Authors: Poul Anderson
“Oh, there’s more to it than that,” added Lewis. “The physical structure of the nervous system imposes limitations, as you well know. A brain can only get so big, then the neural paths become unmanageably long. I’ll work out the detailed theory when I get home, if somebody else hasn’t beaten me to it.
“Earth, of course, is a peculiar case. The presence of the inhibitor field made terrestrial life change its basic biochemistry. We have our structural limitations too, but they’re wider because of that difference in type. Therefore, we may very well be the smartest race in the universe now—in this galaxy, at least.”
“Mmmmm, maybe so. Of course, there were many other stars in the field too.”
“And still are. New ones must be entering it almost daily. Lord, how I pity the thinking races on those planets! They’re thrown back to a submoronic level—a lot of them must simply die out, unable to survive without minds. Earth was lucky; it drifted into the field before intelligence had appeared.”
“But there must be many planets in a similar case,” urged Corinth.
“Well, possibly,” conceded Lewis. “There may well be races which emerged, and shot up to our present level, thousands of years ago. If so, we’ll meet them eventually, though the galaxy is so big that it may take a long time. And we’ll adjust harmoniously to each other.” He smiled wryly. “After all, pure logical mind is so protean, and the merely physical will become so unimportant to us, that we’ll
doubtless find those beings to be just like ourselves—whatever their bodies resemble. How’d you like to be a partner of a—a giant spider, maybe?”
Corinth shrugged. “I’d have no objections.”
“No, of course not. Be fun to meet them. And we won’t be alone in the universe any more—” Lewis sighed. “Still, Pete, let’s face it. Only a very tiny minority of all the sentient species there must be in the galaxy can have been as fortunate as us. We may find a dozen kindred races, or a hundred—no large number. Our sort of mind is very lonely.”
His eyes went out to the stars. “Nevertheless, it may be that that uniqueness has its compensations. I think I’m beginning to see an answer to the real problem: what is superbrained man going to do with his powers, what can he find worthy of his efforts? I still wonder if perhaps there hasn’t been a reason—call it God—for all this to happen.”
Corinth nodded absently. He was straining ahead, peering into the forward viewscreen as if his vision could leap light-years and find the planet called Earth.
SPRING had come late, but now there was warmth in the air and a mist of green on the trees. It was too nice a day to sit in an office, and Mandelbaum regretted his own eminence. It would be more fun to go out and shoot some golf, if the nearest course was dry enough yet. But as chief administrator of the area including roughly the old states of New York, New Jersey, and New England, he had his duties.
Well, when they had gotten the weather-turning force-screens into full production, he’d move his headquarters out in the country somewhere and sit in the open. Till then, he remained in the city. New York was dying, it had no
more economic or social purpose and every day some hundreds of people left it, but the location was still convenient.
He entered the office, nodded at the staff, and went into his own sanctum. The usual stack of reports waited, but he had barely gotten started when the phone rang. He swore as he picked it up—must be rather urgent if his secretary had bucked it on to him. “Hello,” he snapped.
“William Jerome.” It was the voice of the superintendent of the Long Island food-factory project. He had been a civil engineer before the change and continued his old work on a higher level. “I need advice,” he continued, “and you seem to be the best human-relations idea-man around.”
He spoke a little awkwardly, as did Mandelbaum; both were practicing the recently developed Unitary language. It had a maximal logic and a minimal redundancy in its structure, there was a universe of precise meaning in a few words, and it would probably become the international tongue of business and science if not of poetry; but it had only been made public a week before.
Mandelbaum frowned. Jerome’s work was perhaps the most important in the world today. Somehow two billion people must be fed, and the food synthesis plants would permit free distribution of an adequate if unexciting diet; but first they had to be built. “What is it this time?” he asked. “More trouble with Fort Knox?” Gold was an industrial metal now, valued for its conductivity and inertness, and Jerome wanted plenty of it for bus bars and reaction vats.
“No, they’ve finally begun delivering. It’s the workmen. I’ve got a slowdown on my hands, and it may become a strike.”
