him might smash physically out through the thin bones of his skull, smearing him black to his shoulders as Jasper had been smeared, condemning him to death in torment or death in the next second. The moan welled up and took the form of the inaudible scream echoing around his head. He was on his feet, swaying, and his throat was raw as he gave words to the mental message.
“Help me! Help me!
He-e-elp me!
”
But before the startled members of the nearby working party could reach him, he had fallen headlong—not into unconsciousness, but into a kind of hall of mirrors of delusion, in which the mirrors were whole human personalities, myriad in number, between which the blinding images reflected, reflected, reflected, and at eternally long last began to seem familiar, recognisable, interpretable into words.
His eyes snapped open. He was lying on the rough bed where he had spent last night. Above him a curiously misshapen and discoloured form with pinkish bars crossing it—a hand holding a cloth. Nestamay’s hand holding a wet cloth with which she had been wiping his fever-hot face. She saw him come to himself and bit her lower lip in a seeming frenzy of worry.
“He’s awake,” she said after a pause.
The room swirled. Conrad found himself sitting up, not having formulated the intention, and was looking past the girl at her grandfather and Yanderman, who had been studying more of the old man’s treasured documents and now turned like two sections of a single unit to look and frame questions. There was no time for questions. There was only urgent actions.
“Conrad! Are you—?” Yanderman began.
“Listen!” Conrad exclaimed. “I have it now, but we’ve got to be quick.” He was scrambling up from the bed, twisting into a kneeling position facing them. “Do you hear me? I know what’s wrong and I know what has to be done! Maxall, you have to cut the power off—I mean … Well, stop it getting to the cortex but not completely, just hold it down to a sort of trickle and—”
He stopped, aware that he wasn’t making sense to his listeners. A bead of sweat ran down his face like an insect.
“Get a grip on yourself, Conrad,” Yanderman advised, moving close in an effort at reassurance. “You’ve had some kind of a shock, and—”
“I know, I know!” Conrad clutched at his arm. “it’s because I’ve seen what’s got to be done! You were wrong about the visions people like me get—they’re not memories, they’re
messages,
and I’ve had a message that tells me what to do! We’ve got to
cut back
the power to the cortex.”
“But this is impossible!” Maxall snapped. “We depend on it—it runs everything. If we cut off its power we starve, we freeze, we’re done for.”
“But We’ve got to
cut back the power. Not shut it off, just keep it low. Ohhh!” Conrad’s frantic words dissolved in a moan of desperation. “Look, is a madman crazy when he’s asleep?”
“What?” Yanderman jerked his head.
“Is a madman crazy when he’s asleep? I don’t think so. And he’s not dead, either, so it’s not killing him to make him sleep.” Conrad stared up at the low ceiling. “I almost have it all, you see, but I’m still—still arranging it. I think there’s a way of ensuring that only a trickle of power gets to the cortex, enough to keep the automatic things going like the heating and foodmaking, but not enough to—Oh, no
wonder
you don’t understand.” He slapped his thigh. “The most important thing is what I haven’t said.
“Look, this—this thinking machine inside the dome. It’s laid out like a human brain. There’s a level which attends to routine matters, comparable to breathing, and this never stops or goes wrong and uses only a little power. But there’s another level, responsible for big decisions, which uses all the power it can get and when the power is low is—is unconscious.
“And on this level the cortex has been hopelessly insane, with brief lucid intervals, for four hundred and sixty years, ever since it was infected with the disease against which the barrenland was created …”
XXIII
There was a stunned silence. Maxall broke it, shifting his weight with a scuffling sound as he spoke.
“How do you know? I mean—how do you
think
you know?”
Conrad felt an overwhelming wave of relief. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall of the hovel.
“I’ll try and tell you, but it’s got to be quick, because there isn’t much time. It’s sunny today and the stored power is building up rapidly. My head’s full of pictures which I scarcely understand, all jammed in together in a single instant …” He pressed his fingers hard against his forehead. In a slow, effortful voice, with many hesitations, repetitions and gropings for words, he pieced out the explanation which had come to him.
First: the nature of his visions, and Granny Jassy’s, and all others similar. They were not extraphysical recollections of the past. They were received messages, or signals.
And the burden of the message was simple:
Help me!
