Before the poles of the planet were levered into place, the genii was. Before the apes were, he was. He took one tribe of apes and lured them into becoming men.
When this task was partly finished, the genii kept on working. There was no rest for him! He continued talking to groups of men in reality and in troubled dreams, saying:
"Move on! Just ahead of you is the wishing well! Keep traveling! The garage that keeps the magic carpet is just around the next turn in the road!"
By listening to such talk of something better up ahead, men learned to tame horses and to make automobiles and to build airplanes.
This was progress, yes, but it did not satisfy the genii of the inner surfaces. "Move on from continent to continent," he urged men. "And after that, move on from planet to planet, it's better up ahead."
So men moved, thinking they supplied their own motives for motion, never realizing that the genii of the inner surfaces was a Pied Piper forever piping tunes of happy lands and happy times waiting for them somewhere up ahead.
"And after the planets, move on from solar system to solar system, then from galaxy to galaxy. It's better up there. I tell you, it's better!"
When men were weary and their feet stumbled and their poor heads were even thicker than usual, the genii talked to them about green pastures and about lying down beside still waters, which were always up ahead, of course.
When he was not talking about the great day coming on some tomorrow, the genii was tormenting men by asking many questions, such as: "What's an atom? Why does it spin that way? What's on the other side of the moon? Who made you? Who made Him? What are you going to do with it now that you've got it?"
He had other questions which he asked eternally, such as: "What's dying all about? Why is it like being born? Are there other worlds? Have you ever seen them? What is ESP? How does it work? Can you do it too?"
Eternally asking, "Can you do it too?" he tormented men into improving both mind and body. From the genii himself— from no other—men learned the Socratic method of teaching by asking questions. From him also—from no other—they learned the high art of lying. Eventually they were practicing on each other the high art of telling the big lie by talking about democracy and equality and justice and the rights of men and of truths to be held self-evident.
Or did the genii himself whisper these lies to men, knowing their egotism was so great that they would think they had thought up all of this nonsense themselves? No matter the answer to this question. It is a fact that the genii often lost his temper when tormented by too close questions about such horrors as truth and shouted back at his human realists: "I know, I know, I know! But somewhere up ahead you will find a world where liberty, equality, fraternity, the rights of man and truths to be held self-evident, are more than words come out of fairyland!"
If pressed as to where this new world might be found, the genii shouted even louder. "Beyond the stars, you son of an ape! And if you don't find it, make it! But you will never reach it with your head stuck in yesterday's mud. Up and onward! How do you get to the stars? Do thus and so to the atom, you sons of apes!"
He insisted there was a land somewhere—perhaps in the region of the summer stars—where wishes came true. This, of course, was only another way to say that to wish a thing was to bring that thing into existence, and that if you desired it, it would be done to you, for you, by you—sometime. This, in its turn, was only another way to say that mice and the sons of apes—and the whole starry universe and everything within it —came into being as a result of Somebody wishing real hard.
About this Somebody, the genii never talked. When questioned on this subject, via the telephone running through witches and through other kinds of oracles, he always replied, grumpily: "Stick to practical things, you son of an ape! Cherish the devil you know! He's better for you than somebody else's god!"
After this kind of gruff talk, as if to distract attention from the accusation that his head was growing as soft as his heart, the genii always began to shout very loud. "Look, yonder, on the horizon! See that glow in the sky! That's the lights of the promised land!"
Then it was pointed out to him that this glow was in the sky over Hiroshima.
When he saw how the sons of apes had turned aside from what had been given to them as a help to reach the stars, even the genii had to pause to think. This was a twist even he had not foreseen. "What to do about this?" Indeed, what to do about it! Hand in chin, sitting down, the genii got himself all bent and twisted out of shape as he tried to find an answer to this question. He had told them to look for secrets in the heart of the atom. Now he could not take away from them the knowledge they had found there. Even he couldn't do it!
When he finally looked up from trying to solve this problem, he saw, on the ancient space horizon he had always guarded, a small cloud. It was no bigger than a man's hand.
The sight of this cloud shocked the genii wide awake. He knew this little spot so far away as yet that no man could see it was actually worse than the glow in Hiroshima's sky.
What to do? What to do? What to do?
He could do anything, except wait. Knowing waiting would be fatal, he set to work, mixing a porridge made up in part of the thing that had happened over Hiroshima, in part of cold things, and in part of a place in the earth that went zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. This peculiar place that went zzzzzzzzzzzz he had often wondered about but he had never dared use it. Nor would he dare use it now except desperation was driving him.
A porridge of all these things. And of men, women, and children all stirred hastily together.
The cloud in the space sky grew bigger and bigger and bigger.
"No, Mrs. Northcutt," the doctor said. "I'm reasonably sure you're not pregnant."
Lying on the examining table, Cindy Northcutt heard the kind, fatherly tones in the obstetrician's voice as he sought to bring into existence in her mind the emotions she had once bestowed upon her father. She also heard the note of doubt he was trying to conceal and she wondered what was causing his concern. He was her obstetrician, he knew all about her inward works, having delivered her two children, Jimmy, now aged four, and Kathy, now aged two. Cindy had made an appointment to see him for an examination because of the conviction in her mind that it was now time for Richard. Or perhaps Richard would be a Helen. Cindy did not care, one way or the other. Cindy Northcutt had enough love in her for a dozen children, whether boys or girls did not matter to her.
"However, we have a new test . . ." the doctor continued. "If you don't mind, I'd like to run it."
"Sure, go ahead," Cindy said, then winced as the doctor and his nurse probed for whatever it was they wanted. Fifteen minutes later, she was dressed and was standing in the doorway of the doctor's office.
"Give me another month or two," she said to him, imploringly.
"I don't know what you mean," he answered.
"And I'll be back to see you. And I'll be pregnant," she answered.
The grin that came over his rugged face faded almost instantly into worry.
At the Child Care Center, she picked up her two children. This was a family that kept its sexual data out in the open. Both children knew where she had been—and why.
"When will we get another baby sister, mommy?" Richard asked. At age four, his manner was a mixture of gravity and earnest inquiry into some mystery he did not quite comprehend.
"You ask like some oriental potentate inquiring about adding a new woman to his harem!" Cindy said, hugging him. "Aren't your mother and sister enough for you, sir?"
"Don't want baby sister," Kathy said, speaking her mind. "Want baby brother."
"I understand, darling," Cindy told her two-year old daughter. "I like somebody to boss too, preferably somebody male. But mommy can't absolutely guarantee a baby brother for you. Science has made remarkable strides forward, but whether science likes it or not, something else is running the show in this matter."
Cindy spoke with conviction. Kathy nodded vague assent.
That night, after the kids were asleep, she and her husband watched a program on television called "New Worlds of Science," dealing with the activation of Threshold Unit Number 41, hydrogen rather than atomic powered. As the announcer showed the new unit, Cindy shivered and drew closer to her husband.
"Does it shake you, darling?" Tom asked. He was head over heels in love with his wife.
"Yes," she said.
He reached to change the program but she stopped him. "No, no, sweetheart. We can at least look and feel sorry for the poor people who have to face such horrors."
He left the program unchanged.
"In this new unit, the time interval for reactivation has been established at one hundred years," the announcer said. "This means that one hundred years is the shortest period of sleep in this unit. There are many sound technical reasons for this time limitation. As yet, nobody knows the greatest length of time an individual may remain asleep, because the first unit was established only twenty-eight years ago. As of now, May, 2030, the people in Unit One are still sleeping. And are still alive. Regular checks by doctors continuously in attendance at Unit One conclusively prove that everyone who entered Unit One is still alive! Perhaps men may eventually sleep for as long as a thousand years! Perhaps even longer!"
The voice of the announcer took on a note of strain and his eyes showed a slight glaze as he talked about sleeping the centuries away.
"Imagine it!" he continued. "In the past, this was only legend, the Rip Van Winkle story. At the dawn of the 21st Century, the old legend became true! This indicates that no matter what problem anyone faces, science will eventually find a solution for it. To reach this solution, all that is required of the individual is that he enter a threshold unit and there to go into painless, frozen sleep, each person secure in the knowledge that when he awakens science will have solved his problem! Or, if an individual has an incurable disease, such as the dreaded leukemia VH, that strange form of blood malignancy for which not even modern medicine has as yet found a cure, he can enter a threshold unit such as Unit 41 and sleep for a hundred years. In this length of time science will have found a cure for this dread disease. The awakening will find doctors and nurses ready with the cure!"
In the announcer's eyes, the glaze grew deeper. "In a few minutes, I will show you actual scenes from Unit 41. But before I do that I want to mention that signs of bitter opposition which may take the form of laws to suppress the building of future threshold units are beginning to appear. While such an action would be an unwarranted and wholly unconstitutional violation of the rights of an individual in a free society, if it actually comes to pass, it will not be the first transgression by what calls itself 'public authority' against the rights of the individual."
"He can say that again," Tom Northcutt grumbled beside Cindy. "The idea that America is the home of the free is becoming more of a delusion every day—if it ever was anything else!"
"Don't be bitter, darling," Cindy said to her husband. "If people go to sleep in the deep freeze units to reach the future, their action says there is something wrong with the present. The state legislatures, Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, none like this kind of criticism. We'll be lucky if the deep freeze threshold units are not declared Un-American, and therefore Communistic, and therefore the work of the devil."
"Give the law-makers time, they'll think of doing that," Tom said.
Cindy yawned. "After all, darling, the threshold units are not our problem."
"Oh, all right," Tom answered. Then, as memory moved in him, he spoke again. "Why did you go to the doctor today?"
"Oh, that," Cindy said.
"Yes, that," Tom answered. "Is anything wrong with you?"
"No," she said. "It's just that ..." She searched in her mind for words adequate to express so delicate a matter.
"That what?" her husband demanded.
"It's that I have decided it is about time for me to get pregnant again," she said.
Perhaps these words were not really adequate to express so delicate a matter but Tom seemed to get the idea very readily.
"Oh," he said.
"Race you to the bedroom!" she said, brightly.
"Go!" Tom said, quickly.
She went. It was not a race she really expected to win. The best she ever hoped for was a dead heat. But every time she ran a dead heat in such a race as this, she always felt, somehow, that she was the winner.
The next morning, her doctor called.
"Can you come down to my office this afternoon. Mrs. Northcutt? The lab goofed on a couple of your tests and we want additional samples so we can rerun them."
"This afternoon?" Cindy said, sleepily. "Oh, sure."
The doctor was polite—and obviously irritated. He apologized for the mistake, swore at the lab for making it. said again and again that this laboratory was usually completely reliable, and finished by saying, in a worried tone of voice, that he could not understand how they could have made such an error. Deftly, he took another smear, then blood for additional tests.
Cindy was not much impressed by any of this. When she left the office, she was still sleepy. She paused in the doorway long enough to ask a question.
"How do I know if you're pregnant now? I didn't test for that," the doctor shouted. "Get out of here!"
Cindy was laughing as she exited.
The next day, the doctor called again. This time there was no mistaking the agony in his voice. "I must see you immediately, Mrs. Northcutt. And bring your husband too, please."
"Bring Tom? What for? He's done his part."
"I don't doubt that," the doctor answered. "I'll keep my office open this evening until you get here. Will eight o'clock be all right?"
"What the devil does he want with me?" Tom said. He was sleepy too, and somewhat grumpy in consequence. "Is he trying to make a production out of telling me you're pregnant? Hell, I know it! At least I know you've been exposed! Well, if we must, I suppose we must."
The doctor took them into his private office, seated them in comfortable chairs, then went behind a big desk which had several paper-crammed folders on it. Sitting down. there, his lips tightened and his cheeks grew hard and his eyes bleak. His manner was that of a man determined to speak what was on his mind as quickly as possible, but wishing he did not have to say anything at all.
"I am sorry to tell you this. But, Mrs. Northcutt, you have leukemia seven!"
Cindy heard the words. She did not really understand them, all she knew was that they had a vaguely familiar ring. She knew the doctor had said she had some kind of a disease but she supposed this meant something similar to the rash she had had as a child. They had called the rash a disease. Whatever it was, it was nothing important, really. But why was Tom stiffening in his chair?
It was Tom who spoke, in a voice that was suddenly tight and a little shrill.
"Leukemia seven? I'm afraid I don't understand, doctor. Is this a disease?"
"Yes," the physician said. His face grew even more pinched. "It is a new form of blood malignancy."
In the suddenly silent office, Cindy was aware of the hum of an electric clock. She was confused. What was in the doctor's mind? "You surely didn't ask us down here just to tell us about some new form of blood condition," she said hesitantly.
"No," the doctor said. "No. I didn't."
"The . . ." At this point, she stopped being sleepy. She realized what the doctor was trying to say.
"You don't mean that I . . ."
The doctor nodded.
She was on her feet, screaming. "But I can't have this whatever it is! I can't! I can't! I can't! I've got two kids to raise. They're still small. I'm going to have at least one more, maybe two . . ."
At the sight of the doctor's pinched, tight face, her voice went from a scream to a wail.
"I'm a mother! I've got small children that have to be raised. I can't be sick! God won't let me be sick! I . . ."
Perhaps somewhere deep in her mind she perceived that the universe gave scant heed to the importance of her claim of being a mother, seeing in this moment of horror that motherhood belonged to the race and not to her. The wails faded and the screams came back, louder now, in futile protest against a universe which permitted a woman to fall in— nay, which commanded her to fall in love—and allowed her to have children—again, commanded her to have them—then when she had had them, to take her away from them before her job was even started, really . . . "God won't let me be sick!" she repeated.
The doctor's face told her he had seen God permit more horror than was good for men to think about, abortions and miscarriages, freaks born to die within hours . . .
It was Tom who took her into his arms and tried to comfort her. It was Tom who turned to the physician in a voice hot with anger. "You might give some respect to her feelings, doctor!"
"I've been trying to do that!" the doctor shouted in answer.
"But there must be some gentle way to break such news as this."
"If there is, I haven't found it yet!" the doctor answered. He looked like a man who needed nothing so much as he needed a drink.
"All right," Tom assented. "Perhaps you did try to consider her feelings. Let that part go. Now that we know what is wrong with her, our problem is treatment." Tom turned again to Cindy. "It's all right, darling. At worst, this will mean a few weeks in the hospital while you are getting cured. I'll take good care of the kids."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the doctor was choking and shaking his head. Tom was suddenly silent. Hate suddenly pounded in him as he looked at this physician.
"I'm sorry," the physician was saying. "Awfully sorry. I mean, I can't tell you ..."
"What are you trying to say?" Tom demanded.
"What I am trying not to say is that there is no known treatment for leukemia seven!" the doctor answered.
"What do you mean—no known treatment?" Tom demanded. "There's got to be treatment!"
He watched in horror as the doctor shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Northcutt," the doctor said. "There just isn't any treatment. In some people, the disease suddenly appears, for no known reason. Once in a great while, it aborts, disappears. But ninety-nine percent of the cases ran straight to death!"
The physician sounded as if he was strangling on the words he was speaking. "Sometimes I wonder if there is anything at all to the germ theory of disease," he muttered.
"But," Tom Northcutt's voice was now a scream, "if there is no treatment, what do we do?"
"Nothing," the doctor answered. "There is nothing we can do except provide adequate sedation to keep down the pain. Three months is the usual life expectancy after leukemia seven has reached a stage where it can be diagnosed . . ."
"Three months!" Tom's voice rose to a higher scream. "Do you mean to tell me that you brought us down here tonight to tell us that three months is all ... is all ... the time my wife has left?"
Tom's voice failed completely as he looked at Cindy. He loved her. Before her, he had loved his mother. The love of a small boy for his mother had been transferred to the mate, where it had been broadened and strengthened. He loved their kids. If they had more children, he would love them too. All the love he had given to Cindy, she had given back to him, full measure, heaped up, and overflowing. Now this doctor was trying to tell him that Cindy had only three more months to live! Three months! He would see this doctor in hell before he would accept this diagnosis! At this moment, he could have killed the physician.
Then he saw the doctor's face. Pain was on this face too, and hurt, the latter rising from the fact that the physician was having to confess and to face not only his own failure but also the failure of modern medicine. "Not good enough!" some part of the doctor's mind was shouting at him. The physician had tried to produce health. He had failed. Despite all he— and all other physicians—had been able to do, death was still the strong antagonist that no one could defeat. Or was there something in men that sought death as a drunkard seeks his strong drink, finding in death a release to higher worlds that lay afar?
As Tom Northcutt saw the pain on the physician's face, some of the violent anger went out of him. The doctor was only a messenger, he saw, only a man bringing bad news. He was not the source of the news. It was the news that Tom hated, not the man who brought it.
"Are . . . are you sure of the diagnosis?" he faltered.
The doctor tapped the folders on top of his desk. "When the first routine test came back positive, I did not trust it. I asked Mrs. Northcutt to return . . ."
"So that's why you wanted me to come back!" Cindy said. She had sunk back into her chair.
"Yes," the doctor answered. "The second time you returned, I took samples which went to two different labs. Here are all of the reports. They all say leukemia seven. I don't think that three good testing labs would all miss a diagnosis the same way."
His voice had started out with the resolution to be firm and sure. Halfway through what it had to say, the voice lost all of its resolution. It ended twisted and torn.
"All right," Tom Northcutt said. He had brought himself to a temporary acceptance of the doctor's hated words and had gone on into action. "All right! We'll begin treatment immediately!" Tom's voice was also firm and sure.
The doctor spread his hands. "But Mr. Northcutt! There is no treatment!"
Tom's sure and firm voice became a whisper. "No treatment?"
"None known to me!"
"Then we'll get another doctor!" Tom's voice went from a whisper to a scream. "We'll start looking first thing in the morning."
For an instant, something that resembled hope gleamed in the physician's eyes. "I'll help you look!" he said quickly, while the hope still glowed in his eyes. "I'll have the local medical library check for reports of any new treatment that may have come in today. I'll call the National Library in New York and have them start checking, I'll also call London and Tokyo. Sometimes the Japanese come up with new treatments that haven't been translated into English. I'll get through to Moscow and see if the Commies have any new ideas on the treatment of this leukemia."
Tom Northcutt stared at this man in wonder. "I was thinking of calling in another doctor," he said.
"I'll help you find him," the physician said. "We'll send Mrs. Northcutt to three different physicians. She will tell them nothing except that she has been feeling a little draggy and wants an examination. I wonder if all three of those labs could have been wrong on the diagnosis!" Hope leaped into the doctor's eyes again, then faded away. "No. No. All three labs would not have been wrong."
Hope leaped into his eyes, then faded again, a dogged determination replacing it. "Well, I can try," he said, reaching for the phone.
Tom Northcutt, standing, heard the doctor tell an unseen operator to put him through to the physician's exchange in Moscow. "And find somebody there who can speak English!" the doctor said, hanging up. He clicked the phone, then was back on the line again, putting through a call to Tokyo. His next call went to New York. He dialed this direct. Tom heard a woman's voice speak from some faraway spot. "New on leukemia seven? One second and I will check." Tom heard an index whirl, then click to a stop. "No," the woman's voice said. "Nothing new on this leukemia since your call yesterday. Yes, sir. I will call you instantly if a new treatment comes to our attention."
Tom slowly sank back down in his chair. He was barely aware that sitting in the chair next to him was what seemed at this moment to be a bundle of old clothes. He hardly recognized his wife, who only the night before had dared him to race her to the bedroom but who now looked as if she would never again have the spirit to race anybody anywhere.
Tom heard somebody talking. The fellow was saying, "This can't happen to us. It can't! It can't!" Later, he realized this was his own voice that he was hearing, that he was talking to himself.
A voice talked twisted English from Moscow. The doctor listened, then hung up. Eventually the phone rang again. This time the voice talking twisted English was from Tokyo. "Thank you for trying," the doctor said.
"Believe me, sir, you and Mrs. Northcutt have my sympathy," the doctor said. He opened a drawer of his desk, took from it a small plastic box.
"These are for relief when the pain comes," he said, handing the box to Tom. "No more than two in four hours."
In the manner of a man walking a short distance with two good friends going on a journey which he knows he will also have to take someday, the doctor walked to the door of the office with them.
"Remember, I will do everything I can to help," he said.
"One thing is certain," Cindy said. "I'm not going to sit around and wait to die!"
Clicking softly, the door closed behind the physician.
"This I do declare to be the last will and testament of Cindy Harker Northcutt ... To my dearly beloved husband, Thomas Northcutt, I do give, devise, and bequeath all of my worldly possessions, to have and to hold as long as he sees fit, including our two children, a girl named Kathy and a boy named Jimmy . . ."
And the cold came down, came down, came down.
"This I hold to be true, that the only God worth calling by that name is big enough to make every man a true man!" J. Edward Palmer shouted in the soft summer night in Pershing Square in Old Los Angeles.
In this place, speech was still as free as the Founding Fathers of nation called America had intended it to be. Here any man might speak his mind and face no consequences worse than the loss of his audience.
This consequence, J. Eward Palmer had faced many times since he had been coming here to give his message to the world. How many more times he could face it, he did not know. His message was important, he thought. The winos, the bums, the down-and-outers who frequented Pershing Square, thought Palmer and his message were something to laugh at. All except one, a thin-faced, dark-haired young man with an intense manner. And even he often wandered away before Palmer had finished talking.
Here in this place there was competition for an audience.
"I hope you all understand what I mean," Palmer said. At this moment, he had at least a dozen listeners, a fact which made him glow inside. Palmer was a little man. Dressed in the style once made famous by Charles Chaplin, his pants were too long and were rolled up at the bottoms, and his coat was too big. In fact, he had found the suit outside a Good Will collection box. His white shirt was frayed at the collar, as a result of too many washings in too many flophouse sinks and his tie was spotted.
But if his suit was worn and his linen was frayed and his shoes had holes in their bottoms, his heart counted these things as trifles. It knew the meaning of Agape.
"When I talk to you about a God big enough to make every man a true man, I don't mean what you may think I mean. I know, of course, that in the worst man there is some good and that this will redeem him in the end. I am, however, talking about another aspect of the universe which seems to have been overlooked in our hurried modern rush to have a scientific explanation for everything."
He paused, looking over his audience. Yes, there was the young man with the intense manner. He was listening. The others looked as if they would wander at any moment. There were other speakers in the park this night. Audiences had a tendency to drift away and to miss the Word he had to give them.
It was a big Word he had in mind. He hoped to be able to put this big Word into little words so that even a child could understand his meaning. This was not easy. Words were like little butterfly nets in which to capture meaning, only the meaning kept slipping away between the meshes of the net.
"Nor do I mean that in every man called crooked there is somewhere a hidden path that goes straight, nor that in every liar a word of truth is hidden away, nor in every coward there is somewhere a streak of bravery, nor that in every fraud there is somewhere a hidden honesty."
Palmer's English was good, his choice of words was excellent, his accent, however, was foreign to the benign skies of California. He had a right to this foreign accent. He had been graduated from Yale and had been born in Connecticut, coming of wealthy Yankee stock. After graduation, an excellent position with a good salary had been waiting for him in one of the businesses his family operated from New York. Also waiting for him was a young woman, attractive, well-groomed, with perfect manners, but a trifle dull. He had not selected her as a wife, nor had she selected him, though they had been engaged to be married. Their respective families had made the selections, mating children with great care, so that more valuable stocks and bonds could grow.
The engagement had been broken, by him, as a result of a very great change that had taken place in him. This had come about from an automobile accident. Driving his powerful car one night in a strange neighborhood, a little drunk, he had struck and had killed a child whose skin (this seemed odd to him at the time) had been black.
His insurance company had settled handsomely. His lawyers had quietly made the right contributions to the right political funds, and the drunken driving citation had been removed from the records. J. Edward Palmer had gone completely free ... of everything but memory. The night the child had screamed and had died under his car, he had seen a world he had never really known existed, the world of the slums, the ape world of poverty, despair, fear, hate, prostitution, and murder. He had been abjectly contrite over the death of the child, though the accident had not been his fault, not really. Defying death, or perhaps seeking it as an escape from existence in an intolerable neighborhood, the child had practically thrown herself in front of his car. But even if the accident had not really been his fault, the death of the child had hit him hard.