“What for? Higher wages?” Mandelbaum’s tone was sardonic. The problem of money was still not quite solved, and wouldn’t be until the new man-hour credit standard got world-wide acceptance; meanwhile he had established his own local system, payment in scrip which could be exchanged for goods and services. But there was only so much to go around: more money would be a valueless gesture.
“No, they’ve got over that. But the thing is, they don’t want to work six hours a day. It’s pretty dull, driving nails and mixing concrete. I’ve explained that it’ll take time to build robots for that sort of work, but they want the leisure immediately. What am I going to do if everybody’d rather accept a minimum standard of living and sit around arguing philosophy in his off hours?”
Mandelbaum grinned. “Leisure time is part of the standard of living too. What you got to do, Bill, is make ’em want to stay on the job.”
“Yeah—how?”
“Well, what’s wrong with setting up loudspeakers giving lectures on this and that? Better yet, give every man a buttonhole receiver and let him tune in on what he wants to hear: talks, symphonies, or whatever. I’ll call up Columbia and get ’em to arrange a series of beamcasts for you.”
“You mean broadcasts, don’t you?”
“No. Then they’d stay at home and listen. This series will run during working hours and be beamed exclusively at your construction site.”
“Hmmm—” Jerome laughed. “It might work at that!”
“Sure. You find out what the boys want and let me know. I’ll take care of the rest.”
When the engineer had hung up, Mandelbaum stuffed his pipe and returned to his papers. He wished all his headaches could be fixed as easily as that. But this matter of relocation. Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors. That would involve a huge labor of transference and landscaping, to say nothing of clearing ownership tides. He couldn’t resist so strong a demand, but he couldn’t do it at once, either. Then there was the business of—
“O’Banion,” said the annunciator.
“Hm? Oh, yes. He had an appointment, didn’t he? Send him in.”
Brian O’Banion had been an ordinary cop before the change; during the chaotic period he had worked with the civil police; now he was local chief of Observers. For all that, he was still a big red-faced Irishman, and it was incongruous
to hear crisp Unitary coming from his mouth.
“I need some more men,” he said. “The job’s getting too large again.”
Mandelbaum puffed smoke and considered. The Observers were his own creation, though the idea had spread far and would probably be adopted by the international government before long. The smooth operation of society required a steady flow of information, a fantastically huge amount to be correlated every day if developments were not to get out of hand. The Observers gathered it in various ways: one of the most effective was simply to wander around in the guise of an ordinary citizen, talking to people and using logic to fill in all the implications.
“Takes a while to recruit and train ’em, Brian,” said Mandelbaum. “What exactly do you want them for?”
“Well, first, there’s this business of the feeble-minded. I’d like to put a couple of extra men on it. Not an easy job; there are still a lot of ’em wandering around, you know, and they’ve got to be located and unobtrusively guided the right way, toward one of the little colonies that’re springing up.”
“And the colonies themselves ought to be watched more closely and guarded against interference—yeah. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to decide just what to do about them. But that’ll be part and parcel of what we decide to do about ourselves, which is still very much up in the air. Okay, anything else?”
“I’ve got a lead on—something. Don’t know just what, but I think it’s big and I think part of it is right here in New York.”
Mandelbaum turned impassive. “What’s that, Brian?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know. It may not even be criminal. But it’s big. I have tips from half a dozen countries around the world. Scientific equipment and materials are going into devious channels and not being seen again—publicly.”
“So? Why should every scientist give us a step-by-step account of his doings?”
“No reason. But for instance, the Swedish Observer corps tracked one thing. Somebody in Stockholm wanted a certain kind of vacuum tube, a very special kind. The
manufacturer explained that his whole stock, which was very small because of the low demand, had been bought by someone else. The would-be purchaser looked up the someone else, who turned out to be an agent buying for a fourth party he’d never seen. That got the Observers interested, and they checked every lab in the country; none of them had bought the stuff, so it was probably sent out by private plane or the like. They asked the Observers in other countries to check. It turned out that our customs men had noted a caseful of these same tubes arriving at Idlewild. That put a bee in my bonnet, and I tried to find where those tubes had gone. No luck—the trail ended there.
