The Rediscovery of Man Page 5

  Parizianski’s lips were barely readable in the haze of pain which flooded Martel. (He thought: God, God, God of the Ancients! Let me hold on! Let me live under Overload just long enough!) Parizianski was saying: “Get out of my way. By order of the Confraternity, get out of my way!” And Parizianski gave the sign. Help I demand in the name of my Duty!

  Martel choked for breath in the syrup-like air. He tried one last time: “Parizianski, friend, friend, my friend. Stop. Stop.” (No Scanner had ever murdered Scanner before.) Parizianski made the sign: You are unfit for duty, and I will take over.

  Martel thought, For the first time in the world! as he reached over and twisted Parizianski’s Brainbox up to Overload.

  Parizianski’s eyes glittered in terror and understanding. His body began to drift down toward the floor.

  Martel had just strength enough to reach his own Chestbox.

  As he faded into Haberman or death, he knew not which, he felt his fingers turning on the control of speed, turning down. He tried to speak, to say, “Get a Scanner, I need help, get a Scanner…”

  But the darkness rose about him, and the numb silence clasped him.

  Martel awakened to see the face of Luci near his own.

  He opened his eyes wider, and found that he was hearing hearing the sound of her happy weeping, the sound of her chest as she caught the air back into her throat.

  He spoke weakly: “Still cranched? Alive?”

  Another face swam into the blur beside Luci’s. It was Adam Stone. His deep voice rang across immensities of Space before coming to Martel’s hearing. Martel tried to read Stone’s lips, but could not make them out. He went back to listening to the voice: “… not cranched. Do you understand me? Not cranched!”

  Martel tried to say: “But I can hear! I can feel!” The others got his sense if not his words.

  Adam Stone spoke again: “You have gone back through the Haberman. I put you back first. I didn’t know how it would work in practice, but I had the theory all worked out. You don’t think the Instrumentality would waste the Scanners, do you? You go back to normality. We are letting the habermans die as fast as the ships come in. They don’t need to live any more. But we are restoring the Scanners. You are the first. Do you understand me? You are the first. Take it easy, now.”

  Adam Stone smiled. Dimly behind Stone, Martel thought that he saw the face of one of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality. That face, too, smiled at him, and then both faces disappeared upward and away.

  Martel tried to lift his head, to scan himself. He could not.

  Luci stared at him, calming herself, but with an expression of loving perplexity. She said, “My darling husband! You’re back again, to stay!”

  Still, Martel tried to see his box. Finally he swept his hand across his chest with a clumsy motion. There was nothing there.

  The instruments were gone. He was back to normality but still alive.

  In the deep weak peacefulness of his mind, another troubling thought took shape. He tried to write with his finger, the way that Luci wanted him to, but he had neither pointed fingernail nor Scanner’s Tablet. He had to vj use his voice. He summoned up his strength and whispered: “Scanners?”

  “Yes, darling? What is it?”

  “Scanners?”

  “Scanners. Oh, yes, darling, they’re all right. They had to arrest some of them for going into Highspeed and running away.

  But the Instrumentality caught them all all those on the ground and they’re happy now. Do you know, darling,” she laughed, “some of them didn’t want to be restored to normality.

  But Stone and the Chiefs persuaded them.”

  “Vomact?”

  “He’s fine, too. He’s staying cranched until he can be restored.

  Do you know, he has arranged for Scanners to take new jobs.

  You’re all Deputy Chiefs for Space. Isn’t that nice? But he got himself made Chief for Space. You’re all going to be pilots, so that your fraternity and guild can go on. And Chang’s getting changed back right now. You’ll see him soon.”

  Her face turned sad. She looked at him earnestly and said: “I might as well tell you now. You’ll worry otherwise. There has been one accident. Only one. When you and your friend called on Adam Stone, your friend was so happy that he forgot to scan, and he let himself die of Overload.”

  “Called on Stone?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember? Your friend.”

  He still looked surprised, so she said: “Parizianski.”

  The Lady Who Sailed The Soul

  The story ran how did the story run? Everyone knew the reference to Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and Abelard, whose story had been found among books in a long-buried library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Go-Captain Taliano and the Lady Dolores Oh.

  Out of it all, two things stood forth their love and the image of the great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars.

  Mention him, and others knew her. Mention her, and they knew him. He was the first of the inbound sailors, and she was the lady who sailed The Soul.

  It was lucky that people lost their pictures. The romantic hero was a very young-looking man, prematurely old and still quite sick when the romance came. And Helen America, she was a freak, but a nice one: a grim, solemn, sad, little brunette who had been born amid the laughter of humanity. She was not the tall, confident heroine of the actresses who later played her.

  She was, however, a wonderful sailor. That much was true.

  And with her body and mind she loved Mr. Grey-no-more, showing a devotion which the ages can neither surpass nor forget.