J. Edward Palmer was actually a very sensitive human being. This meant he had a capacity for suffering deeper than that of ordinary men. It seemed to him the death of the child had hit him harder than it had her parents! Secretly, they had seemed to him to be glad that the child was dead, that death had not only relieved them of the burden of knowing she existed (they had done little more than this in caring for her) but that it had also given them an opportunity for a big windfall in the shape of a huge insurance settlement. About the child they had cared nothing. About the settlement they had cared everything.
So it had happened to J. Edward Palmer as perhaps it had once happened to a sensitive person called the Buddha and as it must eventually happen to all sensitive humans who walk the surface of Planet Earth. The story is told of the Buddha that he had been raised as a prince, in rich secluded gardens, living in a beautiful palace, and that all ugly scenes had been kept from him. Then, one day, the young prince had wandered away from his beautiful palace and had seen a dead man . . . and a hungry man . . . and other men.
J. Edward Palmer had never heard of the Buddha, except in a class in comparative religions, when he had been in college, which had dismissed him as an obscure religious leader of India of long ago. Then a child had died under the wheel of his car, and he had discovered, as the Buddha had discovered long before, that there were killer, cannibalistic apes on the surface of Planet Earth, who lived by murder as often as not, and who quite often existed in pain in squalid surroundings and that this really seemed to be nobody's fault, not even the fault of the Architect, who had planned a world so that it could include such apes living in such jungles.
Then Palmer had discovered that he was one of those apes, in spite of the different color of his skin, and that the Yankee blueblood, of which his family had been so proud for so many generations, was actually also ape blood, not refined or civilized at all but with the thinnest veneer called culture laid over it as a gilding cover to conceal and to hide its murdering heart.
Nothing that had ever happened to J. Edward Palmer had ever shocked him so much as his discovery that ape blood and ape impulses, including violent sex and violent murder, were hidden in him just as much as they were hidden beneath the surface of the slum dwellers. Perhaps these were only hidden whispers floating quietly to the surface of the conscious mind from deep levels of the unconscious. Perhaps most people could disregard them. But Palmer suspected that such thoughts could easily go ahead of violent actions exploding into the light.
J. Edward Palmer had seen a dead child. Talking to her parents, talking to other people in the neighborhood, he had seen murder, and drug addiction, and prostitution. He had not actually seen murder, but behind the scenes he had sensed its existence. Then he had discovered that his family actually owned many of these horrible slum dwellings!
In the shocks following after the automobile accident, Palmer had unquestionably gone mad. He had broken his engagement, with the hasty consent of the young woman and of her family when they realized what had happened to him. When his own family had tried to force him to undergo psychiatric treatment or be hospitalized, he had brought up his lawyers to defend him. In this way, he had evaded both treatment and hospitalization. True, he had had to surrender a big portion of his estate to his older brother, but enough remained to keep him in comfort all his life. The surrender of all title and of all interest in the slum dwellings had lifted a load from his mind. In the horrible world of mental and emotional turmoil in which he had lived at the time, money had not been important.
In claiming he had gone mad, his family had been right. A family tree that went back to colonial days, with all of its members sternly in their right minds at all times, had finally produced a madman. Or a mad rebel who was really in the exact tradition of rebellion that had made the family important in the first place. Or a man who perceived quite clearly that being sternly in their right minds at all times had made of this family a group of madmen, and that by revolting against this rigidity, he was in the process of becoming sane. Or so he hoped. He also suspected that the difference between sanity and madness is often only as wide as an opinion in the mind of a narrow-minded physician.
Palmer had left New York, driving. His destination had been California. His choice of California as a place to live had been a matter of common sense. From what he had heard of it, California was a place where the nuts and the cults had been gathered together. It was a place where insanity in a man was hardly noticed.
As he was driving westward, on the bank of a small river in eastern Tennessee, where the Smoky Mountains rise tier on tier toward some far-off heaven, something had happened to J. Edward Palmer. It was not such a thing as he had ever heard of, or read about, or thought could happen to anyone. He had slept in his car one night, pulling it to the side of the road when fatigue had overcome him. In the morning, bird song had awakened him. He climbed out of the car to discover he had stopped on the bank of a small river. In the dawn, now, mist was rising from the surface of the water. Beyond the river, through the limbs of trees, he caught a glimpse of hills rising mistily toward a far-off skyline. He moved down to the edge of the stream and squatted there to lift water in his cupped hands. The mirror surface of the little river showed him his face with its twisted, unshaven, and hollow cheeks, its haunted eyes, its wrinkled forehead, its distorted mouth that held dirty, cigarette-stained teeth.
His own face was so repulsive he could not bear to continue looking at it. Averting his gaze, he looked across the stream and beyond it, to the spot where the mountains, misty in the morning, stopped being mountains and became the pearl-gray sky.
Inside him, his own thought stream brought words to the surface of his conscious mind. He listened to these words. He was saying them, inside himself, and he knew it, but he had never thought to hear his own mind saying such words as these.
"I am a son of the living God!" the words said, in his own mind.
With the words came an emotion, Agape, the love that combines a sense of wonder, awe, and reverence, the love that gives with no thought of return to the giver and with no regard to the merit of the receiver.
Until this moment, J. Edward Palmer had not known that such an emotion existed anywhere in the universe. Until this moment, he had been a product of the existing educational system and he had thought that what he had been taught in college was about everything there was to know; if there was more to be know, science would soon discover it and would dutifully report it to him. Until this moment, he had had the unconscious belief that the good things of life came to him automatically as the peons in the laboratories discovered them. He was a product of a materialistic educational system which had its roots deep in the materialistic culture that had produced it and which had forgotten the things of the spirit. The educational system fed back to the culture small-sized replicas of what the culture wanted, images made to look like men but which weren't human at all but were merely well-educated, well-trained robots.
Until the child had died beneath the wheels of his car— dying there gladly, he had thought and had feared—he had been an adequate robot. The death of the child had shaken him and had eventually driven him into flight westward in an effort to escape from the torture his own mind was creating for him.
Now something that seemed to be his own mind was saying to him, "I am a son of the living God!"
And Agape, the love that is given with no regard for the merit of the receiver, was pouring through him, was flooding into him, and was rising upward! Rising, rising, rising!
As this emotion began to pour into him, he had been looking across the river toward the mountains rising peak on peak into the distance. To him, at this moment, the shining sky beyond the far-off mountains was a thing of wonder. Without realizing what he was doing, and without caring, he splashed into the little river, waded through water up to his knees, then to his waist, then to his neck, then was splashing ashore on the opposite bank. When he reached the opposite shore, he was dripping wet.
His face, which had not been in the water, was wet too . . . with tears. Palmer had always thought of crying as being unmanly, an action performed by women, but as this feeling of tremendous love poured through him, rising higher and higher, he found mat tears were pouring from his eyes and that he was breathing in great gasping sobs. He did not know the reason for this lung-bursting grief. All he knew was that in him it was correlated with the enormous love that was in him, and that to have the love was also to have the deepest grief.
His eyes were still on the mountains. He saw the everlasting hills and he saw nothing else.
To him at this moment, the shining sky beyond the mountains looked like heaven. Agape was in him. Water making splashing noises in his shoes, his clothes sopping wet, crying as if his heart was breaking, he moved toward the mountains. At first, his gait was a run, then this slowed to a trot, then to a fast walk, then to a walk as fast as he could manage.
When the walk ended, hours later, he was on top of the highest mountain he had glimpsed from the river. Beyond the top of this hill, stretching range on range into the infinite sky, looking like a mirage from heaven, were more peaks. High, and higher still, snow-capped with shining tops, rising toward that which is Ineffable and cannot be named, the mountains continued.
Palmer knew perfectly well that these mountains existed only in his mind—as perhaps in the mind of every man—and that no real mountains such as these existed in the sky over Tennessee. But Agape was flooding through him and he had another definition for reality than that of the five-sense mind, a higher definition, a definition which said that the vision was also real!
Looking toward the mystic mountains that exist, perhaps, in the mind of man as a symbol for the never-ending search, he started toward them.
His tired body collapsed. His foot slipped and he fell, to discover he could not rise. His decision was automatic. If he could walk no longer, he would start crawling.
And crawl he did! Then the time came when he could crawl no longer. His head fell forward to the ground and he slid away into unconsciousness. When he awakened, his wrist-watch told him the time was mid-afternoon.
Automatically, he looked for the peaks. They were gone from the faraway sky. He looked . . . and looked . . . and looked. They were not there. Sadness came over him. Agape, too, was gone. He knew he would never again be content until he lived in Agape and could always glimpse occasionally the far-away peaks climbing skyward. The flight of Agape and the collapse of the blinding vision had left a dreary heaviness inside him. In his heart, he was certain he would only come back to life again when he had found again the love that includes a sense of wonder, of awe, of reverence for this whole mighty universe, which gives itself with no thought of gain to the giver and with no regard for the merit of the receiver.
Far, far away, but in the lowlands, he could see a small stream winding between green trees. He knew his car was there. Stumbling down the mountain, he turned toward it. In his mind was the knowledge that something had happened to him that he thought all men would like to have, or at least, would like to know about. Reaching his car, he continued driving west.
During the years that had followed this experience, in libraries and in musty books bought from old bookstores on Hollywood Boulevard and in downtown Los Angeles, J. Edward Palmer had sought the meaning of what had happened to him in eastern Tennessee. He had learned that around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in the first and second centuries, and earlier, hundreds of small communities had existed. History called these communities the mystery schools or the gnostic groups. In general, historians had paid little heed to these groups, perhaps hoping to conceal the fact of their existence. Palmer paid much attention to them. They had known about Agape. They had had feasts devoted to this love, they had practiced it, and they had had methods of passing it from one person to another, though these methods had not survived. Nor, for that matter, had the groups survived. But Palmer, reading the New Testament, suspected that Paul had known about it.
"Though I talk with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am become as the sounding cymbal and the tinkling brass," Paul had written.
Only someone who knew the secret of Agape could have written those words, Palmer felt.
Utterly important was Agape, to J. Edward Palmer. Without it, a man who knew all the languages of science in all the fields of science, was nothing. And less than nothing. Without Agape in him, the best scientist on Earth might be a menace to the whole planet.
Agape had existed on the planet ever since the first electrons had begun their dance around the nucleus of the first atom, Palmer suspected. He also suspected that Agape described the ecstasy of that wild atomic dance, in one sense. When gases had become molten magma, the dance had continued. When the rocks had cooled out of the magma solution, the dance of love had continued, at the mineral level. When the seas had been formed, love had played the role of midwife in creating the first slime. When the sea animals appeared, love had been a big part of their life. When the land creatures had come ashore, love had come with them. When the little shrew outran the dinosaurs, love had been in it. When the shrew had continued the long, long climb upward to the intelligence of the apes, love had come with it, easing the hard knocks coming from sudden death on the long trail, making reasonable the striving for an unseen goal, making attractive the search for a dream that existed at the end of some rainbow, somewhere.
It was still in the world! The discovery that Agape was still in the world had shaken Palmer. If only a way could be found to awaken it again in human hearts! If they only knew!
So a little man with torn trousers and with frayed cuffs, but with starshine in his eyes, tried to tell the winos of Pershing Square about Agape!
Perhaps a dozen people were listening to him, indifferently, as he tried to tell them the story of the love he had once known. The intense young man was there too, he saw. No matter what happened, he could count on this one listener.
"I mean this literally. Every man is a true man, every man is a king," Palmer said. "The biggest lies told by the biggest liars are all true or shall come true, fakers and charlatans shall cure the sick as effectively as the most learned physician."
Caught by the spell of his dreaming, and it was not a little dream that he was trying to share with them, his audience listened. Most of his listeners were regular visitors here. They lived in the neighborhood, in flophouses, when they could beg enough money during the day to pay rent for the night. Failing this, they slept where the police would let them.
To them, J. Edward Palmer was just another bum who slept beside them in flophouses when he had the money for it. He was another religious nut, a type well-known to them. In this park every night, two or three or perhaps four long-whiskered prophets held forth, each with his own explanation of why the world was wrong and what must be done to correct it, each with his own plan of salvation, which usually had strong overtones of the necessity for complete faith in the prophet and for regular tithing to him. Particularly the tithing.
Insofar as the tithing went, Palmer was a complete exception. He did not want ten percent of what they begged or stole, and as for believing in him, the idea seemed to horrify him. Since he did not really believe in himself, he could not understand how anyone else could believe in him. What he wanted his listeners to believe in was the reality of Agape.
As he hesitated, wondering what to say next, another voice began to shout near him.
"Calamity is here!" this voice shouted. "The great and fearful day of the Lord is at hand!"
The voice was loud and strong and it talked of catastrophe. It immediately captured half of Palmer's listeners. The intense young man remained, Palmer saw. He was glad about this. He began to shout louder.
"Every man is a king!" Palmer shouted. "I hope you grasp the wonder that is in those words. They say that each of us, in some great and happy day, in some place not now known to us, will become the ruler of a kingdom, even though this kingdom be only himself. Perhaps each of us, in some far time that is to come, as we learn enough and as we become sufficiently perfected in love, will become the ruler of a planet, there to build his own world true to his heart's desire."
To emphasize his meaning, he swept his arms up toward the night sky. True, nothing but smog could be seen in this direction, but he had complete faith that somewhere beyond the smog the stars were shining.
"That is why space stretches out so far and why time is endless," he continued. "So that in the long run each of us can have his heart's desire, so that in the long run each of us can create the dream only he has glimpsed. And in that time, the biggest liar who ever lived will be found to have been telling the truth all along, only the truth when he first glimpsed it was out of time and out of space as yet—"
He had outdone the catastrophe prophet, he saw. The man had moved on to another part of the park. He felt good about this.
THUMP! Thumpity-thump! THUMP! Thumpity-thump! Baaaaa! Baaaa!
Shuddering, Palmer looked hastily to his left. A new prophet had arrived in the park, in uniform, with a drummer and with a man on a horn.
Thump! Thump! Thump! went the drum.
Ya ya ya ya! went the horn.
"This is the god of the universe, who is big enough to let each of his children grow to man-size!" Palmer shouted.
"Thump!" went the drum in reply.
It was not music that the drum and the horn were making, it was noise. But the noise was loud. For a few minutes, Palmer tried to compete with the drum and horn, only to lose all of his listeners, except the intense young man, who was now sitting down. Defeated, Palmer went over and sat beside him, to see that all along this young man had been listening to a transistor radio thrust to his ear!
At this moment, and at this sight, something snapped inside J. Edward Palmer. A kind of sickness came up in him. Vaguely he caught the words coming from the radio.
"Unit 41 is now available and is accepting orders," a voice said, on the radio. It was the saddest voice that Palmer had ever heard. It exactly matched the way he was feeling inside.
"Please understand that this is not a solicitation to buy," the sad voice continued. "The directors of the company that makes the cold machines are most emphatic on this point. We are not soliciting sales. What I am giving you is in the nature of a news announcement, giving you the new wonders produced by the world of science. The cold machines, now atom powered, are one of those wonders. But we are not trying to sell our services. If, however, your life situation is such that you can avail yourself of what we have to offer, then we are at your service. On our staff are the best of physicians, the best of lawyers, and the best of scientists. But you must come to us. We do not come to you. ..."
The intense young man took the transistor radio from his ear.
"You know, they may have a good idea," he said, to Palmer.
"They say those cold machines really do work," Palmer said. "Yes. That's what I've heard. Yes . . ." His voice trailed off into silence.
THUMP! went the drum.
Ya ya Ya! went the trumpet.
"Where's the office of this cold machine company?" he asked, getting to his feet.
"Therefore I, John Edward Palmer, being of sound and disposing mind, so declare this to be my last will and testament, revoking all other previous wills made by me . . ."
Palmer read the words aloud, then looked up at the young man sitting with him in the quietly furnished office. The plaque sitting on the desk in front of the young man read: Lawyer.
"Is there any chance of breaking a will made under these circumstances?" Palmer asked.
"Do you anticipate a will contest?" the young lawyer asked.
"No," Palmer answered. "I don't anticipate it. But you may have it, if you get what I mean. My brother will not like losing the million or so I have left."
"With us, the will of the sleeper is a matter of sacred trust," the young lawyer said. "We have never lost a will contest and we don't propose to start now." His face grew lean and hard and bitter.
"Ah," J. Edward Palmer said. "Ah!" For the first time in years, he sounded happy.
As a result of this will, after the court battle had been won by the grim young man who was the lawyer for the cold machines company, there went through Pershing Square in Old Los Angeles each night a regular corp of young men giving beer and sandwiches to all who were hungry.
Against the voices shouting "Free beer! Free hamburgers!" not even the drum that went thump and the trumpet that went ya ya ya could prevail!
The intense young man was very sad when he discovered his favorite speaker came no more to talk in the night in Pershing Square.
For J. Edward Palmer, the cold came down, came down, came down.
He did not resist its coming. Beyond the cold somewhere, he hoped, was the dwelling place of a god big enough to let every man be a king. If the cold was the bridge to this world, J. Edward Palmer would welcome its coming.
"Some day," Crenshaw thought, "I'm going to kick this laboratory out its own window—and go fishing for the rest of my life!"
He was tired. Muscle-tired. Bone-tired. Brain-cell-tired. His imagination was conjuring up visions of foam-rubber mattresses five feet thick and as soft as a mother's womb in which a man could sleep, and sleep, and sleep . . .
At this thought, Crenshaw felt his neck muscles sag and his head drop away in a droop. He was so tired! Then, from some unknown source, eagerness rushed into him; his neck muscles found the strength to lift his head, and light and life came back to his eyes.
All of his life this eagerness had been in him. It had made him what he was, the nation's foremost theoretical biophysicist. In certain esoteric scientific circles, his name was magic. But he had never been eager for money, and in consequence, he was always broke, always existing from grant to grant from various foundations willing to finance pure research. At this moment, he was expecting still another grant from the foundation that had financed him for many years. The grant was overdue but he was sure it would be along any day.
If he had chosen as a boy to direct the eagerness in him toward sports, he could have played major league baseball or he could have become a professional golfer. Perhaps he would not have been among the top ten in any sport but he would have commanded respect. The eagerness in him was so powerful it would have earned respect for him anywhere. If he had chosen to become an artist, the eagerness in him would have taken him high in this field. If he had selected business for his life work, eventually Dun and Bradstreet would have mentioned his name with great respect.
He had chosen to direct the eagerness toward knowledge. He had made himself eager to know. He wanted to know the how of things, the why of things, the where and the when of things. He also wanted to know the what of things, and the whence and the whither. How does a man work? Whence came a man? Whither went a man? How big was the outside of the universe? What was inside it? You couldn't think of the outside and of the inside of a universe? Why couldn't you?
Eagerness! To James Crenshaw, eagerness was the heart of all successful performance. Whenever you found a job well-done, you also found a man eager to do it. A good salesman was good because he was eager to sell. A good mechanic was good because he was eager to be a mechanic.
Eagerness, to Crenshaw, was only another—and to him a secret way—to say that he loved it. Whatever it was he was doing, he loved it! To him eagerness and love were synonymous. An eagerness to know was also a love of knowledge. It was also a love of a whole wide world, and of everything within it; it was a love of the great starry skies and of everything within them.
Choosing his life work, Crenshaw had become a biophysicist, a member of the newly emerging but still very small group of scientists who were trying to correlate specific energy with specific form, polarity with all, and all with the life processes but particularly with the crystallization found within the living cell. In choosing this sort of work, Crenshaw had ignored the fact that there was little or no demand for such specialists in the commercial world. What fascinated him, what he became eager to know, was whether or not a specific energy of a specific frequency formed a part of and perhaps created all of the regular solids, the squares, the cubes, the pyramids, and the spheres? Or did the form create its own specific energy?
"Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" Crenshaw wondered. Most of his life he had asked himself this question without ever having a really satisfactory answer. To him the answer was important. Perhaps it was important to the whole world even if the world didn't know this and had little interest in finding out.
The sphere interested him most. It had interested him since the day he had first seen a glittering, many-colored bouncing ball, this as an infant.
Later, in high school, and later again at the university level, he had studied Euclid. The father of geometry had fascinated him. Hidden behind the theorems of Euclid and Pythagoras, Crenshaw had sensed a secret meaning. Euclid and Pythagoras had been great men in one of the great periods of world history, in one of the great intellectual and spiritual outbursts of all time, the Greek period of 300 to 500 b.c.
Had these men in these long-gone days uncovered a secret of great importance? Had they sensed the coming of the dark ages? Had they tried to hide their secret behind the mask of mathematics and in this way pass it on to generations that would come into existence after the dark ages had passed?
Crenshaw had no answer to these questions, but he suspected that Euclid had hidden important ideas behind what became high school geometry twenty-three centuries later. If you started with Euclid's definition of a point, as something that had neither length nor breadth nor thickness but which had existence only, a purely imaginary concept; if you took this imaginary point and developed it in the way the Greek mathematician had developed it, as a point moving in any direction, you had a line, ft still had no thickness and no breadth, nothing except extension. If you extended this line upon itself, it created a plane surface, with length and breadth, but with no thickness as yet. This plane surface was still imaginary. If you extended this plane surface upon itself, it became a cube. Now it had thickness, now it was real; now it presented a continuous series of faces to the outer world; now it had an outer and an inner surface.
If you took Euclid's point and extended it simultaneously in all directions—a piece of rock dropped on the surface of a still pond sent out waves in all directions on the surface—it became a sphere.
In doing this, you had described the creation of a solid figure with an inner and an outer surface. Had you also described the manner in which an energy of enormously high frequency descended to a lower frequency and built itself a house in which to live, the house being the sphere?
Crenshaw rather suspected that this was what you had described. He suspected that at the original point was a whirling vortex. He suspected that planets and suns and solar systems and the great swirling galaxies had come into existence in this way. He suspected that the physical structure of the universe, meaning suns and stars and men, was only a small part of a much greater, much vaster, perhaps much more beautiful universe which was invisible to man, which human eyes could not see nor human ears hear nor human fingers touch. He thought this greater, invisible universe had existed for billions of years and that the physical universe which humans knew was only the extension of it, perhaps the most recent extension, and that Euclid's description of a point which could be extended or expanded was only a secret way to delineate the reduction of an enormously high frequency to a lower frequency, a way to describe the function of a transformer bringing voltages down from 120,000 to 12,000. Other transformers brought the voltages down to 220 and to 110, simultaneously giving the higher amperage needed to do work.
But it was when he thought of the inner and the outer surfaces of a sphere—and of the inner and outer surfaces of a human being—that eagerness really took hold of James Crenshaw. It was easy to see, to touch, and to think about the outer surface of a sphere. This surface was always turned outward. But to see the inner surface of a sphere was another matter. If you took an empty ball and cut it into two pieces, did you see the inner surfaces? Crenshaw did not think so. Oh, you saw them, with your eyes; you felt them, with your fingers, if you were easily deluded. If you were not so easily deluded, you realized that the plane of your knife-cut now marked another outer surface. It might be invisible to the physical eye—as was Euclid's point—but it was there just the same. A new inner and a new outer surface had come into existence.
How had existence come to the physical level? How had it been created? Had the higher frequencies flowed down into it, moving through the points described by Euclid? How had the solar system come into existence? Had the higher frequencies flowed down, creating the sun and the planets? Had life then come into them? Had the life force also moved downward from the higher frequencies when the planets were ready to receive them? Was this the secret hidden in Euclid's geometry? Had whole generations of schoolboys labored their way past the Pythagorean theorem without seeing the secret hidden behind it?
Had the first life forms to come into existence on the physical level been spheres? Had they learned to communicate with each other by rubbing their external surfaces together? Did love flow from one sphere to another as a result of rubbing together these external surfaces?