“So I started asking Observers around the world myself, and found several similar instances. Spaceship parts vanishing in Australia, for example, or a load of uranium from the Belgian Congo. It may not mean anything at all, but, well, if it’s a legitimate project, why all this secrecy? I want some more men to help me follow up on it. I don’t like the smell of it.”
Mandelbaum nodded. Something like a crazy, unsafe experiment in nucleonics—it could devastate his whole territory. Or there might be a more deliberate plan. No telling as yet.
“I’ll see you get them,” he said.
EARLY SUMMER: the first shy green of leaves has become a fullness enchanted with sunlight, talking with wind; it has rained just an hour ago, and the light cool wind shakes down a fine sparkle of drops, like a ghostly kiss on your uplifted face; a few sparrows dance on the long, empty streets; the clean quiet mass of the buildings is sharp against a luminous blue sky, the thousand windows
catch the morning sun and throw it back in one great dazzle.
The city had a sleeping look. A few men and women walked between the silent skyscrapers; they were casually dressed, some almost nude, and the driven feverish hurry of old days was gone. Now and then a truck or automobile purred down the otherwise bare avenue. They were all running off the new powercast system, and the smokeless, dustless air was almost cruelly brilliant. There was something of Sunday about this morning, though it was midweek.
Sheila’s heels tapped loudly on the sidewalk. The staccato noise jarred at her in the stillness. But she could only muffle it by slowing her pace, and she didn’t want to do that. She couldn’t.
A troop of boys, about ten years old, came out of the deserted shop in which they had been playing and ran down the street ahead of her. Young muscles still had to exercise, but it was saddening to her that they weren’t shouting. Sometimes she thought that the children were the hardest thing to endure. They weren’t like children any more.
It was a long walk from the depot to the Institute, and she could have saved her energy—for what?—by taking the subway. But the thought of being caged in metal with the new men of Earth made her shiver. It was more open and free aboveground, almost like being in the country. The city had served its day, now it was dying, and the bare blind walls around her were as impersonal as mountains. She was alone.
A shadow ran along the street, as if cast by a cloud traveling swiftly overhead. Looking up, she saw the long metallic shape vanish noiselessly behind the skyscrapers. Perhaps they had mastered gravity. What of it?
She passed by two men who were sitting in a doorway, and their conversation floated to her through the quiet:
“—starvish esthetics-the change.”
Swift flutter of hands.
“Wiedersehen.”
Sigh.
“Negate: macrocosm, un-ego, entropy. Human-meaning.”
She went on a little faster.
The Institute building looked shabbier than the Fifth Avenue giants. Perhaps that was because it was still intensely in use; it did not have their monumental dignity of death. Sheila walked into the lobby. There was no one around, but an enigmatic thing of blinking lights and glowing tubes murmured to itself in a corner. She went over to the elevator, hesitated, and turned off for the staircase. No telling what they had done to the elevator—maybe it was wholly automatic, maybe it responded directly to thought commands, maybe they had a dog running it.
On the seventh floor, breathing a little sharply, she went down the corridor. It hadn’t changed, at least—the men here had had too much else to do. But the old fluorescent tubes were gone, now the air itself—or the walls, ceiling, floor?—held light. It was peculiarly hard to gauge distances in that shadowless radiance.
She paused before the entrance to Pete’s old laboratory, swallowing a gulp of fear.
Stupid
, she told herself,
they’re not going to eat you. But what have they done inside? What are they doing now?
Squaring her shoulders, she knocked on the door. There was a barely perceptible hesitation, then: “Come in.” She turned the knob and entered.
The place had hardly changed at all. That was perhaps the most difficult thing to understand. Some of the apparatus was standing in a corner, dusty with neglect, and she did not comprehend the thing which had grown up to cover three tables. But it had always been that way when she visited her husband in the old days, a clutter of gadgetry that simply didn’t register on her ignorance. It was still the same big room, the windows opened on a heartlessly bright sky and a remote view of docks and warehouses, a shabby smock hung on the stained wall, and a faint smell of ozone and rubber was in the air. There were still the worn reference books on Pete’s desk; his table-model cigarette lighter—she had given it to him for Christmas, oh, very long ago—was slowly tarnishing by an empty ash tray, the chair was shoved back a little as if he had only gone out for a minute and would return any time.