  History may scrape off the patina of their names and appearances, but even history can do no more than brighten the love of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more. Both of them, one must remember, were sailors.

  The story ran how did the story run? Everyone knew the reference to Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and Abelard, whose story had been found among books in a long-buried library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Go-Captain Taliano and the Lady Dolores Oh.

  Out of it all, two things stood forth their love and the image of the great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars.

  Mention him, and others knew her. Mention her, and they knew him. He was the first of the inbound sailors, and she was the lady who sailed The Soul.

  It was lucky that people lost their pictures. The romantic hero was a very young-looking man, prematurely old and still quite sick when the romance came. And Helen America, she was a freak, but a nice one: a grim, solemn, sad, little brunette who had been born amid the laughter of humanity. She was not the tall, confident heroine of the actresses who later played her.

  She was, however, a wonderful sailor. That much was true.

  And with her body and mind she loved Mr. Grey-no-more, showing a devotion which the ages can neither surpass nor forget.

  History may scrape off the patina of their names and appearances, but even history can do no more than brighten the love of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more. Both of them, one must remember, were sailors.

  In the preparation area, the make-ready was fast but not hurried. Twice the technicians urged her to take a holiday before she reported for final training. She did not accept their advice.

  She wanted to go forth; she knew that they knew she wanted to leave Earth forever, and she also knew they knew she was not merely her mother’s daughter. She was trying, somehow, to be herself. She knew the world did not believe, but the world did not matter.

  The third time they suggested a vacation, the s
uggestion was mandatory. She had a gloomy two months which she ended up enjoying a little bit on the wonderful islands of the Hesperides, islands which were raised when the weight of the Earthports caused a new group of small archipelagos to form below Bermuda.

  She reported back, fit, healthy, and ready to go.

  The senior medical officer was very blunt.

  “Do you really know what we are going to do to you? We are going to make you live forty years out of your life in one month.”

  She nodded, white of face, and he went on, “Now to give you those forty years we’ve got to slow down your bodily processes.

  After all, the sheer biological task of breathing forty years’ worth of air in one month involves a factor of about five hundred to one.

  No lungs could stand it. Your body must circulate water. It must take in food. Most of this is going to be protein. There will be some kind of a hydrate. You’ll need vitamins.

  “Now, what we are going to do is to slow the brain down, very much indeed, so that the brain will be working at about that five-hundred-to-one ratio. We don’t want you incapable of working. Somebody has got to manage the sails.

  “Therefore, if you hesitate or you start to think, a thought or two is going to take several weeks. Meanwhile your body can be slowed down some. But the different parts can’t be slowed down at the same rate. Water, for example, we brought down to about eighty to one. Food, to about three hundred to one.

  “You won’t have time to drink forty years’ worth of water. We circulate it, get it through, purify it, and get it back in your system, unless you break your link-up.

  “So what you face is a month of being absolutely wide awake, on an operating table and being operated on without anesthetic, while doing some of the hardest work that mankind has ever found.

  “You’ll have to take observations, you’ll have to watch your lines with the pods of people and cargo behind you, you’ll have to adjust the sails. If there is anybody surviving at destination point, they will come out and meet you.

  “At least that happens most of the times."

  “I am not going to assure you you will get the ship in. If they don’t meet you, take an orbit beyond the farthest planet and either let yourself die or try to save yourself. You can’t get thirty thousand people down on a planet singlehandedly."

  “Meanwhile, though, you’ve got a real job. We are going to have to build these controls right into your body. We’ll start by putting valves in your chest arteries. Then we go on, catheterizing your water. We are going to make an artificial colostomy that will go forward here just in front of your hip joint. Your water intake has a certain psychological value so that about one five-hundredth of your water we are going to leave you to drink out of a cup. The rest of it is going to go directly into your bloodstream. Again about a tenth of your food will go that way. You understand that?”

  “You mean,” said Helen, “I eat one-tenth, and the rest goes in intravenously?”

  “That’s right,” said the medical technician.

  “We will pump it into you. The concentrates are there. The reconstitutor is there. Now these lines have a double connection. One set of connections runs into the maintenance machine. That will become the logistic support for your body. And these lines are the umbilical cord for a human being alone among the stars. They are your life."

  “And now if they should break or if you should fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over: that’s the pack on your back."

  “On Earth, it weighs as much as you do. You have already been drilled with the model pack. You know how easy it is to handle in space. That’ll keep you going for a subjective period of about two hours. No one has ever worked out a clock yet that would match the human mind, so instead of giving you a clock we are giving you an odometer attached to your own pulse and we mark it off in grades. If you watch it in terms of tens of thousands of pulse beats, you may get some information out of it."

  “I don’t know what kind of information, but you may find it helpful somehow.” He looked at her sharply and then turned back to his tools, picking up a shining needle with a disk on the end."