Crenshaw was not prepared to say that anything like this had ever happened. But he was prepared to say that when two friendly humans met, they certainly rubbed together their external surfaces, in the form of shaking hands or rubbing noses or friendly pats on the backside. If the spheres that had taken on the form of humans had further differentiated themselves into male and female, the rubbing together of their external surfaces might involve hugging and kissing, perhaps eventually even sexual intercourse!
Crenshaw was aware that most people thought of sex as the most intimate of experiences. Certainly in this action, interior surfaces were brought into contact with each other! Crenshaw thought otherwise. It was his opinion that sexual intercourse still brought together external surfaces!
The external surface of a human being was much more extensive than most people thought, Crenshaw believed. At the mouth and at the nose, the skin folded inward. But did an outer surface become an inner surface just because of this fold? Crenshaw did not think so. He thought the inside of the mouth and of the nose were simple extensions inward of outer surfaces. The surface that extended downward, becoming a gullet, then a stomach, then a duodenum, then a small intestine, then a colon, was still an outer surface! All of this extensive gastrointestinal tract was only a way to bring an outer surface into very close contact with the minerals of Planet Earth in a liquid or semi-solid condition. Feeding was a way to describe this close contact with the minerals of the planet and their passage through a porous membrane from an outer to an inner surface!
What was an inner surface? Had anyone ever seen an inner surface? What lived on this inner surface that needed the minerals of Earth as building blocks; what touched the inner surface; what maintained its existence in this secret, hidden, inner world—except perhaps the soul of man!
Crenshaw did not know that the soul of man lived on this inner surface or that there was a soul of man or that man had a soul or that the soul had a man! Perhaps only the whole universe had a soul. Perhaps what looked like an individual soul was only the reflection of the wonders of the universe in one facet of a jewel of many, many facets!
When the extension of his grant came through—Crenshaw was certain the extension would be granted any day—he would be able to spend years, perhaps the remainder of his life, exploring this fascinating mystery.
The nose was another example of the way an outer surface curved inward and became breathing tubes and eventually tiny air passages in lung tissue. The medical profession, thinking in terms of tissue, had not realized that even the differentiation into lung cells had not changed an outer surface into an inner surface. Always in back of every outer surface was another hidden, secret—but utterly important—inner surface. Here in these depths was the hidden man, Crenshaw thought.
The eyes were different from the nose and the mouth. In the eyes an outer surface of brain tissue was extended to the surface of the skin so that the dweller within could look out through these windows of the soul and could become intensely aware of the fantastically wonderful world of physical form it was exploring. In the eyes, the membrane separating the inner and the outer surfaces was very thin, so that light could pass through it unimpeded.
Was there really a dweller within, a something, perhaps the soul of man, that lived on the inner surfaces and which contacted the world of physical form through its outer surface? Crenshaw could not prove that this question had an answer. He knew it was not easy to think about the inner surfaces of a human being. Did this difficulty indicate that something lurked there which wished to remain hidden and unthought about and which directed all thinking away from itself? Every time he tried to think of inner surface, Crenshaw was aware of this lurking block. Every time he thought of outer surfaces, he thought of men and women holding hands, of men and women kissing under the influence of that emotion called love. All of this was contact of outer surfaces. Did love come into existence when two people rubbed their external surfaces together? Even in sexual intercourse, that most thought about and most practiced of human actions, men and women were still rubbing external surfaces together. Only when the sperm met the ovum and actually penetrated the egg was there anything even approaching contact of inner surfaces, and Crenshaw was not certain mat inner surfaces really came together at conception. Perhaps the chromosomes and the genes interpenetrated and divided without ever really contacting the inner surface of the companion chromosome or gene. Perhaps, if atoms and molecules were thought of as little round spheres, not even at this level were inner surfaces brought into contact.
Crenshaw knew that molecules and atoms were not little round spheres, that this was only a convenient way to think about them. The atoms were really closer to mathematical abstractions than they were to spheres. They were microscopically small points at which energy was spinning. It was convenient to Crenshaw to think of this energy as flowing from an inner surface to an outer surface and from an outer surface to an inner surface through a membrane, dropping an octave in frequency when it went from an inner to an outer world.
Could all the wonder of love be described as the flow of energy through a membrane, energy that moved from an inner to an outer surface? When two humans of opposite sex met and their outer surfaces came into contact did a secret, hidden energy flow between them? And as this energy flowed, did these two humans—exiled spheres, perhaps—remember happier days in the worlds of the higher frequencies? Were the old stories of angels fallen from heaven symbolic descriptions of energy descending from a higher to a lower frequency? Did these old stories describe the process by which the worlds and their inhabitants had come into existence at the physical level? Except in dreams or in states produced by the psychedelic drugs, had humans forgotten the heaven worlds from which they had descended and in which they had lived before they had embarked on the great and difficult adventure of life at the physical level? After billions of years of life at the physical level, had the life forces in the form of men now advanced far enough to think of contacting the heaven worlds from which they had come? Would they reach these worlds through the inner surfaces of their beings?
Considering these questions, Crenshaw felt a little like a space-age Columbus.
Always, through all human history, men had sensed the existence of a veil, of a magic curtain, behind which something very important was hidden. The genii of the Arabian night had lived in some nonphysical realm. So had the Good Fairy who granted the wishes of small children. Most people regarded the genii and the Good Fairy as products of the imagination, as unreal, and hence to be dismissed from the minds of rational men who wished to have the respect of their neighbors.
What if the Dweller behind the eyes, the Dweller who lived at the level of the inner surfaces of a human being, directing the thinking of men in many secret ways, what if this One wished men to think the genii and the Good Fairy were unreal? What, then, for rational men who wished to have the respect of their neighbors?
"There be fools, perhaps, who live in these lands!" Crenshaw thought.
All of this, and much more, he would investigate when his grant was extended.
Then the long-awaited letter came. The extension was refused, as not being to "the good and welfare of the nation, as not advancing scientific knowledge or thought."
Refused! A blow in the face could not have hit Crenshaw harder. In quick order, because he was desperate for money to eat on, Crenshaw applied to every large tax-exempt private foundation for help. Each refused a grant of funds.
Did these foundations exchange information? Did a blacklist exist?
Crenshaw tried various agencies of the Federal Government. Money was being poured into every conceivable form of research.
But no money was available for James Crenshaw.
"No, I cannot advance you more money on your trunk and books!" the pawnshop owner told him. "No! The trunk is not worth what I have in it already and the books are worthless! No, Mr. Crenshaw. Absolutely not!"
"Unit 41 still has space available," the radio said.
Crenshaw listened. And made up his mind.
"Therefore I, James Crenshaw, do declare this to be my last will and testament. To all men I leave unsolved the mystery of the inner surfaces."
But the cold didn't come down, for him. For James Crenshaw, the cold came in and around, like the inner surface of a sphere, contracting... in and around ... in and around . . .
In the lower levels of Unit 41, the giant machines hummed softly to themselves. The glow in the sky over Hiroshima had announced the coming of atomic power to the world, hence these machines were atom powered. Since there were no bearings to wear out and no frictional losses, the vague hum coming from the generators was hardly a sound that the ears heard. Instead, it was a kind of vague hiss that some organ other than the ears seemed to detect. Perhaps the hiss was detected on the feeling level, felt there as a symbol of enormous energy moving within clearly defined channels, energy that had accepted the limitation of these channels and did not try to find freedom but became a willing servant.
Power there was in the lower levels of Unit 41, power to loose, power to bind, power to heat, power to chill, and power to maintain that chill, if not forever, at least for a very long time. Of course, the heat pumps of the machines that created the cold had frictional losses. And hence had to have attendants to watch over them and to repair and replace worn parts if need be.
Unit 41 was a place of atomic energy, and a place of cold, and a place of fear, despair, suffering, pain, all the deep hurts that the human emotional system is heir to. Do such strong emotions linger for years as shadowy echoes in the spot in which they were first expressed? Is this the reason men think of some spots as being haunted?
If any place on earth was ever haunted, it was Unit 41. And all similar units on Planet Earth. Unit 41 was a place of pain, of despair, of utter depression, and of strong ego threat repeated again and again until the ego itself lost the will to live. To such people, Unit 41 represented the last desperate hope of survival, the hope when no hope was left, the chance when there was no chance.
"And if a man die, shall he live again?" was a question asked across much of human history, in many tongues, in many historical periods. Perhaps the apes on the veldt of South Africa thought of this question half a million years ago, when the leopard prowled in the night and the water holes were drying up from lack of rain. Did this question have a positive answer? The world's religions said it had a positive answer. But the ego of modern man had little confidence in this answer and little faith in the religious leaders who made the claim. Certainly the answer could not be demonstrated. No dead man had ever proved he could again occupy his old physical form and walk again.
"But this was not what is meant!" the spiritualists claimed.
Careful research in the dimly-lighted areas of mediumship had gathered an enormous mass of evidence on what was meant This evidence indicated that something called the human personality, in some form of a subtle body, truly did survive intact the change called death. However, there were those who did not wish to accept this evidence, with the result that a great controversy had developed. Most people chose to ignore this controversy. Those who wished to believe they would continue to live after death accepted as adequate proof whatever evidence satisfied their own hope that they would live forever. The scientists, as much ego-ridden as anybody else but also secretly wanting to live forever, tried to ignore as unscientific the evidence supporting survival. Thus the scientific world was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The bellowings of the scientists were putting the intelligent people of the planet in a position where they were also being gored. This was the price of continuing to believe in magicians who had lost their magic and had to call themselves scientists. However, the intelligentsia, each caught in the ego-trap of his own self-importance, were slow to realize what was happening.
Those who came to Unit 41, or who were brought there on stretchers, simply preferred to believe that any chance of continuing to live was better than certain death. Whether the death was physical, the result of what seemed to be incurable disease, or was the death of the sense of self-importance of the individual, brought about by too many failures to achieve success, did not matter. To the ego, all kinds of death were the same. When its own sense of self-importance had died, the ego brought about the death of the physical body with the greatest ease.
But a human being was a many-faceted creature. Facing death in one time and in one place, perhaps in this moment of supreme stretch, the ego leaped forward to another time and to another place where life could continue. At least something looked forward and was willing to grasp at any straw if the straw gave it hope of continued fife.
Unit 41 was located in an old silver, zinc, and lead mine that had been a famous bonanza in its day. From the top of a desert mountain in southern California, old mine shafts and tunnels going deep under the surface had been extended, widened, and in some cases deepened. The tunnel and shaft walls had been strengthened with reinforced steel and concrete until the interior of the old mine had been made impregnable. Atom powered air-conditioning had been installed to feed pure, clean air to the old shafts and tunnels. Who knew what contaminants might appear in the air in a hundred years? Or in two hundred years? Or longer?
At the time Unit 41 was installed, there were seven nations on Earth which possessed hydrogen bombs. The first nation to create such a bomb had been the United States. Russia and China had followed. After this, France had gotten in on the act. When the time had been ripe—that is to say, when they were sure of getting away with it—West Germany and Japan had announced to the world that they, too, possessed the Bomb and in consequence could no longer be considered conquered nations.
No nation that had the Bomb could ever be regarded as a conquered land.
Then a small nation in South America had suddenly announced that it, too, possessed not only the Bomb but Bombs and had proved its claim by utterly devastating its neighbor, with which it had had a border feud centuries.
The result had been such a shock as the world had never known. Men who had gone around telling themselves how civilized they were suddenly realized that they were not quite as civilized as they had claimed. The nation in South America that had used the Bomb against its neighbor had been condemned as an aggressor. Every kind of sanction by every nation on earth had been brought against it.
Its reply had been, in effect, "To hell with all of you." It had then made peaceful co-existence pacts with all other nations in South America and it had announced that any attempt to use hydrogen bombs on any nation of South America would be met by instant retaliation against the nation or the nations using such bombs.
While the other nations of the world shook with indignation—because this nation in South America was only doing what they would have done if they had had the courage to take the risk—the South American government consolidated its conquest of the continent. It used no more bombs.
No more were needed.
Most of the citizens of Planet Earth thought it was better to be a live slave than a bombed hero.
The one man—only one is ever needed, somehow—stood up to the dictator who had conquered South America, and dared him to use his bomb.
While the inhabitants of Planet Earth held their breath, while horrified scientists talked feverishly about the danger of air contamination from a second bomb blast, the military staff of the dictator suddenly revolted. At high noon, they shot their dictator, with the television cameras of the world invited to watch, live. Then they announced that all of the conquered countries of South America would be returned to their legitimate governments.
While the world gawked, and wondered at this act of utter benevolence on the part of the military staff of a now dead dictator, the conquered countries were returned to their own governments. The strong impression was given to the world that the military aides of the now dead dictator had been forced very much against their will to participate in his crimes against humanity (in truth, they had gone along with him just as the German general staff had gone along with Hitler until his luck had failed). The impression was also given to the astonished world that the heroic military aides had finally found their long-sought opportunity to revolt and to rid the world of a vicious dictator.
Only eventually did the world realize that the military aides who had revolted were less than heroes and more than liars, less like humanitarians and more like rats deserting a sinking ship. The truth was that there had been no second bomb. One had been all this country had been able to steal, this with the secret help of military men from a country really able to make bombs. The conquest of South America had been accomplished by exploding one bomb, then by bluffing that others were about to be exploded.
When their bluff had been called, the dictator's military aides had realized what they were facing and had sacrificed their dictator in an effort to save their own lives.
This effort had failed. When the liberated countries had gotten their wind back, and had grasped how they had been bluffed into surrender, and had realized how badly scared they had been, they had sent whole armies to the task of running down every military aide of the dead dictator and every soldier who had served him—and had caught and had executed every man of the whole lot!
Bearing in mind that on some black and evil day some nation might possess two bombs and might stay in existence long enough to use the second one, the engineers who had drawn up the plans for Unit 41 had taken every possible precaution against contaminated air entering the old mine area. They could not prevent earthquakes but they could and did strengthen the supports in the mine tunnels and shafts which they were using.
The really important thing was to maintain the cold. If this failed, the sleepers would awaken. If they awakened too soon, the gain they sought in thus entering the future might not be achieved. However, the machines which maintained the cold drew their energy from the heart of the atom and were not likely to fail.
How long before the sleepers would awaken?
In Unit 41, one hundred years.
In other units, the sleep period was different. Once established, it was not wise to try to awaken the sleeper and thus shorten the sleep period.
They had arguments about this with some clients.
"Yes, Mr. Northcutt. We understand your position, sir. Believe me, sir, you have our deepest sympathy. If we had any evidence to support the view that ten years might provide a solution to your problem, sir, believe me, we would suggest another unit. But leukemia seven, sir . . ."
"But a hundred years!" Tom Northcutt protested bitterly. "I'll be dead when she awakens. The kids will be dead. Their kids will be dead . . ."
"We understand this, sir. We do not urge the choice of the cold sleep as a solution to your problem, sir. If you have any other choice, we suggest you take it. We know—I have a wife, too, sir, whom I love—how devastating this situation is. Young children losing their mother! How can you ever explain it to them? Yes, sir, I understand. But there is no whisper on earth today of a treatment for this type of leukemia."
"I know," Tom Northcutt interrupted. "Our doctor checked this for us." Desperation rose in him. "What about waking her up in ten years?"
"We can do this, sir," the company expert said. "But . . ."
"Then let's do it!" Tom said, eagerly. "I love this woman. Don't you understand?"
"I understand, sir. But . . ."
"If no cure for leukemia has been discovered in ten years, then she can go back to sleep and wait another ten years. The cure can't be so far off! It can't be!"
"There is this catch, sir," the expert continued. "Any person can go through the freeze process and be awakened, once. We have proven this with many, many animals and with many, many humans. But twice, sir, is a different matter. Something in the makeup of both animals and humans seems to revolt at being twice frozen, with the result that the mortality rises very sharply, sir. We do not recommend but one sleep period and one awakening."
"But . . ." Tom Northcutt said. He was still fighting but he was beginning to have the feeling that no matter what he did, he was going to lose his wife.
"For those coming to us with this type of leukemia, we always recommend a sleep period of one hundred years," the expert continued.
"But one hundred years is the same as death."
"Death exists in our world, sir. It has always existed."
"But ..."
"Perhaps death is only a mask over the face of life, sir. Shall I mark the papers for one hundred years?"
"I suppose so," Tom Northcutt said. Resignation, and pain beyond words, was in his voice.
In the main, the sleepers came in helicopters operating as shuttle services from the mine to Los Angeles and to San Diego, under sedation, with doctors and nurses in attendance. Wary, or perhaps tired of teary scenes, the company encouraged taking the last farewells in Los Angeles or in San Diego, prior to boarding the helicopters, but the company did not always have its way. There was the young mother who insisted on accompanying her three year old child, a girl, also a victim of leukemia seven. The mother also insisted on going down to the crypt with the child.
"Mommy, it's cold in here," the child said.
"I know, darling. Just go to sleep, dear. When you wake up, it will be warmer."
"But I'm afraid to go sleep, mommy," the child protested.
"There's nothing to be afraid of, darling. Jesus is always with you, asleep or awake."
"How do you know he is, mommy?"
"It says so in the Good Book, honey. Let the nice nurse help you put on these new clothes. Look! All new plastic, and all shiny! It covers everything but your nose!"
The child stared dubiously at the plastic sleeping bag. Truly, it did cover everything except the nose. What the mother did not say, because she did not know, was that later the nurse would come along and would cover the nose, this after the life forces had dropped to so low a level that oxygen was not needed and breathing had stopped.
"Where will you be, mommy, while I'm beddy-bye?"
"Just outside the door, darling, waiting for you."
"Will daddy be with you?"
"I . . ." the mother's voice caught. She was divorced. The child had hardly known her father but in spite of this, something in the heart of the child called out to the daddy she had hardly known. "I ... I hope so, honey."
"You won't go away while I'm beddy-bye?"
"No, darling. Give me a goodnight kiss, now."
The kiss was wet and smeary but neither the mother nor the child seemed to notice this. If they clung to each other overly long it was perhaps because the child sensed what the mother knew, that this was the last opportunity they would have for clinging to each other in all the history of the universe that was to come.
The watching nurse, the watching doctor, were very quiet. The colonic tract had already been emptied and the specialized gelatin had gone in, gelatin which would hold the intestinal tract in place indefinitely and which would supply the very little nourishment the tissues would need, this energy being provided largely as radiation from specialized radio-acting substances included in the gelatin.
"Dream good, darling, and wake up happy," the mother whispered.
"I will, mommy," the child answered.
The mother slipped hastily out of the room. Later, after the sedation had taken full effect and the child was in the sleep that would last one hundred years, the mother looked in through the plastic window in the door of the cubicle.
"Great God—if there is a God—be with her when she awakens," the mother whispered.
Silently, like a ghost falling, she slid to the floor beside the door.
Eventually a nurse found her and revived her. When the mother got to her feet, her eyes went to the name plate that had already been put in place on the steel door. The plate said: MARY JONES, age 3.
The plate gave other pertinent data including information on leukemia seven. The mother seemed to feel that this information was not adequate, that more would be needed in that far-off future when somebody named Mary Jones would come, back to life, perhaps. In a twisted scrawl, the mother added this data.
"She wakes scared lots of times. Please, somebody, be with her when she wakes . . ."
The foreman of the jury said, "We find the defendant guilty as charged."
"The prisoner will rise," the judge said.
The prisoner rose. He was about thirty with dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. His way of standing, his way of looking, the set of his jaw, the expression in his dark eyes, all said the same thing: that he hated the judge, the jury, the uniformed officers present in the courtroom, the spectators that jammed the seats behind him. At the back of the room, in closed-off glass booths, he hated the operators of the television cameras who were putting this trial on the air.
Looking down at the prisoner, the judge started to speak.
The prisoner spoke first.
"You can go to hell!" the prisoner said.
Those present in the courtroom gasped, then settled themselves hastily into deep silence. The foreman of the jury made signs at the judge but the judge was too busy hating the prisoner to notice the juryman. The judge opened his mouth as if to levy a contempt-of-court charge, then closed his mouth as if he had realized the futility of holding this prisoner in contempt-of-court. The judge opened his mouth again. This time he managed to speak.
"You heard the verdict of the jury," the judge said.
"Sure, I heard what those mud-hens decided," the prisoner answered. "I'm not deaf!"
The judge started to speak, then seemed to swallow his words. The next time he tried, he managed to talk.
"You have been found guilty of a charge of premeditated murder," the judge said. "Sentence will be pronounced on . . ." He intended to give the date for formal sentencing but again the prisoner interrupted.
"You stupid bastard, go on and sentence me now," the prisoner said.
Bang! went the gavel.
"You will respect the court," the judge began.
"I will like hell!" the prisoner said.
The judge made an obvious effort to control himself.
"I have no respect for this court," the prisoner continued. "All through this trial it has listened to crooked testimony and has accepted the words of lying, perjured witnesses. A court which accepts such testimony is not worthy of respect."
The face of the judge turned black.
"Go on and sentence me to death!" the prisoner said. "And may you rot in hell for it!"
"All right!" The judge was suddenly screaming. "My intention was to defer sentence to a later date but your attitude forces me to grant your wishes and to sentence you immediately!"
"Now is none too late," the black haired prisoner said.
"All right, now!" the judge shouted. "Here and now I do hereby sentence you to be executed according to the laws of the State of California, in the gas chamber."
At this point, the judge became aware that the foreman of the jury was desperately trying to attract his attention.
"What do you want?" the judge demanded. "You have given your verdict."
"Yes. But . . ."
"You found the prisoner guilty?"
"Yes. But we also recommended mercy," the foreman said.
"What? I heard no such recommendation."
"That is because you have been talking so much you didn't give me a chance to finish our findings," the foreman said. He took a deep breath. "We recommend that this prisoner, Roland Green, be sentenced to the cold machines, in the hope that in the future some means may be found to cure the rebellious, sick, and criminal mind which rules him."
The gasp that passed over the courtroom was louder than before. Behind their glass partitions, the television cameras seemed to whir faster. There was not a person present who didn't know that legal history was being made here. The prisoner stood as if stunned.
The judge took a deep breath. "Therefore I, by the power vested in me, in accordance with the constitution of the State of California, do hereby sentence you, Roland Green, for the crime of murder, to death in the gas chamber."
The rasp of men breathing in the courtroom was a sound of protest. Was the judge going to ignore the recommendation of the jury? The prisoner continued to stand as if stunned.
The judge took another deep breath. "However, in view of the recommendation of mercy made by the jury, I will consider that the terms of this sentence have been met upon presentation of this court of satisfactory evidence that the aforesaid Roland Green shall have entered the cold machines for a minimum period of one hundred years.
"And may God have mercy on your soul!"
Bang! went the judge's gavel, ending this trial. In several ways, it made history. The death sentence was already under heavy attack in California and was on its way out. With this trial, and with a sentence to the cold machines being established as a precedent, the death sentence went out of existence. For it, was substituted sentence to the cold machines. Roland Green, born a rebel, did not accept a sentence to the cold machines as an act of mercy. He would have fought any sentence from any judge, as long as he had money to hire lawyers. Since he still had money, Green hired lawyers to fight the sentence. It wasn't that he gave two hoots in hell whether he lived or died. The literal truth was that he didn't care one way or the other. When he was a kid, cops had mistreated him. In consequence he hated cops. He also hated judges, sometimes with good reason. What he wanted to do in hiring lawyers to fight his sentence to the cold machines was not to escape death but to cause as much trouble as he could for judges and for courts—for any representative of authority. That he was a living, breathing example of the Oedipus complex, Green did not know. Nor would he have cared if he had known. All he knew was that he wanted something, what this something was he did not know. It seemed to him that cops and judges and the law in general were keeping this something from him.
In appealing the case, the lawyers claimed that the sentence to the cold machines was "cruel, unusual, and inhuman punishment." They asked that the sentence be set aside and that their client be freed.
That this legal battle would be fought to his last dollar, Green knew perfectly well. This did not concern him. If his lawyers couldn't beat the sentence, he wouldn't need money. If they licked it, he could get money.