In a time when the world was covered with cities of up to tens of millions of people, and not this world only but others, circling other stars, there had come a point at which the sheer numbers wishing to walk to other worlds—restless, bored with their long lives, hungry for the sights, sounds, sensations of alien environments—threatened to outstrip the capacity of the equipment handling the incredible traffic. The means used, in itself, was so complex it had always had to be managed at second-hand—not by individual persons, but by massive thinking machines. And the machines were inadequate.
Hence the development of the organochemic cortex: to all intents, a manufactured brain, with a personality, the gift of consciousness, all the discrimination of a human genius combined with the tireless reliability of an insensitive machine.
Such a cortex was installed at Terminal Station A, the largest centre for interstellar transport on the planet. From the three-mile dome arching above the Station it was possible to walk to any of a thousand distant worlds.
And back.
And from one such distant world somebody returned bearing in the cerebrospinal fluid of his body the virus of a disease named in the traditional lore of the Station as
encephalosis dureri,
which incubated and brought insanity.
No plague had ever before been transmitted on the scale of this one. Within days of the first outbreak it was on a hundred different worlds; within weeks, it had reached every planet known to mankind. As though one had emptied a bucket of sand into a precisely-tuned engine, the sophisticated complex of interstellar society ground to a halt.
Stripped of their sanity, people died—in accidents, in fires, by famine or explosion or a myriad other disasters. In the midst of primal chaos, the very few who were naturally immune stood as long as possible against the searing blast of the collapse, until they too were overwhelmed.
The ancestors of those now living at the centre of the barrenland had been a group of such natural immunes, sent to try and repair this largest of all interstellar transit points.
They started work under the impression that what had gone wrong was the simple consequence of a madman’s interference—some diseased mind among the Station’s human staff, they believed, had altered control settings or distorted the instructions given to the organochemic cortex. At that time, the cortex operated everything in the Station area: not just the actual process of transportation, but every service provided for the convenience of travellers.
The cortex knew better, and could not explain.
There was something so completely human about the despair Conrad had sensed that it had overcome him; it was as if he himself had been in the tormenting plight which the manufactured organochemic brain had endured uncounted times since the onset of the contagious madness. Which was to know that it was going insane, and to be able to do nothing about it.
The cortex was powered by the same source as the rest of the Station—the original emergency power supply, switched on to keep the cortex functioning after the disaster. When the stored power was low, as for instance after expenditure on the use of heatbeams, the cortex was practically unconscious. As the power built up again, its level of activity rose to a kind of incipient awareness. In this condition, it was sufficiently conscious to realise that when the power reached maximum the sleeping layers of its personality would arouse—and be insane because in the nutrient fluid bathing the entire artificial organism the viruses were still multiplying.
They were not like ordinary viruses. In some manner they made false connections between brain cells; the energy available at a synapse was a sort of stimulus to them. As it were, they caused innumerable short circuits and hence random patterns of response.
The effect on the cortex was to bring into operation an overload device intended primarily to limit the number of simultaneous traffic problems it was coping with. By that time it was no longer able to reason; it sought to expend energy and hurl itself into unconsciousness again for a period of recuperation.
And the way of expending energy which came most readily to the rescue was to initiate an interstellar transportation process.
From worlds once colonised by human beings, where now the native fauna roamed among ruins abandoned by disease-crazed savages, the insane artificial brain brought anything which blundered into a transportation terminal. It had just sufficient discrimination left, at this stage of its madness, to select for objects resembling its vanished human masters in mass—plus or minus a factor of about ten—and mobility.
The operation concluded, and signalled to the community of the Station here by an alarm which one of the immune technicians had rigged up after the very first such happening, the cortex relapsed into its torpid state.
And the cycle resumed, varying in length each time according to how much energy had been used up through other channels like the electrofences and heatbeams, which in turn naturally depended on the ferocity or docility of the
thing
from an alien planet snatched at by the desperate cortex.
Vegetation, too, had come through in the form of seeds or suckers transported with the animals, and not long after the original disaster had spread to form a jungle-like screen around the site of the cortex, into which unprotected men dared not venture, and which they dared not destroy randomly for fear of wrecking the cortex as well.