  “Now, let’s get back to this. We are going to have to get right into your mind. That’s chemical too.”

  Helen interrupted.

  “You said you were not going to operate on my head.”

  “Only the needle. That’s the only way we can get to the mind.Slow it down enough so that you will have this subjective mind operating at a rate of Man that will make the forty years pass in a month.”

  He smiled grimly, but the grimness changed to momentary tenderness as he took in her brave obstinate stance, her girlish, admirable, pitiable determination.

  “I won’t argue it,” she said.

  “This is as bad as a marriage and the stars are my bridegroom.” The image of the sailor went across her mind, but she said nothing of him.

  The technician went on.

  “Now, we have already built in psychotic elements. You can’t even expect to remain sane. So you’d better not worry about it. You’ll have to be insane to manage the sails and to survive utterly alone and be out there even a month. And the trouble is, in that month you are going to know it’s really forty years. There is not a mirror in the place, but you’ll probably find shiny surfaces to look at yourself. You won’t look so good. You will see yourself aging, every time you slow down to look. I don’t know what the problem is going to be on that score. It’s been bad enough on men."

  “Your hair problem is going to be easier than men’s. The sailors we sent out, we simply had to kill all the hair roots. Otherwise the men would have been swamped in their own beards. And a tremendous amount of the nutrient would be wasted if it went into raising of hair on the face which no machine in the world could cut off fast enough to keep a man working. I think what we will do is inhibit hair on the top of your head. Whether it comes out in the same color or not is something you will find for yourself later. Did you ever meet the sailor that came in?”

  The doctor knew she had met him. He did not know that it was the sailor from beyond the stars who called her.

  Helen managed to remain composed as she smiled at him to say: “Yes, you gave him new hair. Your technician planted a new scalp on his head, remember. Somebody on your staff did. The hair came out black and he got the nickname of Mr. Grey-no-more.”

  “If you are ready next Tuesday, we’ll be ready too. Do you think you can make it by then, my lady?”

  Helen felt odd seeing this old, serious man refer to her as “lady,” but she knew he was paying respect to a profession and not just to an individual.

  “Tuesday is time enough.” She felt complimented that he was an old-fashioned enough person to know the ancient names of the days of the week and to use them. That was a sign that he had not only learned the essentials at the University but that he had picked up the elegant inconsequentialities as well.

  Two weeks later was twenty-one years later by the chronometers in the cabin. Helen turned for the ten-thousand times-ten-thousandth time to scan the sails.

  Her back ached with a violent throb.

  She could feel the steady roar of her heart like a fast vibrator as it ticked against the time-span of her awareness. She could look down at the meter on her wrist and see the hands on the watch like dials indicate tens of thousands of pulses very slowly.

  She heard the steady whistle of air in her throat as her lungs seemed shuddering with sheer speed.

  And she felt the throbbing pain of a large tube feeding an immense quantity of mushy water directly into the artery of her neck.

  On her abdomen, she felt as if someone had built a fire. The evacuation tube operated automatically but it burnt as if a coal had been held to her skin, and a catheter, which connected her bladder to another tube, stung as savagely as the prod of a scalding-hot needle. Her head ached and her vision blurred.

  But she could still see the instruments and s
he still could watch the sails. Now and then she could glimpse, faint as a tracery of dust, the immense skein of people and cargo that lay behind them.

  She could not sit down. It hurt too much.

  The only way that she could be comfortable for resting was to lean against the instrument panel, her lower ribs against the panel, her tired forehead against the meters.

  Once she rested that way and realized that it was two and a half months before she got up. She knew that rest had no meaning, and she could see her face moving, a distorted image of her own face growing old in the reflections from the glass face of the “apparent weight” dial. She could look at her arms with blurring vision, note the skin tightening, loosening, and tightening again, as changes in temperatures affected it.

  She looked out one more time at the sails and decided to take in the foresail. Wearily she dragged herself over the control panel with a servo-robot. She selected the right control and opened it for a week or so. She waited there, her heart buzzing, her throat whistling air, her fingernails breaking off gently as they grew.

  Finally she checked to see if it really had been the right one, pushed again, and nothing happened.

  She pushed a third time. There was no response.

  Now she went back to the master panel, re-read, checked the light direction, found a certain amount of infrared pressure which she should have been picking up. The sails had very gradually risen to something not of Man far from the speed of light itself because they moved fast with the one side dulled; the pods behind, sealed against time and eternity, swam obediently in an almost perfect weightlessness.

  She scanned; her reading had been correct.

  The sail was wrong.

  She went back to the emergency panel and pressed. Nothing happened.

  She broke out a repair robot and sent it out to effect repairs, punching the papers as rapidly as she could to give instructions.

  The robot went out and an instant (three days) later it replied.

  The panel on the repair robot rang forth, “Does not conform.”