The case would have been simpler if the company that made the cold machines had not entered it. The legal battle was getting them much publicity, which was good, but they didn't like the claim that using one of their units was "cruel, unusual, and inhuman punishment."
The process was not cruel, the company insisted; it was not now unusual—hundreds of people had already used the cold to flee to the future; and it was definitely not punishment. Claiming that its reputation was being damaged by this sentence and that it was suffering loss of business in consequence, the company demanded that Roland Green be sent to the gas chamber, where he clearly belonged.
This plea failing, the lawyers of the cold machines company fired another volley. "Our machines are not places of refuge for convicted criminals nor do we want such people in any of our units. We refuse to accept the applicant, Roland Green."
The lawyers for Green replied that their client was not an applicant, that he was the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history, that he had not sought refuge in the cold machines but that he had been ordered to them, this being contrary to law and custom.
"Then order him somewhere else," the cold machines company lawyers had answered. The language they used was complicated legal double-talk but it meant essentially that!
"We are asking the superior court to order freedom for our client," Green's lawyers answered. "As to the cold machines company, we have nothing to say to them and no desire to listen to their ridiculous claims."
The judges of the superior court mulled the case of Roland Green. A transcript of the trial showed he had been fairly tried and that the verdict was in accordance with the evidence. But the sentence was not prescribed by law.
"It is unfair to the future to dump our criminals among them," the superior court judges decided. They remanded the case to the lower courts for a new trial.
By this time, the chief witness for the prosecution had died of natural causes. Without this witness, there was no case.
Roland Green walked out of court a free man.
Following the twisted pattern within him, he promptly applied to the cold machines company for admission to their first available space to sleep for a minimum of one hundred years.
Still smarting over what his lawyers had said about them, the company refused to accept him.
He sued them for admittance.
They refused again, saying he was a convicted criminal. His lawyers said talk of their client being a criminal was false. He had been freed by the court. No charge lay against him. And who was the cold machines company to be deciding who was and who was not a criminal?
Well-aware that heavy opposition to its "Sleep to the Future," program was developing from many sources, including organized religion, the company gave in. Some preachers were saying, "If God had meant men to sleep to the future, He would have made them so they could sleep that long!" The cold machines company could logically have retorted that if God had meant men to use electricity, He would have given them generators in their stomach. Opposition to its program was developing from other sources too, including the taxing agencies of federal, state, and local governments. Besides, there was a tendency on the part of young men to try to sleep past the requirements of their draft boards.
In the Year of Our Lord, 2030, men had ceased to exist for themselves and had come to exist for the benefit of the federal, state, and local governments. "Rights to be held self-evident" no longer included the right to make up one's own mind. The idea that men might exist for themselves, that a man might have the right to be an individual and to act for himself on the basis of his own knowledge and his own opinions, to make his own decisions and his own mistakes, long repugnant to all forms of religion, was becoming more and more repugnant to government, particularly on the federal level. If a man was allowed to think for himself, he might decide not to pay taxes. How would the overloaded bureaucracy that called itself a federal government continue to exist if men in any numbers began to think for themselves? Who would pay the taxes? Who would serve as raw material for military conscripts.
Knowing that heavy opposition was developing and not wishing adverse publicity, the cold machines company gave in to the request of Roland Green. The company hoped that its action in this matter would go unnoticed.
The hope was vain. In Congress the next day, a representative rose.
"I wish to call attention to the action of the cold machines company in providing a way for criminals to escape justice."
In vain, the company protested that legally Roland Green was not a criminal and had not been found guilty of any crime. The representative who had made the charge ignored the truth. He could claim Congressional immunity for his words. Also, he was running for re-election and needed a popular issue. Being "agin the cold machines" would gain him many votes among the religious bigots.
For the cold machines company, the handwriting was on the wall. However, it proposed to postpone as long as possible the day when it would be out of business. In consequence, it stepped up establishing new units.
Roland Green wrote his will.
"To my lawyers, I leave all the money I have hidden away in secret places. Some of it is hidden in safe deposit boxes under other names, some of it is in Swiss bank accounts which have only a number but no name, one cache of over a hundred thousand dollars is stuffed inside an empty wine jug which is buried eight feet due north of a mesquite tree on the road between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas . . ."
Roland Green was laughing as he dictated his will. In truth, after paying his lawyers and the cold machines company, he was flat broke. But his lawyers didn't know this! He could imagine each of them in a secret frantic search for the hidden money he was describing. They would think he was lying but they could not be certain of this. Greed alone would drive them. He thought with great satisfaction of his lawyers digging eight feet north of every mesquite tree between Dallas and Fort Worth. There were hundreds of such trees.
On second thought, he added another clause. "In this bequest, I also include all judges, all policemen, all state patrolmen, and all law officers everywhere."
At the thought of the trouble he was causing so many people, particularly lawyers, cops, and judges, searching for nonexistent hidden money, Green broke into hearty laughter.
He was still laughing—though weakly for the sedatives were heavy in his case—when the cold came through to him.
Saturated with cold, its life processes slowed to the pace of a bug crawling, the body of Cindy Northcutt lay quietly in the little room that was the door to future life, she hoped. This body at this time was so near to death that careful tests would have been needed to prove that it was capable of returning to life. It had no capacity for movement.
But to say that Cindy was dead, or to say that she was unconscious, was to miss a vital point in the meaning of the words conscious and consciousness. She was not dead. As proof of this, hundreds of people had gone through the cold process and had been awakened or had awakened without effort when the cold had been reduced. Had these sleeping people been dead? No. Was Cindy dead? No. The energies that animated her body had been slowed almost to the vanishing point. When warmth returned, the energies would return. She would live again.
Nor was she unconscious. The body was unconscious but that part of her which said I was still conscious. Very much so! And it was still saying I.
After the cold had come down, that which said I was still dimly aware of the existence of a body, somewhere, not to which it belonged—it belonged to infinity, eternity, and to itself—but of a body which belonged to it. It had built the body; it had not come into existence as a result of the functioning of the body. From the moment of conception, from that giddy and wonderful instant when the genes from the ovum and from the sperm began to mix—perhaps the highest sexual ecstasy ever experienced—the I had been present It had not come into existence at this point—it had already had a history as extended as that of the universe —it had merely come into this particular body at this particular point. It had played a vital part in the construction of the body. At a very early stage of life, the I had shifted the switches that controlled whether or not the recently conceived creature would be male or female, in this case deciding the new human would be female, for reasons that were perfectly clear to it and which emerged from the history of the I stretching back to the point where time and form began for it. The I had built that complex structure called the nervous system and that hardly less complex structure called the muscular system. It had built the brain, the bones, the skin, and the connective tissue.
Had the I done all this working in the darkness inside the womb? Or is the womb actually dark? Does another kind of light shine there, a light which makes the building fetus as bright as midday to the working I? Is there a light which no human eye can see but which the I perceives? Does the I build the human eye in such a way that this light which illumines the interior surfaces of all things is excluded from the vision of the human and another, lower spectrum is made visible?
If the I makes the eyes, and the brain and the nervous system and all else there is in a human body, using a kind of light visible only to it, why does it forget all about its workmanship and the light that is used to illumine that work when it is born into the world? Why does it forget the light that shines on the inside of things?
Perhaps it does not forget! Perhaps this world of the inner surfaces and of the light that shines there may be its place of final refuge, to be used when death comes!
While the body was in the cold, the I that had been known by the name of Cindy Northcutt found the memory of that body and of the world in which that body had functioned. It was slipping away. If the memory failed completely—but this could not happen. Life was in the I, not in the body. The I could act as it chose. From its viewpoint, the body was an intricate and curious structure, a tool it had built with the primary purpose of using this tool to explore the worlds of the lower level. The body moved, it laughed and cried; it felt love, knew wonder in the dawn and in the sunset, felt happiness in the touch of a mate, as the I felt. The I could withdraw from the body. At death, it withdrew permanently. In the condition of extreme cold established by the cold machines, it withdrew partly and temporarily.
Withdrawn in this way, it became the dreaming I, effortlessly creating whatever it willed, effortlessly destroying its own mental creations. If it chose, it could cooperate with other creatures like it; it could play laughing games with them, or serious games, or pompous games, as it did on earth. If the body died, this did not matter to the I. It might have to wait its turn for another entry on the stage of Planet Earth, but once this turn came, it could build another body and have another tool for exploring the wonders of the lower level. If it left this body, if the body died . . . well, there would simply be an untenanted body on the planet. This was no unusual situation. Bodies by the millions had been left untenanted on this planet! And what was Planet Earth? It was only a minor world on the edge of a small galaxy that was one such galaxy among billions of other star collections!
The first leap the I took from the body of Cindy Northcutt, almost took it out of that body permanently. It was on the edge of the solar system and was heading out, fast, when it remembered somebody named Jimmy, aged four years, and somebody named Kathy, aged two years, and of a man named Thomas, her mate and the father of her children.
At this memory, the I stopped its outward movement. With the memory of her children came another memory, that she was a woman. The woman remembered her children and her mate, remembered love itself as it had expressed itself through her female body and as she had felt it expressing itself through the body of her mate and of her children.
Checking its outward flight, the I held itself at the edge of the solar system for a timeless moment while it decided which way to go. Out there in the glow of light that came from many suns was freedom. In there, on that little planet just out from the sun, was something far less than freedom, the demands of a growing family, the needs of a mate. No one was free who had so many claims upon her attention!
While the I hesitated, all creation seemed to wait upon its decision. At this moment, it knew itself to be bound by its own will alone. Whatever choice it made, this choice was right. Objective, impersonal, detached, factual, it could decide as it wished. What was this emotion that pulled it back, what was this thing called love?
As the question came into the mind of the I, the I moved. With it, to think of movement was to move. Wanting to know about love, it went directly to the last spot where it had known love.
This was Cindy Northcutt's bedroom. Instantly, the I was again inside this room. Here on a double bed a man was tossing in restless sleep. Through the single sheet pulled over him, she could see colors playing about his body, colors that told her how sad he was, how much he missed her, and how he longed for her.
Sex was part of his hunger, she saw. As she thought of sex, she suddenly remembered that this was the room where she had once raced him to bed. At this memory, pressures surged and boiled in her. When she had lived in the body, she had thought of sex as being wonderful. It had been that, in part. In part, she now saw with her heightened vision, it was also the hiding place of fear, envy, jealousy, rivalry, and of fear's eternal companion—hate. Yet out of this morass of savage emotions—this was the real miracle of it—two wonderful kids had come.
Of course, they in their turn would want to run races to some bedroom, thinking that only love awaited them there, and would learn in pain that love's eternal companions were fear and hate. For the sake of love, they would have to learn how to live with love's ancient partners.
As she thought of her children, she wished to see them. And instantly was in their room and was seeing them. Jimmy had slipped out of his sleeping garment and was sleeping raw. Unless his sleeper was tied tightly, he always managed to slip out of it. Tom had not tied it tight enough or had forgotten to tie it at all.
She bent mentally to pick up the garment and to replace it on her son. It slipped beneath her fingers. Try as hard as she would, she could not grip the sleeping garment, could not lift it in her hands. Slowly she realized she was not present in this bedroom as she had been in the past, that she was here as a detached I, that the body she had once used was now asleep in a place called Unit 41, in the deep freeze far out in the desert.
As she could not touch the sleeping garment, she could not touch her son. The wonder of flesh touching flesh was not possible. She was forced to let him continue to lie, naked and sprawling on his bed, because she could not move him.
Across the room, Kathy was tucked under her covers, but above the light blanket, her little hands were balled into fists.
Here in the nursery the feeling of sadness was heavy. It was heavy in the whole house, she realized, then knew the reason. Here in this place were three people who loved her and who needed her . . . and she was gone. She wondered how many lies Tom had told the kids to explain to them where mommy was and why she wasn't coming back. How could you explain death to a child? How could you explain the cold machines and Unit 41?
"Oh, my poor darlings! Wanting me and needing me! Well, you shall have me. I'l1 be back! I promise you!"
She started toward her body. Confusion was in her mind. She intended to return to her body and awaken it, then return to her family. Then she realized she could not awaken it and that it would sleep for a hundred years.
"Wait for me!" she whispered to her children. "Wait for me."
Pain struck at her then, a sharp, stabbing blow that went through the intangible mental-emotional structure that was her subtle body like the blade of a knife.
In that instant, when she realized that nothing she could do would enable her to return to her children, her husband, and her home, she almost snapped the fragile thread that still connected her with the ice-cold body in the deep freeze of Unit 41. The same tortured feeling of utter loss that was in her husband and in their children appeared in her. With it came a feeling of complete unimportance. Their loss made her feel that she was nothing and less than nothing. Was this feeling the price one paid for lost love?
She could not, would not, believe that the loss of love was the cause of her pain. How could love cause pain? It was the essence of all good, of all beauty, of all harmony, of all family relationships.
In a flash of flickering insight she found herself wondering if she had really loved her husband and her children, if instead she had possessed them, had seen in them extensions of herself? Was there a difference between love and possession? Would not real love release the love object?
"I don't want to release them, I want to keep them," Cindy Northcutt whispered. "I want to hug them, to kiss them, to pat them. I want them to hug me, to pay attention to me, to make me important . . ."
Like a typist striking a wrong key, her thinking stuttered at this point. Was it love she was feeling and had felt, or was it egotism?
As if it stung her, she hastily pushed this thought away. Again and again she told herself she had loved her husband and her children, that she had been a slave to them, that there wasn't even a whisper of egotism in her whole body. In her, the pain sharpened. She thought: If it hadn't been for that leukemia . . . As if finding in this thought a way to escape, something in her seized upon the leukemia, claiming that this disease was the cause of all the pain she was suffering, of all the conflicting emotions.
"It was the leukemia seven that put your body in the deep freeze!" something in her mind whispered. "The leukemia is the villain, not you. You are a poor, misunderstood, brave, suffering, dear woman! Why don't you spend your time finding the real cause of this horrible disease? Then, when your time in the freeze is up, you can bring this cure back to the world with you! No other woman will ever have to suffer as you have suffered. You will be a heroine!"
Cindy Northcutt made up her mind instantly. She would take the advice given her by her own mind. Perhaps here in this subtle world were wise men and women, who could answer her questions about this disease. Perhaps there were schools here, perhaps universities.
"I'll be a real heroine!" Hugging this thought to her, she turned away from the home where lived those whom she had loved, and fled into the enormous reaches of the subtle worlds, seeking knowledge, and knowing she would find it.
A corps of young men in uniform made the rounds of Pershing Square in Old Los Angeles each evening, calling:
"Here's food for the hungry! Here's beer to go with it! Come one, come all! No need to push, gentlemen! There's plenty for all and more where this came from! No, sir, no pickles to go with the ham sandwiches tonight, sir. Sorry, sir. Somebody forgot to order pickles. Tomorrow night I'll have them. Another can of beer? No, sir. Sorry, sir. All the food you want but only one can of beer to a person, sir. Why? Because the will of J. Edward Palmer says that is the way it is to be, sir. We obey his orders. If we don't obey them, a man from the cold machines company comes around and tells us he is making a special reservation for us in the next unit that is opened!"
The young man who told this story always grinned as he told it, to indicate that he was joking, but the effect on his hearers was always as if he had been telling the truth. Here in this black and bitter world of the winos and the bums were those who believed that they could be sentenced to the cold machines for being what they were. Just the thought of such a sentence was enough to make a man shiver.
Behind the will of J. Edward Palmer stood the lawyers of the cold machines company, making grimly certain that its provisions were carried into effect. They understood quite clearly only people for whom the last hope had faded ever became their clients. They had strong feelings that the last wishes of the hopeless and of the desperate should be carried into effect.
There was no question that in giving away food and beer each night, J. Edward Palmer secured bigger audiences than he had ever gained when he had tried to talk about Agape and about a god big enough to make every man a true man. He also realized a quite unanticipated dividend from his charity. The man with the drum and the trumpet could not compete with free food and beer! The fellow was forced to leave the park.
In this place and in these times many were hungry for food for the belly; few were hungry for the things of the spirit; fewer still wanted to know about a love big enough to give with no thought of gain to the giver and with no regard to the merit of the receiver. As for a god big enough to make every man a true man—how could this be true? Did every crooked congressman have the right to write laws to his personal advantage? Did this mean you could call every cop a true man who was telling lies on the witness stand? Could you consider to be a true man every judge who gave decisions to the side which paid him the most?
How could such things be? Old Palmer was crazy. But his beer was good!
It was best to think that in America every lying cop and every crooked judge and every stealing congressman were found out eventually and were given stiff prison sentences. Only you knew they didn't. You knew they didn't! You knew the odds were they made it big, kept it until they were finished with it, and died rich!
The universe didn't seem to care about any of this. It seemed to have no concern about thieves stealing and killers going about their work of murder and about cops being bought and judges selling justice like prostitutes on the street.
Or did the universe care and was its reckoning long overdue?
If the universe didn't care, then who had made the laws of nature that scientists claimed they had discovered?
As to the laws written in books, the winos of Pershing Square clearly understood that these were whimsies of men in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C. In these places men had decided what was legal and what was illegal. And they had acted just as if these whimsies made sense!
If men had made laws to declare what was legal and what was illegal, couldn't they also make laws to declare themselves to be true men? Was this the way it was?
"We are poor men," the winos in Pershing Square told one another. "We do not understand these matters. It is best to take the sandwich and the can of beer put out by old Palmer. By the way, who was he? Who gave him the right to disturb our peace with wild talk about some god big enough to make every man a true man? We're already true men, aren't we?"
While the young men in uniforms made their nightly rounds with beer and sandwiches in Pershing Square, in Unit 41, the body of J. Edward Palmer lay dreaming.
So far as he could determine, he was simply dreaming. It was a strange dream he was having, even for him.
Inside himself, before he had come to Unit 41, J. Edward Palmer had discovered many emotions which had shocked him. The death of the child under the wheel of his car had been a shock. The discovery of fear and of hate, these within him, had also been shocking. But the real shock, the great shock, the shock from which he had never recovered, had been the experience of Agape in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. From this shock he had never recovered. A love great enough to give with no thought of return and with no regard for the merit of the receiver! Could this be true, could such an emotion really exist?
It had to be true, it had to exist, if the worlds were to come into existence, if they were to start turning on their axis, and if they were to continue on their paths through great space! It had to be true!
As he thought about his experience, it seemed to him that Agape had come into existence somewhere in the region of his middle, somewhere near the solar plexus. He suspected that if it had gone downward and had found expression through the sexual organs, it would have become a love of sexual relationships, and after this, a love of a mate and of a family, and after this a love of the herd which is a bigger family, perhaps eventually becoming a love of the ultimate herd, of all life everywhere, perhaps of the whole vast universe. He suspected that Agape flowing downward through the sexual organs of a woman instantly created a nymphomaniac, the sexual compulsive who so loved the world that she continuously gave her reproductive organs in its service. And that was true love!
But sex did not mark the limits of the ways in which Agape could express itself. There were other ways, a sense of beauty, a feeling of wonder, a touch of awe, an instinct for harmony, a feeling of utter security in the midst of death, an ability to look beyond the on-scene crime a human was committing and see the off-stage drama leading onward to love.
Here in the land beyond the cold, J. Edward Palmer found the sky high mountains he had glimpsed in eastern Tennessee. Cloud mass piled on cloud mass piled on top of cloud mass, they went up and up and up toward infinite horizons, in all the colors of earth's rainbow and in colors never seen in any rainbow ever seen by human eyes. All through these vast ranges of cloud massed color beauty, creatures lived. Some were human, some were beasts, some were semi-divine.
Seen occasionally by startled eyes on Earth, these sky high mountains and their residents were thought to be hallucinations. Seen occasionally by those who lived in these cloud masses, Earth was thought to be the hallucination.
In part, Palmer had come to the land beyond the cold because he could no longer face failure on Earth, because he could no longer abide the thump of the drum and the ya ya ya of the trumpet, the indifference of faces of the winos of Pershing Square. In part, he had gone for another reason, which was to find a way to really give to these indifferent faces the emotion of Agape. If there was one thing the winos of Pershing Square needed, it was love.
If there was one thing that all men and all women needed, it was love.
Palmer had seen quite clearly the need for knowledge, learning, wisdom. But this by itself was not enough. Added to knowledge, to learning, and to wisdom needed to be love.
Here in the world beyond the cold, he could find the solution to the problem. He did not in the least doubt that the problem had been solved here. The creatures who lived in the cloud-massed mountains, human, beast, or semi-divine, lived together in harmony and hence knew the secret of love.
Palmer took his problem to them. They listened. They would be glad to help him find a solution, they said.
Palmer hugged this knowledge to his heart. He knew that when he awakened he would be able to give to the world the secret of love.
Crenshaw, the biophysicist, went through the cold like a streak of flashing light, and landed in a universe of pure form. Rather, he went into that segment of the universe where form was alive, and being alive, was creative, that is to say, it was not only reproducing itself, it was also striving to create new and novel shapes. He stared at what he saw. Squares, rectangles, cubes, spheres, pyramids, five, six, seven, and eight-sided figures, all were here. Here also were other forms never glimpsed by man, which did not belong to man's universe, and which not even Crenshaw had ever imagined! Since no human had ever seen such shapes as these, there were no words for them.
So great was Crenshaw's wonder at what he saw, so great his awe, perhaps so great was his love for all of these strange things, that the word Agape might have been used to describe his emotional state. Not that he had ever heard this word. He had not heard it and did not know that it existed. He was a scientist. To him, all emotions were damned as being subjective and thus suspected as having no real existence.
But real or not, the feeling in him was a mixture of wonder, awe, and love.
Before his eyes was a circle. As he watched, it shifted and became an oblong. The oblong shifted and became the shape of a four-leaf clover. The clover shifted and became the petal of a flower, which, miraculously, also had four petals. Now color, a very faint but very beautiful shade of blue, was in the petals.
Crenshaw knew he had seen color created. He did not know how this miracle had been accomplished. The color seemed to have been created offstage, just out of the range of his vision.
At this point, he realized that the circle itself still existed, without color, but that the circle had a strange kind of clear transparency. Words to describe this transparency clicked into his mind from some unknown source, calling it the clear light of the beginning. Vaguely he remembered that these words were from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He also knew that what these words were describing had nothing to do with death but were concerned with the fountainhead of life itself. The Clear Light of the Beginning was a verbal symbol describing a starting point for that which had no starting point and which was, and is, deathless.
As the circle shifted and became an oblong, the clear light had begun to take on color. Gradually Crenshaw realized that this was a shade of blue very like the color of the sky seen on top of a very high mountain. Blue! A color most humans liked. But this blue was so beautiful that to see it was to know love.
As the oblong became a four-leaf clover, the clear transparency diminished. It was as if the transparency took on substance and became real, becoming blue as this happened.
In the light-blue color, dots were swimming. Staring at the dots, Crenshaw saw what they were. They were planets! He was looking either at the whole solar system or at some perfect image of it, seeing the whole system in one glimpse. There in that pale blue light swam great Saturn with his rings. There was pock-marked Mars, with his two tiny moons. There, bits of rock sparkling in the void, was the asteroid belt There was the Green Planet, Earth, Home! His heart gulped at the sight.
All of the solar system was held in this blue light. Then the system swam out of existence as the four-leaf clover changed again. New colors appeared, vague purples, different tints of blue. The form was also shifting, moving with the colors. The subtle energies were also changing. In many ways subtle changes were taking place. Behind the circle that had become a four-leaf clover a background was coming into existence. There, arches were leaping into the sky. These arches followed curves that he knew had to exist mathematically but which he had never seen and which he had never expected to see.
Then he saw that arches, circles, and the four-leaf clover, together with the now widely varying colors, were blending into a symphony built of curves, colors, and of energies, all of which seemed to be flowing in the invisible outlines of some master matrix that remained out of sight and which still managed to control and to keep in order all of this master movement of blending form and color. As he watched all of this happening, wonder and awe rose to even greater heights within him. This . . . this wonder . . . had been waiting for him beyond the cold! Did it wait here for all men who might happen to pass this way? Crenshaw suspected that it did so wait, that in some way it was a part of the beginning of a planet and of men on this planet. It had waited here for him to see it, but his mind was also creating it! Was his mind flowing in the same invisible pattern the forms and the colors were following?