When perhaps as much as two centuries had gone by in this vicious circle, the cortex began to recover a little. Self-adjusting, it was able to cope to a limited extent with the harm the virus caused. By that time, however, the people trapped at the centre of the barrenland had suffered the loss of so much information and so many irreplaceable personnel that the best they could do was hold the ground they had gained; they could not advance.
What to do? The cortex was no longer equipped to communicate verbally—it had once been provided with vodors, but a massive monster had smashed the equipment as it stampeded from the arrival area.
Helpless, dumb, the cortex faced the recurrent cycle of insanity in full awareness, and the mere intensity of its longing for a return to the orderly past began to solve its problem.
This was where Conrad, even though he had experienced the actuality, began to lose his grip on the slippery concepts. It seemed, he thought, that there were—perhaps had always been—people slightly sensitive to the thoughts of others. At some time, somewhere, a person so gifted thought with longing of the happier past of which legends had survived, and responded to the neural currents—subliminally faint—generated by the organochemic cortex. Its maximum power consumption was on the machine level; its signals might be as strong as a radio’s.
Relaxed, in an autohypnotic state, someone like Granny Jassy or Conrad could tap the very thought-stream of the cortex in its lucid moments. Pictures of the past mingled with pictures of the present, but the present was hateful and discoloured by frustration, whereas the cortex was yearning for the past, and so little attention was paid to the available knowledge that people survived in the barrenland. Conrad had opened his mind to impressions of that sort only because he was thinking of growing up to kill devils like the one which had come to Lagwich, and had glimpsed Nestamay’s likeness and later dredged it from his subconscious; however, like most people, he abandoned pursuit of barrenland images and preferred to seek visions of the distant past.
But today, within a shorter distance of the point of origin of the signals than anyone else with his gift had ever reached, he had happened to turn his maximum concentration on the idea of the organochemic cortex at precisely the moment when it realised the mounting power level made its return to insanity imminent.
As though a bolt of lightning had flashed between his mind and the artificial brain, the truth had stormed in and taken possession of him.
He stopped talking. There was much more that he hadn’t said, but his sense of urgency was growing. He looked at his hearers. Nestamay, withdrawn into a corner, was staring at him with round-eyed wonder. Yanderman, his forehead etched with a deep frown, was biting the back of his knuckles and wrestling with the facts Conrad had offered. Maxall had his head forward and his fingers buried in the thick hair at the back of his scalp.
“It makes a kind of sense,” Yanderman ventured at last. He glanced at Maxall.
“But why
him?
” the old man groaned. “He was never here before! I know you told me he was right about water in the desert and helped you to find your way here—” He checked, raising his head.
“Now explain that!” he challenged. “You’ve said that these visions of yours are messages from the cortex here; well, how is it that the cortex happened to think about the location of water so conveniently for you? Hey?”
Sickly, Conrad realised the old man was looking for any excuse to avoid believing the story he’d heard. It was too great a blow to his vanity to accept that a total stranger could cut through the fog of mystery which had baffled him a lifetime long, and his ancestors before him.
“It was a
total
awareness!” he exclaimed. “It’s not limited the way you and I are. It’s got usable senses still—it can see outside the dome, for instance. And not just that. If it sees you, it automatically pictures to itself what you can see from your point of view, and the same applies to all the other people around it. Similarly, when it remembers the past, it remembers in a way which is much fuller and more comprehensive than we can manage. It remembers everything simultaneously. After all, if it was designed to direct literally hundreds of processes at once—Oh, what’s the use? You’re not even trying to follow what I’m saying, are you?”
He put his head in his hands.
Unexpectedly, Nestamay moved in her corner. She said in a low voice, “Grandfather, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“What?” the old man started and looked around.
“I said you should be ashamed!” The girl gathered courage and her tone grew firmer. “You’ve taught me all you were able to, and you never managed to show me an explanation which all fitted together. Conrad’s does fit. It may not be right, but it’s got to be tried. You said yourself we were at the end of our resources here. If you were desperate enough to spare Jasper till he couldn’t be spared any longer, just to give us a chance of going on, then you can get desperate enough to do as Conrad tells you!”
She set her chin mutinously and met the old man’s gaze fair and square.
After a long moment, Maxall said, “But—but we don’t know how to cut back the power as he wants us to.”
“I do,” Conrad repeated. “The cortex has always known what had to be done. It just hasn’t any way of doing it by itself.”