This thought shook Crenshaw. He knew he was trying to accept two contradictory ideas at the same time. He also knew these contradictory ideas were both equally true. In this world where he now was, where a whole solar system floated in a delicate shade of blue, a statement could be both true and false at the same time! Here a man could be a true man and a false man simultaneously. In this higher universe, in this lower universe, in this older universe, in this newer universe, truth was a sword with two edges!
Crenshaw had never heard of J. Edward Palmer and of Palmer's talk of a god big enough to make every man a true man. If he had heard Palmer talk in Pershing Square, he would never have seen the truth in Palmer's words but would have joined the winos in thinking the man was simply crazy. How could such conflicting ideas exist in a sane universe?
Crenshaw had not as yet realized that the universe was not necessarily sane, that sanity was an effort on the part of men to impose their value systems on a nonhuman world. The super sanity of a super mind might sweep all of these value systems aside.
Crenshaw watched something happen that could not take place. He saw before his eyes a symphony of magic, a blend of curves and colors, a mixture of arcs and energies, a movement outward from an exploding core that was simultaneously a movement inward from the outermost limits of space-time, a harmony that had in it a feeling of being as young as the first spring and as old as the last man, that was a whisper of flame and a crash of wonder, that was a thundering roar of silence.
These Crenshaw saw, sensed, heard, felt, was aware of, was! Here where opposites met, there was no contradiction, but in this area where the whole solar system floated in a soft blue haze; the meaning of the verb to be underwent startling changes. Here was meant become! Here you were the thing you witnessed; to see it was to become it. Crenshaw did not cease being human; it was simply that he became more than human, this while still remaining human. The more that he became included in this solar system floating in the soft blue light, he also became included in the thunder of silently crashing curves and their associated colors. He was all of this, all of it simultaneously; he heard it; he saw it; he felt it; he was it!
Watching, he knew that language was inadequate to describe a thousandth part of what he was seeing. Words could not tell what mind knew, what heart had felt, what ear had heard, what eye had seen! His finest way of talking was little above the level of grunt. The best of language was a series of shrieks, groans, and shrill yells. One of these grunts said, "There's an enemy! Run like hell!" Another said, "I smell a dead horse!" Another shouted, "There's a woman! Come on, boys."
Used at its very peak, language could only convey the heavy emotions of the jungles of the Home World; it could only tell a story of conflict, hunger, and sex, and the solution to these conflicts. Here beyond the cold were sublime beauties that no words could reveal. Even the poets, who must have glimpsed this spate of wonder, had not been able to find the right words to describe such lofty visions and had never been able to tell what they had seen in such a way that their readers could grasp a millionth part of what was here.
The energy of form! Here this energy was alive! Crenshaw saw the energy, knew he had described it in part in some of his equations; here he understood this energy; here he was the energy. The energy of a square figure was a moving pleasure in four directions. The energy of a rectangle was flattened and went mainly in two directions. The energy of an equilateral triangle was three-pointed. It spurted as it moved. The energy of the Pythagorean theorem, which said that the sum of the squares on the two sides of a right triangle was equal to the square of the hypotenuse, was definitely sexual! It went in rhythmic spurts and had a panting beat about it. The energy of the inside of a sphere was a feeling of constriction lying in all directions. The energy of a curve flowed smoothly, going in both directions from some invisible heart of the curve and leaping out from both ends to embrace the whole universe.
There were other forms, a myriad of them, each with a different feeling and a different kind of energy, forms that Crenshaw had not guessed could exist until the freeze had come in around him, forms that no mortal mind had ever visioned or ever would vision, forms that the human brain could not accept as real and remain human, energies that no instrument devised by the human mind had ever detected. Behind all of this was an enormous evolutionary process, a growth of form and of energy, growth in many directions, a growth that was creating new life forms on Earth and in the solar system. Life on Earth in all of its many forms had correlations here and was an expression of energies and shapes moving downward from this mental region.
Where had life started? Here or on some far-off star? Had it drifted to Earth through the interstellar spaces, floating as microbes on vast energy currents flowing through space, perhaps hitchhiking on meteors and asteroids?
To Crenshaw at this moment it looked as if life had started here in this land beyond the cold and had gone down a vast flowing river to the physical level of Planet Earth. Cause seemed to be here in this land; effect seemed to be on the Home World. This not only held true insofar as the origin of life was concerned; it also held true for many of life's activities. Boy meets girl was presumed to be inevitable. Which boy meets which girl was presumed to be accidental. Was a cause actually operating here in this land beyond the cold which brought about the meeting of a specific boy and a specific girl?
If cause was here in this world, where was it located? As soon as the question crossed his consciousness, Crenshaw felt his mind start to move inward. Simultaneously something outside of him moved outward. Suddenly the fantastic play of forms and energies grouped themselves in such a way that he was surrounded. He realized then that he was actually in contact with the inner surface of a sphere!
And what a sphere this was! Crenshaw gasped in rising wonder at what was here. In this place there was gentleness; here was awe and wonder; here was flame and thunder; here was the most feminine quality he had ever experienced in his life! Here was, perhaps, the ancient, hidden, secret mother of all life, gentle and tender and kind and sweet, and infinitely patient. Willing to wait a million years, if need be, or ten million, to see her children come to full growth. Here she was, as intangible as the mist of the morning and as real as the surface of a planet, on an inner surface, where no one had thought to look for her!
Filled with this ancient goodness, faced with this infinite kindness, feeling this overwhelming softness, Crenshaw felt an impulse to worship. Here was the softness of the womb; here the male quality was in diminuendo; here the female quality was in crescendo. Yet never for an instant did Crenshaw doubt that outside somewhere—and simultaneously inside in some strange way—was flame and correlating thunder, the male principle, the ancient Father.
Yet, even now when he was in contact with an inner surface, Crenshaw knew that this was not the final inner surface. What seemed to him to be an inside would eventually be seen to be an outer surface for still another inside surface. Other worlds, other times, other male and female principles lay inward! Crenshaw knew that what he was experiencing was an infinite regress, another way for an infinite series to find expression—and another name for infinity. Always, inside every outside, was an inside. Always the inside was the mother, the womb, the gentle, tender crucible of life; always there was an outside that entered in flame and thunder, and always as the outside came in, there was fertilization and the beginning of new life. This process continued into infinite smallness, into the littleness that was microscopic in size, then became even smaller. And smaller still!
Simultaneously with the infinite regress that went down into infinite smallness, always with an inside and an outside, the same process was going in the other direction. The expanding process produced globes as large as planets, as large as suns, as large as solar systems, as large as a galaxy, always with the inner softness and the outer flame and thunder. And as all of this happened, that which was going in the direction of infinite smallness was continuously meeting that which was going in the direction of infinite largeness, in a meeting of opposites. And as all of this happened, the process continuously broke into smaller bits—a million of them, a billion, a hundred billion, Crenshaw could not guess at the number involved—which became planets, suns, mice, and the sons of apes, all of which duplicated the tireless, eternal play between the two plates of a condensor, between the inner and the outer surfaces.
In what seemed to him to be a split second, Crenshaw learned the meaning of form and of energy and of inner and of outer surfaces—and the secret of creation.
Then there was a scraping noise. The vision vanished and he found he was waking up. Had a hundred years passed as quickly as this?
"Great God—if there is a God—be with her when she awakens," the mother had prayed.
Prayers, and the prayers of mathematics, which are equations, electronic computers, devices for predicting the tides and for predicting and controlling the weather, doodlebugs for locating oil, uranium, and gold, devices for predicting the stock market, all of these can be considered to be efforts to impress the Infinite with the human will, as attempts to direct properly a god big enough to make every man a true man! Yet such is the human ego, and such is the human emotional system inside the human ego, that such attempts are made. If all the prayers of all the humans on Planet Earth were counted for any one day, no number would be big enough to express so great a magnitude.
Perhaps the prayer of the mother did have some effect on the Ineffable. When the cold came down, the fright of the child was short-lived. The feeling of cold quickly gave way to a feeling of warmth. Something happened. She did not know what it was. She was in another place. So quiet, so easy, so natural was the transition, she did not really notice it was happening. One instant she had seemed to be a little chilly. This often happened at night when she kicked off the covers and mother had not yet come to replace them. This time mother did not come to replace them. Growing tired of waiting, she slipped away from the cold and went swimming in the warm beautiful sea.
It was as simple as that! Just slip out of the cold, cold body and go swimming in the warm, beautiful sea. Here gold fish were to be seen, and purple fish, and green fish, and pink fish, and fish all the colors of the rainbow, fish that one instant were a delicate shade of green and in another instant had changed into wonderful yellow, then instantly changed again and became a gentle mauve.
At the sight of the colored fish swimming in this crystal sea, Mary Jones cried out in delight. Her happy cry instantly became a burst of visible colored light which danced in circles around her. Here her voice was music! She reached an inquiring hand toward a golden fish, intending to pat it. Eager to be caught and patted, the fish swam toward her, wiggling in utter happiness at the touch of her fingers. She screamed in happy glee. The sound of her scream caused another burst of colored light around her, light which was made up of millions of tiny microscopic bubbles, each of which echoed and reechoed her happy shout so that in an instant the whole of the crystal sea was living in the joy roused by her happiness.
At the sound and at the sight of all of this joy, from all directions fish came swimming toward her, fish eager for a pat from her fingers, fish that wiggled in delight when she held them gently, golden fish, silver fish, green fish, blue fish, fish of colors she had never seen and did not know existed, iridescent fish, fluorescent fish that exhibited living colors each of which was bright and glowing with its own internal light, colors with the silver glow of dawn on them, colors with the brilliance of the noon sun, colors with the quiet of the day's end shining through them, all of these forming the bodies of fish that swam in the crystal clear waters of this transparent sea.
At this moment, without knowing she was doing it, the child was in the process of forgetting a world that had held overmuch of pain, horror, and terror for her, and which had held too little love. Bathed in this transparent sea, with its waters washing every atom of her being, the transparency of the sea itself seemed to be washing all painful memories away. Slipping away were memories of the horrors that had lived with her back in that place she had called home. Perhaps the memories were being taken away by Someone, but if this was true, she could not detect the presence of the Someone. So subtly was the memory loss taking place—or so quietly and so effectively was Someone working—that she did not notice what was going on. Memories of her mother began to slip away, then were gone; her name went, sliding away quietly into the transparent sea that seemed to shine with its own bright inner light. The last memory to slip away was the knowledge, or the idea, or the state of being, that she was a girl.
Here in this transparent sea there were no girls. And no boys. In this wonderful world, sex had a quite different meaning than on Earth. Here it was not connected to reproduction —indeed, reproduction in the Earthly sense did not exist here. Sex in the sense of the basic dance between the polarities did exist here. It was the source of the changing color in the fish themselves, the source of the transparency in the crystal sea, the source of . . . everything.
Mary Jones forgot her name, forgot the fact that she was a girl, forgot pain, forgot horror, forgot the fear that had made her, in the words of a now forgotten mother, "wake up scared . . ."
And as this happened, she forgot something else too, forgot it so easily and smoothly that she did not know she was forgetting it. Nor did she realize what was happening until she glanced down at her body. Then she saw, to her complete lack of surprise, that her body was no longer human.
She had forgotten that she even belonged to the human race!
Memory had slipped away and had slipped away and had slipped away until it, and she were back at the point of the beginning, when the clear light was still shining, when there was no memory because there was no history, no time, no form. From this point, she had moved forward again. Now she had picked up the oldest learning method in the universe, imitation, and as she had come forward, her body had imitated its surroundings. It had ceased being human and had become a beautiful, golden-yellow fish.
This was what she now saw, when she looked down at her body, that she was a fish!
The girl that had once been Mary Jones, of Planet Earth, accepted this fish-body with no reluctance whatsoever. And with no surprise. Having no memory of having ever been human, what was there to be surprised about? She liked the fish-body; she appreciated it. At her will, it shifted colors instantly, glowing with all the colors of the rainbow and with other colors never seen on the Home World.
But the memory was not wholly gone. Vaguely, the golden yellow fish was aware that somewhere on some far world an inexplicable something that had once been called Mary Jones was waiting for her to return to it.
"Let it wait!" she said. In her mind was the thought that it would wait a long, long time.
With a flick of her tail, she swam to join the other fish that lived in this crystal sea.
Here, for a very long time, she played with the other fish.
Then, from some far world, something called to her, something she had quite forgotten.
She was not sure what was calling, but whatever it was, she suspected it was horrible.
As the cold came down, Roland Green continued screaming to a judge that now existed only in his own mind: "You can go to hell, hell, hell!"
He meant the words to apply not only to the judge but also to the jury, to the prosecuting attorney, to the spectators, and to the television camera operators and to the radio broadcast announcers behind their special glass panels at the far end of the courtroom.
Roland Green had never heard of J. Edward Palmer and of Palmer's concept of a god big enough to make every man a true man. He would have jeered at this idea if it had been called to his attention. The judge a true man? The judge was a crook; he had listened to false testimony like . . . like ... He searched in his mind for an elusive image that the judge resembled. This image was hard to find. It was just off the edge of his memory, he knew, but the harder he tried to recall it and to get it into clear focus, the more it slipped away from him.
Suddenly he found the image. And wished he hadn't! Dark and terrifying, it rose up before him, a raging giant with a club in his hand. Making grunting noises, the giant was lifting the club. In his own mind, Green was sure the giant meant to kill him with the club, then to eat him.
Before this horror, Roland Green fled screaming. Somewhere was a place of refuge; if only he could reach it before the giant caught him!
As he ran, he heard the club thud heavily on the ground behind him. If he had not dodged, if he had not run, he would have been crushed. Now as he fled screaming, he heard the feet of the giant thumping behind him, in hot pursuit.
Suddenly—it happened so fast he did not know exactly what took place—the giant's mate was directly ahead of him. As big as the giant, she was blocking the path. As he tried to turn aside, she caught him in a huge hand, lifted him high into the air, and drew him to her enormous breasts. His thought was that she intended to smother him against her breasts and after he was dead, she and the giant would eat him together.
Then his sense of smell functioned. And he remembered her. She was the place of refuge he had been seeking all along. She was his mother!
But mother or not, the fact still remained that the giant was huge. He might strike his mate and his child to the ground with one blow of the club, then eat them both!
In his mind, Green was sure that this could happen and that it had happened many times before on the horizon of some nearby savage world. He screamed louder. Everywhere he turned there were enemies.
Then he realized the giant was shouting at his mate, protesting vigorously, in defense of him!
"Careful, honey! You're smothering him!" the giant was saying.
"You've already scared him half to death!" the giantess answered. Anger growled in her voice.
"I was only playing a game with him," the giant answered.
"He didn't know it was a game!" the giantess answered. She turned her attention from her mate to her child. "There, there, honey. Daddy is not going to hurt you."
Somehow her voice relieved a little of the fear that was in him. As this happened, he was suddenly and inexplicably a child in his mother's arms. Now he realized that what he had thought was a giant was actually his game-playing father. He was in no danger! It had all been a game. He was in his mother's arms. As she cuddled and soothed him, the face of the giant changed into the face of daddy, a friendly but not wholly trusted face.
As the scene righted itself in his mind and he realized he was a child—this without ever wondering how so marvelous a change could have taken place—he was sure in his mind that somewhere back of the one called daddy was a situation in which a real giant had clubbed his son to death.
Suddenly this event became real in his mind! Only now it had changed. He was no longer the child. He was the giant! He was the killer!
In a furious rage, he snatched a hairy child from the arms of a hairy mother. With a sweeping motion, he smashed the head of the screaming, wailing child against the top of a huge boulder. As the head struck, the skull was crushed, giving off the sound of thwuck. Brains splashed on his face and arms. The wails of the child went into instant silence. Flinging the dead body into the nearby bushes, he turned toward the hairy mother, intending to destroy her too. As he felt the pressure of her body, the rage in him was converted into sexual fury. Throwing her to the ground, he forced her to submit to him sexually. She exhibited no real resistance, no real protest.
In the mind of Roland Green all of this was utterly real. He was the giant; he felt the giant's hot fury, felt that fury abate in the process of orgasm. He had no question whatsoever that this event had actually happened many, many times in the history of the race that now called itself human. Many times a killer was he! Across the long, long history of the race, killing had been a way of life.
Now, in the mind of Roland Green, something shifted. He ceased being the giant and became the child. He felt all the terror of that child as the giant seized him by the legs; he felt himself being swung through the air; he felt his skull strike the rock.
He screamed, and screamed, and kept on screaming. Suddenly he was not the child; he was Roland Green again, in court, looking up at a judge who looked to him like a giant at this moment. He was still screaming.
"And you can to to hell, hell, hell! I had no choice, I tell you! Murder was forced on me! It was forced upon me! Forced upon me! I had to kill to save my own life! If I had had a choice . . ."
"But you always had a choice," a voice said.
As the voice spoke, the stage scenery in his mind shifted again. The judge, looking down at him from the high bench, slid out of sight, slipping away into a kind of clear light that seemed to be everywhere. It was as if this clear light dissolved everything, except Roland Green and a voice.
Green reacted to the voice as he had reacted to everything else in his life, by violent resistance. Since the voice had spoken behind him, he turned quickly to face it.
"That's a lie!" he shouted. "I never had a choice!"
His voice went into silence. Consternation rose in him. He had expected to see the spectators in the courtroom. There were no spectators. There was no courtroom. There was no possible source from which a voice could have come.
There was only a white transparency, a kind of crystal clearness, a light that seemed to have no focus but which seemed to come from every direction at the same time.
Green turned quickly back toward the judge on the high bench. The judge and the high bench were both gone, dissolved into the crystal clearness that now was everywhere. Seeking the source of the voice, he turned to his left, then to his right. He found no one.
"Whoever you are, stand and face me like a man!" he shouted.
"But I am not a man," the voice answered.
"Not a man?" Green felt his vocal chords begin to shake. "Then . . . then what are you?"
"No man has ever been able to say what I am," the voice said.
It was a calm voice; it spoke quietly, yet it also gave an impression of vast power under perfect control. It also gave the impression, incredibly, of love! It was male yet there were female tones and female qualities mixed into it too, so that deciding whether it was more male or more female was impossible. The mixture of male and female qualities, the blend of these two parts into a whole, was something of which Green was aware, not something he had to act upon. At this moment, he was enormously shaken by the fact that a voice had spoken to him and he could not see the speaker.
All he could see was the clear transparency. Everywhere he looked, the clear transparency existed, overhead and underfoot, to the right and to the left. Also, he was confused about what he was. Only an instant before, he had been a giant murdering a child. Then he had been the child. Then he had been himself again, screaming defiance at a judge above him.
Now he was all of these, inexplicably blended together. In addition, he was himself, with all the qualities that he knew belonged to Roland Green, all of this boiled together into a single pot of alphabet soup.
As he thought of himself as being himself, he realized that this was no longer true. Inexplicably, his body seemed to be changing, seemed to be enlarging. As this happened, his body was taking on the appearance of light itself! He seemed to be growing taller. At his back, he had the impression of giant wings coming into existence, though he suspected that these wings might be only a symbol of his coming ability to move with incredible speed across galactic distances.
What did this change mean? Why this body of light? Why the symbol of wings?
"It means you are seeing, in advance, your great potential," the voice answered.
"What?" Green gasped. "For me there is no potential, no tomorrow. I am a killer sentenced to the cold."
"Yes," the voice answered. "But is this all you are?"
"I—uh—" Green said, then was silent, awed at the changes that were still taking place in him. Now he was standing at least ten feet tall and the light that was in him was burning with great intensity. He was aware, also, that this light had always been in him, but that he had covered ft up, had hidden it away so that he could not see it, and had refused to look at it or to admit its existence.
"Well, Meliki?" the voice questioned.
As the voice said Meliki, the memory of Roland Green slid backward in his mind. Like the giant, Roland Green became a once-was thing, a something that had been a part of the long, long journey, a thing left far, far behind. Displacing all that was behind him, built out of all that had happened, created out of all he had been, was a new creature with the new name of Meliki. And Meliki was something he might become in some far-off future that he was seeing now, might become, if the cards fell right, and if he played them correctly!
"Well, Meliki, what do you have to say for your actions on Planet Earth?" the voice said.
"I—uh!" Meliki answered.
"Vomiting is not an adequate answer!" the voice said.
"I—uhf!" Meliki said.
"Do you still contend you had no choice?"
"Well . . ."
"Let us be clear about this," the voice interrupted. "When you lived as an animal, you had very little choice. Mostly, your actions were reactions over which you had very little control. Your actions as an animal will not weigh heavily against you. However, as you became human, as you acquired more and more brain tissue, you gained more and more freedom to choose your actions. You used this freedom to hide the fact that you had a choice!"
"B—but!" Meliki felt a distinct sputter come into his voice. "But I did not . . . begging your pardon, Sire."
"Pardon granted," the voice said. "You are trying to say that humans have hardly more freedom to choose than animals. This is true. But little as this freedom is, it is important. It must be used, repeatedly. Just as an athlete must train for the games, so must a human train to become a free man. The way he does this is by constantly exercising his freedom to choose."
"I . . ." Meliki felt the sputter grow larger. He did not doubt that he was on dangerous ground. He knew he faced enormous power but he did not know how this power would be used.
In him the impulse to hide was growing very strong.
"There is no place to hide, Meliki," the voice said. "Neither down there nor up here!"
"Yes, Sire," Meliki whispered. Even if he could not hide, file impulse to flee was still very strong within him. "But, down mere . . ." He pointed downward toward a planet that was invisible but which he felt was somewhere below. "I killed a man!"
"And you are now trying to hide behind that fact!" the voice said. "You are trying to pretend that the fact of murder relieved you of your freedom to choose!"
"Ulp!" Meliki gulped. The voice was reading his mind!
"Of course I am," the voice said. "How else can I be what I am if I cannot read the mind of any human? Of course I know you are a killer. So are all other men, at some time or other in their long history, if not in fact, then in wish. Sometimes I become a little tired of the enormous egotism of humans in trying to prove themselves important by pretending that murder is important! If you kill my own, do you think I have no power to bring them here to me?" For an instant, the voice sounded irritated.
"I know you have that power, Sire," Meliki said, hastily.
"Then do not try to pretend that your actions as a killer relieved you of freedom of choice, and made punishment necessary! This is such nonsense as men talk! If you kill one man, or a million men, what harm is done? Am I not here to give back to them the life you think you took? Am I not competent to do this?"
Tones of distant thunder rumbled in the voice. While Meliki trembled, the voice continued.
"I took apes and made them into men! I gave them life! The life in them belongs to me, not to them! Only the development of that life, only the gain they are able to achieve, only the improvement belongs to them. I give them life. It is like a shining diamond in the rough. They may cut the facets on it; they may add the sparkle and the luster! In so doing, they create themselves and are the self-born!"
In the voice, the distant thunder rumbled louder, not in threat, now, but in looking forward to some great day that was visible only to the speaker.
"Yes, Sire," Meliki said. "But so many times, it was so difficult to choose!"
"Did I say it was easy?" the voice growled. "How can I build men fit to be my equals by giving them easy tasks?"
"Equals?" Meliki sputtered. "Did you say equals, Sire? Your equals, Sire?"
"Equals and more than equals, my betters!" the voice answered. "Men who know the facts of the situation around them, men who are able to choose on the basis of the facts, men who also know Agape"
"Agape?" Meliki faltered. "I ... I do not know the word."
"You knew it once and you still know it, but you are trying to pretend forgetfulness," the voice said. "It means love."
"I ... I do not know what you are talking about, Sire."
"Again, you choose not to know," the voice continued. "Let me tell you, Meliki, the time may come when I will choose to eliminate from my solar system those apes who choose to remain ignorant. Do not forget, I, also, have this choice! And this power! Apes who choose to remain stupid I can make as nothing, as less than nothing!"
"Sire!" Meliki protested, horror rising in him.
"I want men who have chosen to be free!" the voice continued.
"But freedom ... this is so difficult!"
"Again, have I said it was easy? I want free men, whole men, not soft men!"
"But surely you can give them freedom."
"What good is the freedom that is given?" the voice shouted. "If I give them freedom, they come back to me as beggars, whining for me to restore their chains. Never, never, never, can freedom be given! It must be earned by a man's own efforts; it must be fought for; it must be died for, if this is necessary. Freedom is won in blood, in struggle, and in death, Meliki, and it is kept the same way it is won, in blood, struggle, and death!"
Booooooommmmm! went the thunder in the voice.
"But . . ." Meliki began, then was silent. He knew now that any protest was futile.
"As you see yourself now, so you can become, Meliki," the voice continued. "But only you can create yourself; only you can cut the facets on the rough diamond; only you can add the luster to make those shining facets. On the other hand, if you fail to choose, or too often choose incorrectly, you will simply cease to be!"
"Sire!" Meliki protested.
"What good is a game you can't lose, Meliki?" the voice asked. "Who would choose to play a game he always won?"
Meliki tried to think about this question. He saw, now, that the voice was right, that a game that could not be lost was no fun, that a life that could not fail had no challenge in it.
The voice spoke again. "My life is in you, Meliki, and as I bet on myself, I also bet on you, knowing that though we may be many times defeated, somewhere, sometime, we will win! When the task is bitter hard, it is in this way we gain the strength to turn defeat into shining victory, on some stricken battlefield that is to come. If you die, I die too, Meliki, by as much of my life as was in you."
Meliki listened to these words with growing horror. "But, Sire, you cannot die!" he protested.
"Only as you die do I die, Meliki," the voice answered.
"And if I make a mistake?"
"Then we both die, a little," the voice said. "As you learn to make correct choices, so do we both grow stronger."
Meliki tried to think about what he had been told. He was aware of an enormous complexity around him, a complexity so great that it took into account even the fall of the sparrow. No wonder he had blinded himself, no wonder he had pretended that he had no choice! It was to escape facing this complexity! Also he was aware of rebellion rising within him.
"I . . . I . . ." Meliki felt his voice rise to a shout. The great wings at his back began to pound. Fear was rising too. He did not doubt that the voice possessed the power to blast him out of existence, that it could make him as if he had never been. He tried to choke down the rebellious feelings. They grew stronger. Trying to speak, he found he was beginning to shout. Tones of faraway thunder were trying to appear in his voice too and he had vague premonitions of gods shouting at each other.
"It is not fair!" Meliki shouted.
"What is not fair, Meliki?" the voice asked.
"It is not fair for you to die even a little because I die! It Is not fair for you to suffer, even a little, when I make a mistake!" The tones of thunder grew stronger in Meliki's voice. "You take unfair advantage of me, Sire! You attempt to control my conduct by linking it to your well-being! This . . . this . . . this is a stinking, dirty trick, Sire!"
Meliki was striding up and down through the clear transparency wherein he existed. Shaking his fists and beating his wings, he was shouting at the voice.
"Why is it a dirty trick, Meliki?" the voice asked.
"You are taking advantage of the affection I feel for you, Sire!" Meliki shouted. "You are trying to use that affection to control my actions. You talk to me of winning freedom, then you attempt to control me through love! Sire, it is not fair!"
"Not fair?" The voice was shouting too. "Remember, I define fairness, Meliki! I say what is fair and what is not fair!"
"That's what you say!" Meliki shouted.
"In this system, my word is law."
"Except where you have been found out!" Meliki shouted.
"Are you defying me, Meliki?"
"Yes!" Meliki screamed. He was out of his mind, he thought. Such defiance could only end in death. Yet the rebellious feelings were still strong within him.
There was silence within the crystal transparency. Somewhere Meliki sensed that a voice was making up its mind.
Suddenly the voice spoke a single word that shook Meliki as had nothing that had gone before.
"Good!" the voice said.
"Sire!" Meliki gulped.
"How else may a man win final freedom except by defying me?" the voice asked.
"Sire," Meliki whispered.
"Men who come to me crawling on their belly, telling me how great I am and how little they are, I send back to that bitter world called Earth, to learn their lessons again," the voice answered. All sound of thunder was gone from it now and it had become a murmur of soft sound in the transparency of this clear sea.
"But those who come to me with their chins up, with enough courage in their hearts to defy even me, if they have to, these I treasure. These are the choice fruits of my bitter garden called Earth, Meliki, these are my children grown to full stature."
The voice was a gentle whisper in the depths of the mind of Meliki, who had once been known as Roland Green.
"My real children go back to Earth of their own free will, Roland Green," the voice said. It spoke, faded away, and was gone.
As the voice slipped away into the clear transparency of the crystal sea, something called Meliki went with it Left behind was a frightened man named Roland Green.
He was frightened because something that he had forgotten, a physical body in a deep-freeze, was calling to him.
"What have I to do with a physical body?" he demanded.
"Nothing, if that is your will," the body answered. "It is only that without you, I die."
"You die without me?" He was a little startled. Only a second ago he had been talking to the ruler of the system. Now he was talking to a body that claimed to belong to him. He was finding the transition a little difficult.
"Our lives are linked," the body said.
"Linked? But that is just what the voice . . . what someone else was saying!" Green gasped.
"I do not know about that," his body answered. "However, if returning to me is too hard a task for you . . ."
"Who says it is too difficult?" Green shouted.
"No one," the body answered, hastily. "It is just that I am in serious trouble here. Perhaps the problem is too great for even you to solve."
"Who says so?" Green demanded. He had just been talking to the ruler of the system! After this experience, what problem could be too big for him to solve?
"I'll be right there!" Green said. "I'll find a solution for your problem!"
Roland Green sat up.
Not a muscle moved.
He sat up again. That is to say, he was in his body and his intention was to rise to a sitting position. When he made the effort to rise, no muscle moved to obey.
He tried to think about this strange refusal of his muscles to obey his will. Slowly, he realized that his muscles felt like old saddle leather. Stiff, hard, and rigid, they seemed incapable of movement Also, and this was worse, his thinking processes seemed as rigid as his muscles. It was as if his brain had solidified and had become a rigid mass through which thoughts could move only with the greatest difficulty.
Panic tried to come up within him. Even panic could not force impressions through the rigid mass that he called a brain.
He lay still, trying to think. So much had happened, so little of it was clearly remembered. Vaguely, he recalled talking to a voice. Dimly, he remembered a judge, also something called a cold machine.
Somewhere, far away, a sluggish drum was beating, going thump, then after an eternity had passed, going thump again. Also, he was aware of warmth somewhere.
A long whistling sound caught his attention. Who was whistling here? More important, where was here? The question startled him so badly that he tried to sit up again. Again the effort failed, though this time he was sure that muscles had moved somewhere in his body. Also, the effort to move had started the sluggish drum to beating wildly, out of rhythm, with beats piled on top of beats and with other beats missed completely. The whistling sound became louder and grew to panting gasps, giving him the impression that somewhere near him someone was dying.
He realized now that the distant drum that was badly out of rhythm was the heartbeat of the dying person and that the whistling sound was the breath being drawn with difficulty into clogged lungs.
How could this be?
Was he in a hospital? Vaguely, his mind accepted this solution. He was in a hospital and he was listening to the death agony of the person in the bed next to him.
This explanation satisfied him for perhaps a minute. The rasping sounds and the wild, arhythmic heartbeat continued until he wished, in exasperation, that the person in the next bed would have the consideration to die quietly. Where were the doctors, the nurses, the interns? What kind of a hospital was this that permitted a patient to die without help?
So far he succeeded in deluding himself with the idea that he was in a hospital. Then his rigid brain seemed to come open a little. Lightning flashed through it and he realized he was not in a hospital; he was in his own separate space in one of the vaults of the cold machines, and was awakening without anyone to help him.
The problem his body had faced as it awakened prematurely was that of almost rigid muscles, of a violently arhythmic heart trying to come to life and to force sluggish blood through narrow arteries and veins, of stiff lungs fighting to begin again their ancient task of breathing.
There was no dying man in the bed next to him. There was no bed. He was the dying man!
In a flash flood, fear poured into him. Again he tried to rise to a sitting position. His muscles moved, a little, but not enough to hold him erect.
Now real memory came flooding back, memory of Unit 41, memory of the promise of the cold machines company to have complete medical help instantly available when he awakened. Where was this help? The contract with the cold machines company had guaranteed it would be on hand!
They had failed to keep their contract!
He did not seek the reason for this failure.
"The dirty, chiselling, double-crossing thieves! They took my money and then ignored their promises!"
Anger black enough to lead to murder was suddenly in him. He swore at the cold machines company. "Damn them, when I get out of here . . ."
He was suddenly silent as another question entered his mind. Was he going to get out of here?
Desperation rose in Roland Green. He tried to force his legs and arms to move. All he succeeded in doing was to send his heart into another wild flutter. Something was over his face. He could not reach up and remove it. He was suffocating!
His efforts to move grew stronger, then became weaker as energy faded. Real desperation rose in him. With this desperation came the memory of a voice that had talked to him from some other world.
"God!" he whispered. Perhaps this was the first time in his life that Roland Green had prayed. And the voice answered!
"What is it?" the voice asked.
"Help . . ." Green whispered.
"What do you mean, help?" There was real astonishment in the voice.
"Help me! I ... I can't move! They deserted us, left us here to die. I . . . I'm paralyzed!" Roland Green whispered.
"Then die!" the voice answered.
"What?" Green gasped.
"It's your body," the voice explained. "Either bring it back to life or let it die. It obeys you!"
"But . . ."
"I have grown rather tired of the snivelling apes who run to me with every little problem that arises, whimpering that I should help them! You humans will do anything, except learn to use your own resources!"
"But I have no resources, now!" Green wailed.
"No?" The voice seemed to think this protest was hardly worth an answer. "Is this true? Or are you again choosing not to choose in an effort to arouse my sympathy? Is it that you see no reason to find answers for yourself when you can cozen answers out of me?"
"No! No!"
"I say again, it's your body and it will obey you. Either bring it back to life or let it die!"
"Please—"
Click! The sound in Green's mind was rather similar to a broken telephone connection, with the exception that it gave the impression of utter finality. Roland Green found himself completely alone, on the shelf in the crypt that had been his resting place for many years. Was it now to become his grave?
Death was here in the crypt with him. All he could do was wait for it to come.
Wild rebellion rose in him, the same kind of fury that had come up when he had screamed at the judge, the same intense emotion he had felt when he had faced his father when the latter had seemed to be a giant, the same violent ferocity with which he had faced a world of fang, claw, and talon in the jungles of long ago, before aces had become men. Back of the emotion was the same feeling of unfair action. His father had been unfair, the judge had been unfair, now the voice had exhibited the same unfairness.
He screamed in his mind: Will you leave me here to die? You dirty bastard!
For the fraction of an instant, he expected blue lightning to flash from nowhere and to destroy him. During this instant, he held his mental breath. When no blue lightning came, he began screaming again.
"Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!—"
That he was directing these thoughts at a Something that had the power of a god, he well knew. In this moment, the power of the Voice did not matter. Perhaps the blue lightnings could be provoked to release him from the horror in this crypt where he was getting warmer and warmer!
"I say it again, you can go to hell!"
As he screamed the words in his mind they began to appear in their proper place, his vocal chords, so that he was suddenly screaming aloud. As this happened, the sensation of suffocation grew stronger. Something was over his face, stopping his breathing. He remembered now the plastic suit that had been put on him. With his right hand, he reached up and snatched the plastic covering from his face. Air reached his nose, air poured into his lungs!
Simultaneously, his heart leaped wildly, protesting that fat too much load was being placed on it.
"Then explode, and die!" he shouted, to his heart.
THUMP! the heart answered. For a wild second, he thought it had exploded. Then he realized it had given one enormous beat, as if this was necessary to clear some obstruction from its channels, then had settled down into a pounding action that had some sense of rhythm in it.
But his lungs were in trouble, shouting at him that they had been unused for a very long time and now were about to burst under the pressure of blood coming from the heart and air coming from the nose.
"Then burst, if you must!" he told his lungs. "Burst and we will die together."
Whether this was a threat or an order, he did not know, but his lungs seemed to take it as a challenge. Instead of bursting, they took up their task of exchanging waste products for new oxygen.
"We can't carry the load coming into us!" his arteries groaned.
"Carry it or die!" he told his arteries.
They carried their load.
"We're too stiff to move!" his muscles wailed.
"You'll move and like it!" he told his muscles.
"I'm empty!" his stomach lamented.
"Then learn to live empty!" he answered.
His stomach protested into silence.
"We're full of that damned gelatin!" his intestinal tract told him.
"Then start getting rid of it!" he answered.
"What! There will be a hell of a mess!"
"Then let it come!" he answered. "There are worse messes!"
It seemed to Roland Green in this moment that every part of his body was screaming in violent protest against movement, against change.
"You must move!" he told the complaining parts. "To stop moving is to start dying!"
Subtly, without quite realizing he was doing it, the energy that he had developed to defy the voice had been shifted. He was now using this energy to take charge of his body, to give it direction. The energy he had developed was needed to bring his body back to life! Had the voice known that this would happen? Had the voice deliberately challenged him, deliberately forced him to defy it, so that in such defiance he might find the strength to take charge of his own body, and thus find life? Green did not know the answer to this question. At this moment, he had no time to think about such questions.
"Start working, damn you!" he told his body. "And keep working!"
No master of any Roman galley ever drove slaves chained to their oars as Roland Green drove the parts of his body. The muscles would evade, if he permitted it. The glands would claim no secretion was possible, if he let them get away with it. The heart would protest it could not beat, the liver that it could not secrete, the very bones would protest they could not support the weight of the body. And every one would be an evading liar! Every organ, every muscle, every bone, would whine and try to evade its function. Each would rationalize and would find reasons why it could not perform its task. The whole body would claim that no man had ever awakened from such sleep as this, if he permitted! He did not permit!
"Get to work, all of you!" he shouted. He was not instantly obeyed. This was a time-world he was again entering. In it time was needed to start the body machinery of the time-world into operation again. But eventually he was obeyed; eventually he managed to sit up and to throw his legs over the edge of the platform on which he lay.
His first mistake was to fall off the platform. He t& the floor with a shaking thump that sent echoes of pain though his body. Dust exploded outward as his bottom nit the? floor. His head reeled; his mind reeled with it. Vaguely, he was aware of the furnishings in the crypt, the big cans labelled First Day, Second Day, Third Day, the soft light coming from the paint on the ceiling and the walls, the fact that the door of the crypt was open. Mostly he was aware of silence.
Complete silence! Utter silence. The kind of silence in which there is no sound of insect or cheep of bird or mutter of motorcar exhaust or whisper of wind moving. The kind of silence that eventually hurts the ears.
As he listened to this strange silence, and tried to guess the reason back of it, his stomach went into violent spasm and tied itself into a knot Instantly his intestinal tract started obeying the order he had given it to get rid of the gelatin which had been put there before he went into the cold.
How long the spasm and the nausea and the emptying process continued, he did not know. He knew, vaguely that he fell on his right side and lay there, unable to move, with his head resting on. his right arm. Turmoil was in his mind. Fantastic images played leapfrog across the screen of his inner vision, of giants and apes and impossible beasts that he thought of as being animals of the world. There were other images too, of gods and of men, or of creatures man had made in imitation of the gods they hoped existed, or as symbols by which to evoke the gods. At this moment, so violent was the nausea in him, he did not know the difference between gods, men, and animals ... or if there was a difference. Perhaps gods sometimes went about the world disguised as animals! In this case, how would a man know which was which? Somewhere a croaking noise that he vaguely recognized as his own voice was repeating over and over. "You can go to hell, hell, hell! You can go to hell, hell, hell! You can go . . ."
Then the voice returned. "Do you still defy me?" it asked.
"Yes!" Roland Green answered. He was not at all clear what he was defying or even what he was saying but defiance was a part of him. He let it express.
"Good," the voice said.
"What?" Green gasped.
"How else can you become a man except by defying a god?" the voice asked.
Then something happened. The invisible owner of the voice that spoke from nothing seemed to lean forward toward the dusty floor of the crypt to kiss Roland Green on the forehead. Nothing that had ever happened in his whole life had prepared Roland Green for this moment. He had defied what to him was a god. In some degree, he had defied the whole universe. All his life he had been expressing such defiance. Now the god that he had just defied had said "Good!" and had told him that there was no other way to become a man, and had kissed him on the forehead!
Utter silence held the vast mausoleum that was Unit 41. Green pulled his body across the crypt and put his back against the wall. He did not try to stand; he had not the strength for this. Inside him his very soul was gasping in anticipation of something that it seemed to sense was coming but which the conscious mind of Roland Green had not yet glimpsed and did not know existed. The conscious mind of Roland Green had never had such an experience. He had never heard of Agape, and even if someone had given him the word and had explained its meaning, he would have doubted its existence. Love, meaning sex, he knew. Agape he did not know. Yet as the emotion came into existence in him, he knew he was feeling love, knew that this emotion was not derived from sex but sex was derived from it. As was everything else in all the worlds!
Agape came into him as a rolling flood, a tide of love that had enormous power. It swept into the region of his stomach and the retching stopped. It leaped out along the nerve trunks and the muscles were calm. It swept into his laboring lungs and thumping heart and these came to normal function. It went outward with the blood pulsations through the arteries and came back with the veins and these became flexible. In short, to Roland Green, Agape gave life. His vision, however, was fogged. At first he thought that this was a result of the deep-freeze, then, slowly, he realized that his vision was fogged because his eyes Were filled with tears. Long unused tear ducts suddenly opened at the touch of the strange magic that was in this love and he began to cry in great gasping sobs. He knew no reason for this weeping. All he knew was that his emotions and his body were reacting in such a way that he was crying like a small child, not in misery but in joy! He knew that as the powerful emotion of Agape swept through him, despair was coming surfaceward from a thousand places where he had hid it and was running joyfully to meet this love that was pouring into him and was being dissolved in it. Hate was also coming out of hiding and was running to meet this love and was being forgiven for being hate! As was fear. Thus despair, hate, and fear ran joyfully to meet Agape like ragged, forlorn, and dirty children finding their way home at last. And Roland Green dissolved in tears!
Green did not know how long he sat on the dusty floor of the crypt, with his back against the wall, while great gasping sobs shook his body. In one sense, time did not seem to be involved in this experience. Perhaps Agape was before time and would exist after time had gone! When the sobs began to die down, he knew the strange experience was ending. He knew also that his distressed body was able to achieve limited function.
His clothing consisted of a heavy pliofilm sack that covered his body. He had already torn the film from his face, this in order to breathe. Now he jerked it off of his whole body, cleaned himself with it, and threw the plastic garment into a corner. Across the room he saw again the canisters marked First Day, Second Day, Third Day. Vaguely, he now remembered a part of the instructions given him when he had entered the deep freeze.
"While we do not anticipate that anything can go wrong and that you will awaken unattended, the three canisters contain emergency rations for three days. By the end of this time, our doctors and our nurses are certain to be on hand to help you to a complete recovery."
Green crawled across the crypt. Here was food and drink mixed in such a way that the weakened stomachs of those just awakening from the long sleep would accept them. Lifting the canister for the first day, he examined it. Made of metal, the canister was actually a tin can which had to be opened with a can opener.
Green searched through the shelves for the can opener.
There was none. Someone had failed to carry out his instructions.
"Goddamned crooks!" With all of his strength, Green threw the can across the crypt It struck with a thud and dropped to the floor. He stared at it, hoping it had broken open, but it was a stout can. Except for a dent, it showed no sign of having been thrown against a wall.
The effort involved in throwing the can left Green exhausted. Gasping and panting, for a time he lay on the floor of the crypt. When he had regained some of his strength, he crawled through the door of the crypt.
Outside was a small alcove which contained the doors of other crypts. He glimpsed name plates there. Mrs. Thomas Northcutt ... J. Edward Palmer . . . James Crenshaw . . . Mary Jones . . .
She wakes scared lots of times. He saw the writing scrawled on the card. Please, somebody, be with her when she wakes . . .
He wondered who had written those words. And who was sleeping behind the door that was now ajar.
The alcove opened into a long corridor. The walls and the ceiling of the wide corridor had been painted with the same luminescent paint that had been used in the crypt, with the result that they provided a soft illumination.
At the end of the alcove, Green paused. The memory of the experience in the crypt was still strong in him. Though it seemed to be sustaining him, his muscles had very little real strength and his stomach and intestinal tract were still threatening revolt at any instant.
Here in the wide corridor the silence seemed more intense than in the crypt. It was as if there was more empty space to be silent. There wasn't a sound, not even the ghost of a sound. The floor of the corridor had a layer of dust that was perhaps a quarter of an inch in thickness. With his finger, Green tested this dust. Along the whole corridor the dust lay unstirred but far down the wide passage, he could glimpse an obstruction. What the obstruction was he did not know. It looked a little like a rotten log lying on the floor.
"Hal-lo?" Green lifted his voice in a shout.
Back from what seemed to be hundreds of sources the echoes came, a rolling, riotous tumult of shouting sound. But it was his own shout mat returned to him. No other voice was included in it. No one came running from a side passage to see what the disturbance might be.
He got clumsily to his feet. Naked, barefooted, with matted hair and whiskers down to his navel, leaning against the wall for support, he made his way down the corridor, to where lay the rotten log.
Remnants of a white jacket were on the log. Beneath the white jacket, ribs were dimly visible. Over the ribs the skin was drawn drum-head tight, as it was over the face, with the result that the open eyes seemed to bulging outward as they stared upward at some horror mat this man had glimpsed as he died.
Roland Green stood looking down at this corpse that had looked like a log. On the tattered shirt collar, he caught a glimpse of gold. Done in yellow metal there, twin snakes twined upward in the ancient symbol of the healing arts which modern medicine had appropriated as its own.
Green thought: So even the doctors died.
Beyond the doctor, unnoticed until now, another log lay on the floor. This log was wearing the white uniform of a nurse.
So that's why they weren't here to help me when I woke up, Green thought.
The first thought made him feel a little better. The cold machines company had not deliberately ignored its obligations. The next thought, following close on the heels of the first one, made him feel much worse.
What happened out there? The doctors and the nurses couldn't just die here! Somebody would come along and would find them within a few days. Even if the whole staff died, routine checkups would find them all dead. A new staff would be sent . . .
Deep in his mind, he knew beyond any doubt that this nurse and this doctor could not lie on the floor of this old mine unless something had happened in the world outside. Had disaster struck out there? Had catastrophe come? Had the prophets of doom finally made a true prediction?
It couldn't have been just a little disaster either.
Whatever had happened outside, it had been at least as big as California. If an earthquake had devastated a single city, even as large a community as metropolitan Los Angeles, the damage would soon have been cleared away and someone would have discovered that Unit 41 was not reporting.
A catastrophe as big as the United States, as big as North America?
Green thought: I'm nuts; I've just come out of the deep-freeze and I'm not thinking straight. Nothing happened outside. Out there the world is just the same as it always was, except maybe they've got regular space traffic to Jupiter now.
Resolutely he turned his eyes away from the two corpses. If he did not look at them, perhaps they would go away! When he looked back at them an instant later, they were still there. The hope that they would turn out to be hallucinations faded from his mind and he had to face the fact that here in this place of utter silence, something had killed a doctor and a nurse.
Did the silence mean that everyone here was dead? What of the sleepers in the crypts? Had they died too? What had happened to the world outside? Had it gone into the shadows of yesterday? Down the corridor a sign caught his eye:
Stumbling through the door, he found himself in a large room with doors opening into small rooms on either side. It was a typical place where the staff might rendezvous between tours of duty and drink coffee and eat sandwiches. Two small signs caught his eye. One read Kitchen, the second read Supplies-Food for Sleepers.
On the floor were two doctors and a nurse.
Stepping over the corpses, Green entered the storeroom. Here were more of the canisters. He picked up the one marked First Day and carried it to the kitchen.
For a long time, he stared at the can opener on the wall. It was electrically operated and he did not know if he dared try it. What if the current were off? True, Unit 41 was atom powered, which meant that the generators would continue to operate for several hundred years. Theoretically, there should be current.
Theoretically, there should have been doctors and nurses on hand when he had awakened too!
The doctors and the nurses were dead. The current might be dead too!
When he had awakened, his crypt had felt warm. This meant that the current had failed, at least in that one alcove. Had it failed in the whole unit?
Finally, he slipped the can into place and pushed the button. A relay clicked; a motor throbbed. Spinning, the top was removed from the can.
Gratefully, Green drank the oily liquid in the can. Current was still flowing in the unit. This meant that only his alcove was off. Or perhaps this whole floor had no current. The unusual warmth had awakened him. How soon before others would be awakening.
His stomach gulped as the liquid hit it, gulped and exploded upward, then reacted with violent nausea. Clutching the can, he dropped to the floor. He knew he was no longer able to walk. But he could still crawl.
He puked in the lavatory. When this was finished, he took another small sip of the contents of the can.
During the hours that followed there were many times when Roland Green wished he had remained asleep. Or dead.
Inside he was sure that death would have been preferable to the reactions of his intestinal tract as it resisted resuming its normal function. He had not known that a human being could be so sick and still live.
Fortunately, there was running water in the faucets. There was also a shower. A trickle of water ran from the shower head. Cold and stale, it was better than nothing at all. It dissolved the gummy incrustation from his skin. Eventually the sweat glands began to function. Yellow liquid seeped from them. It smelled like sulphur drainings from the bottom of the stables of hell but he was glad to have this stuff on the outside of his skin rather than on the inside.
The stuff in the First Day can never did begin to taste good, but his stomach eventually began to accept it It seemed to clean his intestinal tract, then to fill it. There was strength in the oily liquid, after he stopped being sick.
He discovered each of the rooms opening off the main room contained two beds. There was a small drug room containing bottles and vials he did not understand. This did not concern him. Moving to one of the beds, he threw himself full length on it. When he was not nauseated and when neither his kidneys nor his bowels were discharging, he slept fitfully. This was not an easy or a restful sleep. Occasionally he found himself dreaming he was back in the courtroom screaming at the judge. Again his dreams were nightmares of awakening in the crypt when the cold was failing. He slept to dream, then to wake and sample the food in the can, then to take care of the processes of elimination, then to stumble back to the bed to throw himself down and sleep in nightmare land. Eventually he awakened to open the can for the second day. This was a liquid too, with more bulk and less oil to it. The contents of the can for the second day sat more easily on his stomach. Also, it seemed to contain a tranquilizer. He found he could not get enough sleep and he hardly noticed when he began to use the can for the third day.
The contents of this can seemed to contain an energizer. He found he suddenly has an interest in life and the strength to implement it. In a closet, he found several suits of white, jacket, shirt, and trousers, also white shoes and socks. Putting them on, he found his beard was down to his belt buckle.
His first impulse was to leave the dead bodies where he had found them. Nothing was left of them but dried flesh and bones. No smell remained. His second thought was to get them out of sight and to use this area as a temporary headquarters from which to explore not only the other levels of the unit but also what lay outside.
His thoughts about the outside world were grim. He did not know what was out there. And he was not sure he wanted to find out.
Then the utter silence of this level was broken. Somewhere in the direction of the alcove where Green had awakened, someone began to call.
"Help . . . I need help ..."
When Cindy Northcutt felt the cold begin to lessen, her first reaction was terror. She was going to have to leave this world of incredible beauty that she had found here. She was also going to have to leave the vast schools she had attended here. And many of the people of this land beyond the cold had become her firm friends. She wanted to stay here, forever.
Her friends explained to her that no one could stay here forever, that eventually everyone grew tired of the wonders of this place and wandered on to adventures in other worlds. "And in your case, you still have a physical body," she was told.
"So what?" she said. "Here, it is beautiful."
"Without you, the body will die."
"Let it die," she answered.
Her friends did riot approve of this attitude.
"It's going to die anyhow," she told them. "It has leukemia seven!"
To her, this was an important point. Her friends did not think it was so important "We have explained this disease to you," they told her. "We have taught you its cause and it's cure."
"Oh, that," she said, indifferently.
At this point, she heard a child call to her. She was Cindy Northcutt a good mother, and this was a call that could not be ignored. Instantly, she went to answer.
Before she realized that this call had come from her body, she was back in it. To the body, she was the vital principle, the animating spark, the informing genius, the vital which gave life and was life. Without this elan vital, the body was nothing, a dead thing that had existence only at the molecular level of the chemicals that composed it.
Cindy Northcutt would never ask questions about the vital principle. To her, the fact that there was a vital principle and that she was this principle and that there was a body and that she could become this body too—in fact, she was the body on Earth—was so natural that no questions needed to be asked. Her world was bounded on all sides by her meaning for love, which meant a mate and children—and more and more children. The love that was in her ruled her. She had no thoughts beyond it. To her, science was a means of perfecting a birth-control pill that would enable her to space her children more accurately. She did not want to bother her head about the contents of this pill or how the chemicals in it related to the chemicals in her body.
A split second after she had discovered that the wailing child calling to her was actually her own body awakening in its crypt, she wished to hell she had stayed in the land beyond the cold. This body was in pain! It hurt! Even in childbirth, she had not known such pain as this.
In addition, the body was afraid. Utterly afraid. It was in such deep fear that just to touch the fringes of the emotion sent her reeling backward. In effect, she was slugged, knocked down, and trampled just by touching the enormous fear that was in this child body.
As she tried to flee, the body called to her, called again and again, wailing like a hurt and desperate child. Hearing that wail, she knew she had no choice except to answer no matter how much answering hurt. Figuratively, she gathered her skirts about her. She was Cindy, and a good mother, but in this moment, she was more than mother, she was mama, she was the one whose flowing breasts had sucked those who would eventually become men, as individuals and as a race. She was a blending of all the mothers who had ever been, made into the person of Cindy Northcutt. She went back into the fear that was in his body, into the pain that was in this body, into the horror that was here. All of these she accepted as her own. The fear in this body became her fear, the pain in it became her pain, the horror here became her horror.
Going to help what she thought was a child, she discovered she was the one who needed assistance.
Time and time again, she called out for help. Somehow she found the strength to lift her right arm and to tear the plastic away from her face. Air flowed into her lungs. Now she could scream louder.
What followed was a period of nightmare, of alternate screaming, fainting, and of reviving from fainting to scream again. Coming out of one faint, she found a man with a long beard and wild, glittering eyes bending over her. A glimpse of the white suit he was wearing gave her reassurance.
"Oh, doctor! I'm so glad you came!" she whispered.
"I'm not a doctor," Roland Green answered.
"No?" Alarm rose in her again. "Then who are you?"
He gave her his name.
"Green? I don't know you. If you are not a doctor, what are you doing here?"
Green did not answer. Instead he slid his arms under her knees and back and started to lift her. Weakly, she tried to push him away.
"Damn it, quit fighting! I'm trying to help!" he snarled at her. "If you bite me again, so help me hell, I'll knock your jaw loose from your face!"
Hastily, she stopped trying to bite. The effort was ineffectual anyhow, more of a gesture than a fact. She had not the strength to bite effectively. Grunting and grumbling at her weight, Green lifted her and carried her into the long corridor.
Taking her into a small room, he laid her on a bed, and began tearing the plastic wrappers from her body.
"No, no!" she protested. "There's nothing under this plastic!"
"I'm not undressing you to look at you," Green told her. "I've got something else on my mind."
When he had finished undressing her, he picked her up again, to carry her, stark naked but too weak to protest, into a shower. There he soaked both of them. When she was scrubbed clean, he carried her back to bed. There he threw a blanket over her. With water dripping from his clothes and squashing in his shoes, he went away. A few minutes later he returned. Helping her to sit up in bed, he held the can to her lips. At just the smell of it, her stomach revolted.
"Drink it, lady!" Green said, grimly. "I know you're going to puke."
"But ..."
"Drink it. It's the special drink prepared by the doctors of the cold machines company for us to have the first day after we wake."
"Doctors? Where are they?"
"I wish to hell I knew," Green answered. "This will make you sick, but you're going to be sick anyhow. This will also give you strength. And, lady, you're going to need all the strength you can get."
He tilted the can held at her lips. Some of the oily liquid ran into her mouth and she was forced to swallow it. As her stomach began to react, Green lifted her again and carried her into the washroom. In spite of his beard and his glittering eyes, he was as gentle as any nurse could have been, with one exception. As soon as each surge of vomiting had finished, he forced her to take another sip of the drink.
"I know you feel like hell, lady," Green said, again and again. "But tomorrow you'll feel better."
"I want to die today," Cindy answered. "Where are the doctors? Where are the nurses? It's not that I don't appreciate all you are doing to help, but . . ."
"They're dead, lady," Green answered.
"Dead?"
"Yes. In here everybody is dead except the sleepers."
"In here?" Cindy questioned. "What about outside? I mean, what's out there?"
"I don't know, lady. And now if you've finished puking..."
"I . . . I think I have," Cindy answered.
"Then don't ask any more questions," Green answered. "Because I don't know any more answers than you do."
She felt herself lifted and carried back to bed. There, a light blanket was thrown over her. Left alone, she drifted into uneasy sleep. So much had already happened to her! What else could happen?
One thing could happen that she had not noticed. Memories of the land beyond the cold could fade forever out of her mind!
Now the fish was gold, now it was silver, now it was green, now it was red, now it was blue, now it was purple. Or a dozen different shades of any of these. Or all of them together, the result being a hue for which no name existed.
The fish could never decide which color it liked best to be. In consequence, it kept experimenting. The other fish in this crystal sea faced a similar problem. They lived in so much beauty that none could decide whether gold was more beautiful than green. Was purple more wonderful than bright yellow? All colors were so wonderful! Perhaps blends of many hues might be even more beautiful!
The result was that the crystal sea was filled with fish of many colors. No matter how many fish were here, the sea always seemed to be big enough to hold all of them. Now and then, in their experimenting, the fish created new colors that even they had never seen before and which thrilled them to utter exuberance, colors that no human eye has ever seen or ever will see, colors that in this place had a real life of their own and which blended with other colors simply because the love of blending was in them. living in this crystal sea, this fish found great happiness. Over and over again, the fish told itself there was no place called Earth; there was no meaning for the word pain, that suffering was non-existent, and as for awakening scared, when there was no sleep, how could anyone awaken scared? The fish told itself these ideas so often it came to believe them, almost.
"I'm a fish, I've always been a fish, I'll always be a fish, and I will live in this beautiful sea forever," the little fish said to itself, time and time again.
This crystal sea was perfect happiness. And was not. The sea was so perfect it was marred, eventually, by its own perfection! The colorful fish that lived here eventually began to discover that where there was no opposite of happiness, there was no real happiness. So, one by one they slipped away from this crystal sea, seeking drabness, which would make their colors more beautiful, seeking misery so that misery might emphasize happiness!
The fish that had worked very hard to forget even the name of Mary Jones noticed occasionally that some wonderful companion was missing. She asked questions about the missing ones.
"We do not know what happens to them," the other fish explained. "They go away, somewhere. No, we do not understand why anyone would willingly leave the perfect happiness that is here."
Flicking their tails of many colors, the beautiful fish swam languidly away.
So the fish that had been Mary Jones, but had forgotten this name along with many other distasteful things, lived in the crystal sea and was perfectly happy. If something was missing from the life there, if growth or change or difference except in color did not exist, the fish did not permit thoughts of these disquieting things to enter their minds. Perfect happiness meant a quiet and peaceful mind, a harmonious existence in a harmonious world, the fish told each other. Again and again and again, they explained the meaning of harmony and peace and quiet to each other. Where there was no one to dispute, the claim would not be challenged. If something seemed to be missing, the fish concentrated harder on blending the colors that glow with their own internal light.
Then a memory of long ago and far away slipped into the mind of the fish that was Mary Jones. The memory brought whispers of the meaning of space and of time with it. These were disquieting ideas; these were inharmonious concepts that did not belong to the perfect life of this crystal sea. She tried to put them out her mind.
Tried and failed! Once she had admitted the first of them, other memories came crowding into her mind. They were like dirty children who had been too long hungry. Now these hungry children were clamoring for her attention.
Back came the memories of Earth and of pain and suffering that were associated with that grim and bitter world.
She recoiled from these memories. Then came another memory, of something called a body, which was filled with pain and suffering, but which belonged to her and which needed her.
Perhaps the fact of being needed was strongest of all. Here in this crystal sea where to wish a color was to have the color, no one ever needed anything. Certainly no one needed her here!
But something somewhere did need her!
To her, it was as if an old and greatly beloved doll needed help.
She made up her mind instantly. As silent as a ghost, she slipped out of the crystal sea and went back into a world where existed pain, suffering, and need.
Wishing she could die, Cindy Northcutt was lying on the bed. Never in her life had she felt so miserable. Agony seemed to be rising from the life center of each cell. The tiny whirling vortices that made up every atom seemed to be clashing instead of moving in harmony. The atoms hurt; the molecules hurt; the organs hurt; the muscles hurt; the bones had pain in them too. She felt every separate pain, then she felt one big pain that was the body as a whole. She wanted to wish real hard that she could die, but she was afraid even to think such a wish, lest the wish should come true.
The bearded man with the burning eyes and the wrinkled white suit and the dirty white shoes had gone away, where she did not know and did not care. Perhaps he would drop down dead and would not return to harass her with demands that she come back to life!
"Oh, God!" she whispered. "How can anything hurt so bad?"
The pains of childbirth had been nothing compared to the pain of bringing back to life a body that had been in the deep-freeze. She thought, bitterly, that the cold machines company hadn't told her anything about this! Perhaps they had not known about it? Her experience with childbirth had taught her that the pain had been vastly over-rated by women eager to make themselves important in every possible way. Her own two children had hurt, a little, as they had been born —though she had always suspected she had hurt them far worse than they had hurt her. Later, to secure sympathy and attention from her husband, she had ignored the pain the babies had felt when they were being squeezed in the birth canal and had concentrated on the pain she had felt, a technique for managing husbands not unique with her.
What she was suffering now was real pain. As the pain was at its height, she heard the door open. Instantly, she began to moan.
"Okay, lady, I know you're hurting," a familiar voice said. "But I've got somebody here who is hurting even worse. You're going to have to forget yourself and take care of her."
Opening her eyes, she saw the bearded man was standing beside her. He had a burden in his arms. What the burden was she neither knew nor cared.
"I'm sick," she moaned. "Go away."
"I don't give a damn if you are sick," Roland Green answered. "I've got a child here that's sicker."
Opening her eyes, she saw that he really did have a child in his arms. The head lolled downward and the pathetic little body drooped. For an instant, her interest roused. Then she remembered how sick she was. "Take it away," she moaned. With Tom, this had always worked.
It didn't work with Roland Green. "Goddamn it, lady, you get up from that bed and take care of this child. I don't care how sick you are. The kid is sicker."
His words shocked Cindy. But not enough. "You take care of it," she moaned.
"I can't take care of it, for two reasons. One is it needs a woman to mother it. The second is, something has gone wrong with the cold supply in our alcove and everybody in that alcove is beginning to wake up. My job is to help them. Your job is to help this child. And by hell, lady, if you don't do it, I'll knock your jaw loose from your head!"
His words and the tone in which they were spoken shocked Cindy into paying attention. Then the child began to whimper in a pain-harassed voice, calling out to some long-gone mother. Cindy sat up and held out her arms. "Give it to me," she said.
Green instantly obeyed her. Cooing and murmuring, she soothed the child. Looking up, she saw that Roland Green was still present.
"Get the hell out of here, you bearded bastard, and take care of the others!" she shouted at him, fury in her voice. "I can take care of this kid without you around!" Grinning, Roland Green exited.
Cindy washed the child, then found a can of the liquid for the first day.
"Drink it, darling," she whispered. "Go on and drink. It's good for you."
Tasting the liquid, the child that was Mary Jones jerked her head away. With a skill handed down through thousands of generations of mothers, Cindy began to coax the child to drink. When she had finished, she had drunk half the can of oily liquid herself, though she had vowed this particular drink would never cross her lips again. The child was vomiting and Cindy, herself, had forgotten all about her own illness.
Much later, when Roland Green entered again, the child was lying on the bed and Cindy was sitting in a chair beside it. Fiercely, she looked up at him. "Damn you, she's asleep! If you wake her up . . ."
"All right, mom, all right," Green answered. "I won't wake her up. Only I've got another one for you here."
"Another child? I'll kill you ..."
"No. Grownup this time." Green moved around the corner of the door to reveal the limp burden he was carrying.
Cindy went hastily outside and closed the door, to hiss at the bearded man that she was not a nurse.
"You'll be a nurse before you're finished," Green told her. "I'll carry this one into the shower for you. You wash him off."
"Me give a perfect stranger a bath!" Cindy protested.
"Yes, you! I've got to go get another one."
"I won't . . ."
"His name is Palmer," Green answered, ignoring her. "He's kind of skinny and used up. He may not make it back here but do the best you can for him."
"What about you?"
"I told you before, there's another sleeper in our alcove, a man by the name of Crenshaw. He can't be any more important than this one," he nodded toward Palmer. "But just the same, it's my job to try to help him."
"Bearded bastard!" Cindy said.
"Move, sister!" Green answered.
She moved.
In the land that lay beyond the cold, in the world of the clear light, in that place which has been glimpsed by very few humans—and incorrectly described by the few who had glimpsed it—J. Edward Palmer had found again the meaning of love expressed in the word Agape, the love that is a sense of wonder, reverence, and awe, which gives with no thought of gain on the part of the giver and with no regard for the merit of the receiver—or for the lack of merit!
If there was one thing needed on Planet Earth, Palmer felt, it was Agape. Not only did men need this love to ease the stress of their multitudinous relationships with each other, they also needed ways to transmit it to each other.
Such ways had existed, once. In the first and second centuries, and probably in earlier times, men had known how to transmit Agape to another person. Perhaps the ritual initiations of the mystery schools had been one such way. Possibly the laying on of the hands had been another way.
This knowledge had been lost. Little men had concluded that love meant sex. Degenerating into sexual orgies, Agape had been lost to the world.
With the loss of Agape, something had gone from the world that the world needed. The world needed its scientists, of course. But it also needed men and women who could stand tall enough and could fill themselves so full of the meaning of Agape that this higher love would radiate outward from them, like radio waves from a tall tower. Others, picking up these radiations, would find their lives enriched.
What was needed were men and women who could stand tall.
To be one of those people had been one of the secret dreams of J. Edward Palmer.
In the land beyond the cold, in the world of the clear light, in the plane beyond color, Palmer found how to become such a person.
"The quality of Agape is not strained," Palmer had thought, misquoting Shakespeare. "It falleth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath . . ."
True, the English poet had used the word mercy, not even hinting that he suspected the existence of such an emotion as Agape. Had Shakespeare actually known more than he had written? Had he chosen to use the word Agape to hide his real meaning from the times in which he lived, times that knew neither love nor mercy?
Palmer did not know what Shakespeare had had in his mind. It was difficult enough to know what one had in one's own mind, particularly so here in this world where the light was so bright that the normal boundaries of even the body used here seemed to grow dim, so that at one and the same time, a person was both himself and also everybody and everything else.
But the secret of Agape was here. This was the important thing.
When he returned to.the world, he would know how to teach men and women to stand tall and straight, so that secretly they could broadcast this higher love to a world that desperately needed it.
Keeping this a secret was important, Palmer decided. If one revealed that one could do this, if one boasted about it, the human ego, that insufferable feeling of self importance, was certain to rush on stage. Where the ego was, Agape was not! The ego was an imposition of limits. It would attempt to limit Agape, it would attempt to dictate which way the higher love should flow and which way it should not flow. The ego would impose regard for "merit or for the lack of it," rewarding some and punishing others. Agape gave scant regard to the channels that men tried to establish for it. It made its own channels, went where it pleased, gave itself with no regard to the merit of the receiver, asked nothing in return.
In all the many lands beyond the cold, time had a different meaning than it had on Earth. To some, it went slowly, to others it went rapidly. And there were those who forgot about time completely and made it as if it did not exist. But all of the swarming multitudes in these fantastic lands eventually felt that change which humans have come to associate with the meaning of time.
The feeling of change came to J. Edward Palmer, as he dreamed of finer and finer and finer meanings for Agape. When his body called to him, he went back to it with gladness. He had the dim impression that the body was another and finer meaning for Agape.
He discovered it was a harsher and grosser meaning for hell.
Palmer had the vague impression of being lifted and carried. Later, someone—he thought it was a woman—started giving him a bath. Eventually this same woman slipped an arm under his shoulders and lifting him to a sitting position.
"Drink this, Pop," he heard her say.
As trustingly as a child, he opened his lips and drank, only to vomit the oily liquid back into her face.
With wonder strong within him, with awe so great it seemed to fill him to overflowing, James Crenshaw, the bio-physicist, watched the interplay of energy and form. Watching a sphere come into existence, he understood the purpose back of this form and the energy involved in its creation. He also sensed that something wonderful was involved in some way with the inner surface of all spheres. Longing to know more about this, something rose in him. As this longing strengthened, without realizing what was happening, as Mary Jones had become the golden fish, so James Crenshaw became the inner surface of a sphere.
"Ah!" he gasped, in understanding. In a split second, he learned a secret that he had sought all of his life, namely, that as a human being, he had once lived on the inner surface of a. sphere! This was the way he had come into the physical world! Over millennia, the sphere itself had been reshaped into the human body; it had been filled in with the solid stuff of earth, with minerals and liquids, and had walked about the world as a man. And so had all other men!
In becoming a man, however, he had also retained the secret of his origin. He, the essential identity, the essence, the vital principle, the core of life that said I, continued to live on the inner surface of a sphere that had been reshaped into a human body! To contact the outer world, he had built himself an outer surface of skin. To see the world of wonder that was out there, he had built specialized organs at the surface of the skin which were called eyes. He had built other specialized organs to take in very small particles floating in the air of this outer world. He used these organs to smell what was out there. Closely allied to the sense of smell was the sense of taste, which told him whether or not the liquid and solid materials taken into the body were fit for drink and food. Other specialized organs were called ears. These listened to vibrations in the air.
On the inner surfaces of this body, men detected enormous greater frequencies which were called clairvoyance and extrasensory perception, when they were allowed to reach the level of the conscious mind. Usually they were not allowed to reach this level but were withheld in the regions of the subconscious.
Why did he live on the inner surfaces of a human being, hiding there from the light of day, like an intruder who does not dare present an honest face to the world?
Because he was a creature built of stuff finer than sunbeams, softer than moonlight, brighter than the stuff of the crystal sea, all of this formed into a gossamer web so fragile that the slightest puff of the gentlest wind that blew on Planet Earth would shatter him to fragments! The body was a device to protect him. Like the shell of an oyster, it was a shield around him.
Of no form himself, the dweller on the inner surfaces was the creator of form. Made of no color, he created color. Perhaps inward from him, on other inner surfaces of inconceivable finenesses were other worlds and other energy sources from which he drew the breath that was life to him, but, as he existed on the physical level of Planet Earth, he was the creator of form, of energy, and the maker of movements. In himself at this level, he was not only life, he was also the giver of life. Working from their inner surfaces, he made men move. And the worlds!
He was one, an individual, and yet he was also One, the many. He was that which was and is One, making himself into two, three, many, by the process of splitting himself into polar opposites. As one, an individual, he was part of a greater, larger unit made up of many individuals, all connected together in a web of minds that existed at the level of the inner surfaces. Each individual of this larger unit saw what the others were seeing, if he so desired; each felt what the others were feeling, if he so desired. He could detach himself from the larger unit and go his way as a complete individual, working alone, creating his own destiny and working it out for himself, playing his own game, learning in the only way it can be learned, by experience, the toughest, roughest, meanest, bitterest, hurtingest and most difficult art ever invented, that of becoming a true individual! An individual able and willing to accept responsibility for his own actions and to refuse responsibility for actions not his own.
Unquestionably, thought James Crenshaw, the art of being an individual was the most difficult game ever invented or practiced anywhere in all the worlds in all the times that ever were, but as it was the hurtingest game when it went wrong, so also it was the blessed game when it went right.
The art of becoming an individual was the road to high adventure.
The nature of the dweller on the inner surfaces, the very essence of him, was joy, happiness, and love. True, if he so chose, he could create anger inside himself and could huff and puff himself up until he became as big as the wolf that threatened to blow down the house of the little pigs. But it was all bluff. If the pigs faced him and dared him to do his worst, all he could do was to huff and puff himself down again. If, on the other hand, they ran from him in fear, with great joy he could nip at their heels. Perhaps now and then he would pretend to catch a piglet and eat him. The piglet might think this was real but the dweller at the inner surfaces of the little pig was not so easily deceived. He knew a game when he saw one!
Although he could create anger in himself and fear in others, his inner nature was love. A universe could not continue to exist that did not have love at its heart. A universe built with hate as its central motif, would destroy itself. With fear as its central motif, it would run away from itself. The only universe that could continue in existence had to build around love.
Living on the inner surface of a sphere in a replay of what he took to be real racial history, though exceedingly remote, Crenshaw discovered that other spheres existed in the outer world and that he could make direct contact with them by rubbing against them. What a joy these contacts were! From them had come handshaking and nose rubbing, and eventually, sexual intercourse.
As he was exploring the wonderful world of the inner surfaces, Crenshaw felt a higher, specialized kind of sphere calling to him to return to it. At this point, he remembered his body. He had forgotten it temporarily.
Hastily returning to it, he wished he had forgotten it forever.
With one hand, Cindy Northcutt held the child's hand. It had awakened and had begun to whimper. Since it would only be quiet when she was touching it, she was forced to hold its hand.
With her other hand, she held the can of oily liquid to the lips of the man she had called Pop. This was not his name. She knew this but did not care. She doubted if he cared either. His face was thin; his body was flesh hanging loosely on bones. White whiskers covered his face and matted white hair covered his head. In addition, he stank. Some of the smell had been washed off of him in the shower, but not all of it. Nor near enough of it. If Cindy had had a third hand, she would have used it to hold her nose.
Now and then Palmer's eyes opened to stare unbelievingly at Cindy, then at the child on the cot, then around the room. When first he looked at her what she saw in his eyes was so startling that she almost dropped the can of oily liquid. Love was in this old man's eyes, such love as went through dreams. Giving them such beauty as she had never seen before, love was a shining light in the eyes of this man. When he looked at her, she felt wonder come to life in her soul and begin to glow there like a living flame.
"You . . . you're a saint!" she whispered.
"No," he denied. "I'm not a saint. I'm something tougher . . . a man!"
"I . . . I don't understand," she whispered.
"Any poor idiot can be a saint," he replied. "But being a man, that's a real job even for a saint!"
She moved the can to his lips. He tried to avoid it.
"I know it tastes like hell, Pop," she said. "But drink it, like a man!"
He smiled at her and drained the can to its last drops.
The sound of slushy shoes came from the main room. As Cindy looked up, the bearded Roland Green appeared in the door. At a glance he took in everything that was happening in the room.
"I got another one," he said. "Name of Crenshaw. He's the last one from our alcove, which seems to be the only alcove where the cold is running low."
"You're doing a great job, honey," he said, looking at Cindy. "A real great job."
"Thanks," Cindy said, bitterly. "And I'm not your honey."
"Nothing personal intended. I call all women honey. And you're doing a great job. I'll take this one into the shower and wash him off myself."
She heard water splashing in the shower. When Green returned, his shoes were squishing again and he was dripping water.
"Why don't you take off your clothes when you're giving somebody a bath?" Cindy demanded.
"I didn't have time with the first one," he answered. "Since then, it hasn't seemed to matter. I'm going to pull a bed out here in the big room for this one."
"Pull beds out for all of us," Cindy said. "Well turn that room into a hospital ward." She stared at the man Green was carrying. This man also had a long beard and long hair. Both were matted now from the effects of the shower. His body was frail and slender and he looked incredibly old. "Is . . . is he alive?" Cindy asked, doubt in her voice.
"I think so," Green answered. "In the shower, he was swearing at me. He was alive then. When I start pouring that can of oil down him, he'll probably start swearing again."
His eyes went from Cindy to the child. "She all right?" he asked.
"No," Cindy answered. "But I think she'll be all right. What she needs now is lots of love."
"Oh," Green said.
Miracle of miracles, they all survived the rigors of this rude awakening from the sleep of the deep cold. For days, it was touch and go with J. Edward Palmer. Remembering the love that had poured from his eyes and the saintly expression that had been on his face when he awakened, Cindy wondered what had happened to him in the deep-freeze. He must have experienced such wonders there that he had little relish for here, wherever here was. At this point, nobody had any idea of the date and neither time nor energy to think about the length of time they had spent together in the little alcove off the wide corridor. They had entered the deep-freeze in 2030, A.D. Had they been fifty years in the cold? Or a century? Or one hundred fifty years? At this point, they had no way to answer this question. Engaged in the bitter straggle of returning to life, they had no energy to ask it. Old hearts began to thump again; old arteries began to regain their needed flexibility; old capillaries began to open to permit passage of blood, and old muscles began to function. None of this was easy or comfortable. Literally, the awakening was torture.
For two days Palmer seemed to linger in the borderlands, now here, now there. Somewhere was heaven and the now old man knew it. He wanted to be there. But he had a duty here. Duty finally won. Almost as if somebody had turned a hidden switch within him, Palmer turned to live again in his painful body.
When James Crenshaw had finished drinking the bitter cup of the third day, he seemed to find the hidden switch marked Live and Die somewhere inside him. Crenshaw did not linger long over the choice. He knew how much he had learned in the land beyond the cold. He also knew how badly the scientific world needed his data. Promptly he flipped the switch to Live.
It was the child, Mary Jones, who caused the most concern to Cindy Northcutt and to Roland Green. All during the nausea and the vomiting stages of awakening, when she was not actually in spasm, the child seemed to be making swimming motions with her hands and feet. Now and again she awakened enough to try to explain to Cindy or to Green that she was a fish.
"Really, I am, Aunt Cindy," she protested.
"You've been dreaming, darling," Cindy answered.
"No, Aunt Cindy, this is real," the child answered. Each time she gave this answer, she seemed to slip away into some world of color and clear shining light that existed beyond the borderlands. Again the swimming motions would resume.
"You look after her," Cindy told Roland Green. He was always glad to take over her task of being with the child while she hurried away.
Cindy had problems of her own. The sight of Mary Jones, particularly of Mary Jones in deep pain, reminded her of two other children, one named Jimmy and one named Kathy, lost now across the void of time, gone forever into the backward gulf, gone irretrievably.
When she had gone into the cold, she had known she was losing them forever. She had comforted herself with the thought that all pain would be gone from her memories of her children when she awakened. Not sol Losing them hurt almost as much now as when it had happened. Had love no way of letting go of precious memories? Was love always the same, now and forever fresh and new? Did it truly exist in a world beyond time and was losing it always a horrible experience? It seemed to Cindy Northcutt, as she faced agony in her, that love was forever. Forever and ever.
Well, she had lost Kathy, Jimmy, and her husband, Tom. But love was still in her. Here was a waif called Mary Jones who needed love. Unless this waif was given love in enormous amounts she was certain to find a way to return permanently to the crystal sea where the fish of many colors lived beautiful, languid lives.
To Mary Jones, Cindy gave her love. As did Roland Green.
Cindy comforted herself with the thought that even if she had lost her own kids, she had been given an orphan in their place. Also, in the land beyond the cold, she had found a cure for leukemia VII. There was large comfort in this thought. She would be able to give this information to the world that waited beyond Unit 41.
What she had discovered about this disease had shocked her. In large part, she had created it herself, for reasons that were clear enough to her subconscious mind but which were not at all clear to the conscious.
As she thought of what she had learned, of what had been taught her in the schools of the cloud-massed land beyond the cold, unease went through her conscious mind. It was as if, here in these strange borderlands, two worlds were meeting, the world of the conscious mind, which had its brand of reasoning and its type of logic, and the world of the subconscious mind, which used a quite different brand of reasoning and a different type of logic.
As the two worlds met, for an instant she remembered what she had learned in the land beyond the cold. But this information belonged to the world of the subconscious. When she tried to bring it to the world of the conscious mind, a violent battle ensued. The conscious mind won! It would have nothing to do with such disturbing information from worlds that lay afar. It would not admit that what it had heard was even information! At best, it was wild rumor, the fantasy of disordered states of consciousness, the hallucinations of the cold!
So reasoned the conscious mind of Cindy Northcutt, with the result that the cure for the dread disease that she had brought into the cold was forced out of sight!
The fact that forcing this information out of sight meant death to her from the still present leukemia VII made no difference to the conscious mind! From its viewpoint, it was better that she be dead than to admit to consciousness as fact the data brought back from the land beyond the cold.
The result was that her memory simply failed! One second she knew the cure for leukemia VII. The next second, so fast were the mental processes, this knowledge was swept out of sight. Her mind went blank. She could not remember. So complete was the coverage that she could barely remember there was something to remember!
She went to the others recuperating in this strange ward, asking them if they could remember what had happened to them in the deep freeze.
For a second, as he considered her question, the face of J. Edward Palmer brightened. Again the glow of a saint looked from his eyes.
"Agape happened!" he answered.
"What's Agape?" Cindy asked. She had never heard the word.
"It's . . ." The glow in the eyes of Palmer was a beautiful thing. Then, as he started to speak, the glow faded. Puzzlement replaced it. "Agape is . . ." His face became blank. "Just a second ago, I knew the answer. But when I tried to answer, I forgot!"
"What about some other things that happened when you were in the freeze?" Cindy continued.
"What other things?" Palmer answered, staring blankly at her.
She went to James Crenshaw.
"What happened to me when I was in the cold?" the bio-physicist said, repeating her question. A glow appeared in his eyes too. Then, slowly, the glow began to fade.
"The secret of ... of the correlation of energy and form. The secret of ... of the inner surfaces . . ." Crenshaw began.
His eyes turned inward and his face went blank. "I learned something very, very important, in the cold," Crenshaw said. He turned sick eyes toward Cindy. "But I have forgotten what it was!"
Cindy went to Roland Green and asked the same question. The eyes of the bearded man went blank. "There's only one thing I remember," he answered, shamefaced.
"What is that?"
"That I was kissed," the bearded man said. "But who kissed me, I don't know." He turned away from her. "I don't want to be bothered with questions like this. Got too much to do. And so have you, sister!" Cindy went to Mary Jones.
"I was a beautiful fish," the child answered promptly. "And I swam in a crystal sea."
Cindy turned away, to go into a separate room to be by herself for a while. She knew now that she still faced the same disease that she had tried to escape by going into the cold. Moved by a sudden impulse she went back to the others, to ask each his reason for entering the cold.
"I guess I grew tired to trying to convince people that love is real," J. Edward Palmer answered. "There came a time when I couldn't face my own failure any longer."
"I got tired too," James Crenshaw said. "Tired of having political bureaucrats refuse my request for additional funds for vitally important pure research because the research wasn't getting them any publicity or any votes!"
"I went into the cold because I wanted to," Roland Green answered.
"What about you, honey?" Cindy asked Mary Jones.
"I don't know, Aunt Cindy. Mommy kept talking about something called loo ... loo . . ."
"Leukemia seven?" Cindy asked.
"That's it," the child answered.
"Then it's you and me, honey," Cindy said, staring at the child. What she did not say was that it was the two of them who had to wait for death here in this world of the future. She moved away from the child to speak bitterly to Roland Green.
"I don't see why this child has to die, while the rest of you go free," she said. "It's not fair."
"That's the way I've felt all my life," Green answered.
"We went through the cold just as long as you men did," Cindy continued. She was so engrossed in her own emotions that she hardly noticed the bearded man.
"Why do we still have to die while you men go free?" Cindy demanded.
The bearded man looked at her. His eyes were strange, a faraway expression was in them. He seemed to be swaying.
"Is something wrong with you, Mr. Green?" Cindy asked.
The bearded man passed a hand across his forehead. "No," he answered. "Nothing. But I don't think it is just you and the kid who have to die."
"What are you talking about?" Cindy demanded.
"Me? Huh? Oh. Well . . . what I haven't told you . . . Well, this place, you've noticed there's nobody here," the bearded man answered. Now he was definitely swaying on his feet.
In an effort to stop this swaying, he moved until his back was against the wall.
"I've noticed that no one is here," Cindy said.
"Well, there was somebody here. When I woke up, there was somebody here."
"Where are they?" Cindy eagerly demanded.
"They're not here any longer. I carried them away and put them in another room down at the end of the corridor."
"You carried them away?" Cindy's voice was suddenly sharp.
"They were dead," Green answered. "A couple of doctors and some nurses."
"Dead?" Cindy repeated. "I don't . . ."
"As I figure it, whatever it was that killed them is still here," Green answered. "So I don't think you and the kid are the only ones who are going to die. No, I don't think that at all." He shook his head slowly.
Now for the first time Cindy noticed that the skin of his face that was not covered by his beard was red. Much too red.
"Have you got a temperature?" she spoke.
"I've got more than a temperature," Green answered. "What it was that killed the doctors and the nurses here, I've got it. No, Sister, I don't think it's just you and the kid who have to die. I think it's all of us right along with you."
As he spoke, he was sliding down the wall. When he finished speaking, his bottom was on the floor. His head sagged forward.
He lifted his head and stared at her from blank eyes. "Talk about something not being fair . . ."
Again the head sagged down on his chest.
"You can look clear into infinity in this bleak and empty sky and not see a ship anywhere in it," J. Edward Palmer said. His voice was touched with a kind of lonely pathos which said he was feeling like the last man alive on Earth.
So far as he knew, this was true.
Palmer and Crenshaw were standing on the flat plateau atop the mountain that housed Unit 41 and which had once housed a mine that had produced lead, zinc, and silver. Attempting to leave the unit, they had discovered that an earthquake had closed most of the exits. Possibly this was the same quake that had broken or damaged the alcove where they had been in deep freeze, allowing warm air to enter. Perhaps another quake had done this.
They remembered the flat top of this mountain. The helicopters that had brought them to Unit 41 had landed here.
"There's the reception building," Crenshaw said, pointing to a cluster of small buildings at the edge of the plateau. "And there's the radar shack! I wonder . . ."
Excitement grew in his voice as he moved toward the radar installation. Other antennae on the roof of the little building told him that other radio equipment was also housed here.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside, then hastily stepped back as his foot turned under the bones of what had once been the forearm of a human being.
"What is it?" Palmer asked behind him.
"Probably one of the radar technicians," Crenshaw answered. "I mean, it's just skin and bones now, a skeleton. But probably it was once a man who worked here."
"Oh," Palmer said. He moved around Crenshaw and saw what was on the floor, then said "Oh," again in a muted voice.
"Well, we can't let him stop us," Crenshaw said.
"But what killed him?" Palmer asked.
"What killed everybody else around here?" Crenshaw answered. "What is it that put Roland Green flat on his back down below?"
"Oh," Palmer said, his voice even more muted.
Crenshaw did not linger long inside the radio shack. With the exception of the copper wire, which could be salvaged, the equipment was green with corrosion. The hope that he would be able to put the radio equipment back into operation and to use it to find out what had happened in the world while they had slept had died quickly.
He went back outside and joined Palmer. They moved to the edge of the mesa top and stood looking down. Below them, rampart after rampart fell away to the floor of a vast valley. Highways streaked it. Empty now and lonely, deserted under the sun, both valley and highways.
"No traffic down there," Crenshaw said.
"Nor up there either," Palmer said, pointing to the sky.
Above them, the blue vault of heaven was a broad highway to the planets, and beyond the planets, a path to the stars. Once men had dreamed of going that way, of climbing that broad highway that was the sky.
What had happened to the dream? And to the dreamers?
"How long did we sleep?" Crenshaw said. He was voicing the question that was heavy on the mind of each but which neither had quite dared express.
"I don't know. Too long, I guess," Palmer answered. "Let's go back down. It . . . it's cold up here."
Hugging tighter to their bodies the clothing they had found in closets down below, they went down the steps on the outside of the mountain. A whole bank of elevators existed. Atomic generators were still working to supply current but neither trusted the elevators as yet. Cables might have eroded, fatigue might have entered the metal. They preferred to walk, to use the flights of concrete steps that had been built down the mountain slope.
Beside the steps, mineral glinted in the sun. Crenshaw scrambled for samples in the broken rock.
"Galena," he said. "Crystallized lead, a mineral that is a natural rectifier. Once it was very useful, as part of a detector set, in the early days of radio. I wonder . . ."
Carrying pieces of the shining mineral, he returned to the concrete steps.
"What is it you are wondering?" Palmer asked.
"I was wondering if I could salvage enough copper wire from the radar and radio equipment to build a receiver around this piece of galena?" Crenshaw said.
"What?"
"We know there's no traffic down below and up above," Crenshaw said, pointing to the empty highways in the valley and to the empty skyways up above. "But perhaps this is merely a local condition. Perhaps, for such reasons as earthquakes, this valley, perhaps all of Southern California, has been isolated. If this is true, a radio receiver will reveal traffic on the airwaves."
Hope sounded in his voice as he spoke. "Right now, even a commercial would sound good to me."
"Me too," Palmer said. "Did you look in on Green this morning?"
"Yes."
"How was he?"
"Alive. That's all I can say."
"And Mrs. Northcutt and the child?"
"Mrs. Northcutt is on her feet and is taking care of Green and the child. I think the fact that they need her is the reason she is staying alive."
"Um. Then you really think that a disease . . ."
"You saw the man in the radar shack," Crenshaw answered. "He died at his post. One reason 1 want a radio receiver is to find out . . . to find out if . . ."
"If there's anybody left alive on Earth!" Palmer gasped.
"Well, the absence of radio signals would not prove that no one is alive, but . . . but their absence might prove that civilization as we knew it no longer exists!"
"How could that be?" Palmer said. "There is no known disease . . ."
"But how about an unknown disease?" Crenshaw answered. "Let me assure you, so little is known . . ."
"But all life gone from the whole planet . . ."
"All life is not gone," Crenshaw said. "We're still alive. How do we know that the real purpose back of the invention of the cold machines was not to build a bridge to the future, so that some humans at least would survive to start civilization again?"
"We don't know it," Palmer said. "But that kind of thinking . . . Who could know that such a catastrophe was coming? Who could plan for it?"
"It might be better to say what instead of who," Crenshaw said. His throat was dry and his voice was tight. "No human as we knew humans could do it."
"But that kind of thinking and that kind of talk hints at the existence of something bigger than humanity . . ."
"Isn't there something bigger than humanity?" Crenshaw asked. "This is a very small universe if nothing bigger than man is in it."
"Yes, yes, of course, I agree with you that there is something bigger," Palmer's voice trailed off into silence. He felt that somehow he had gotten on the wrong side of this discussion. He was the one who should be insisting on the existence of something bigger than man. Moving by a quite different path, the biophysicist seemed to have reached essentially-the same conclusion as Palmer had reached as a result of the mystical experience. Did the scientist and the mystic both glimpse the same goal?
Down below, in a single bed in a separate room, Roland Green was a black beard and glittering eyes. Their feelings must have showed on their faces as they entered.
"Get the hell out of my sight," Green told them. "When I die all the way, you can dump me down the side of the mountain, but until I'm dead, I don't want any long faces looking down at me!"
In the big room, Cindy Northcutt lay on a bed. The child was lying beside her.
"Can we do anything?" Palmer began.
She looked at them and shook her head. "Fm trying to remember something," she said. "It was something I learned when I was asleep. Now it's like a dream."
"What are you trying to remember, Aunt Cindy?" the child asked.
"How to cure leukemia seven," Cindy answered. "They taught me how, over there. But . . ." Pain twisted her face. "I've forgotten."
"I wonder what really happened in the land beyond the cold?" Palmer wondered, in the corridor outside.
"The land beyond the cold?" Crenshaw questioned. "There seem to be so many of them! We remember them very vaguely but no two of us remember the same thing."
"I know," Palmer answered. "Something was said long ago about many mansions. I don't doubt there is a cure for leukemia seven over there. And for every other disease! But we have to be able to remember! Why can't Mrs. Northcutt remember the truth that will make her free?"
"Perhaps she can't face that truth. The ego of a human being is a very sensitive instrument, my friend," Crenshaw answered. "If you don't mind, I'll go back to the top of the mesa, that is, if you are willing to stay here and sort of help anybody who might need it."
"Of course I'll stay," Palmer answered. "You're going to try to make a radio receiver, aren't you?"
"Yes. And a small transmitter, if I can."
"Why will you need a transmitter?" Palmer asked. "I mean, if there's no traffic in the air . . ."
"No real reason," Crenshaw answered. "It's kind of silly to use a transmitter but I sort of hoped someone might hear . . ."
"Noah used a dove," Palmer said, smiling.
"Noah? But that was fantasy!" Crenshaw said.
"Was it? I wish I knew. To us right now everything that happened in the many mansions beyond the cold is fantasy, unproved and unprovable. I can't even prove the existence of Agape." At this word, a glow appeared in Palmer's eyes. "But please go and work on the radios you want to build. If I need help, I'll come and get you."
Crenshaw was reluctant to leave. In the few days that had passed since he had first met this man, he had come to have a high regard for him. As for all the others, Palmer had not shown much inclination to talk, but when he had spoken, Crenshaw had found his words worth listening to.
"It may be that our world has its roots in other universes and in other times," Palmer continued. "Perhaps what we call fantasy are little glimpses into other worlds. It may be that what we see as the dimmest image in the remotest corner of our minds is a voice whispering of times to come. In other words, we may be bigger than we think."
"You can say that again," Crenshaw said.
"And the radio message you are hoping you will be able to send may already have been received!" Palmer continued. A glow and a faraway look were simultaneously in his eyes.
"What?" Crenshaw gasped, appalled. "How can that be true?"
"In this universe anything can be true," Palmer said. "And usually is." He smiled at his friend. "But before any message can be sent or received, you have first to build the radio equipment."
In the radar shack on top of the mesa, Crenshaw constructed his work shop. Here he worked for many days. Crenshaw was a theoretical biophysicist. He knew very little about electronics. Was there a difference between a Marconi coherer and a galena detector? He rather suspected there was. Both had been very crude instruments but each in its time had been a wonder of science. Then had come along the Fleming valve, to be the wonder of its time, then the De Forrest audion had come, then transistors.
Crenshaw had to start all over again with what he could remember of the history of radio, start at the beginning. For him, this was difficult. He was a research man, a theorist pure and simple, a mathematician, an inventor of a system of mathematics which applied only to curves that did not exist in the real universe! A visionary, a dreamer, utterly impractical, his mind readily leaped from familiar worlds to imaginary worlds that lay afar. One reason he had had so much difficulty in making a living lay in the fact that he was so far out in orbit that no one else could grasp the importance of what he was trying to do with a system of mathematics that applied only to curves which did not exist!
Nobody had ever been able to make sense of James Crenshaw, not really. In consequence, nobody had ever been able to give him credit, for anything.
Working alone in the radar shack on top of a mesa that looked out over a deserted world, Crenshaw sometimes wondered if anybody, anywhere, any time, had ever given him credit for anything he had done. Indeed, had he ever earned credit, had he ever done anything except express in mathematical terms the calculus of wild fantasy? Of what worth to the world were the Crenshaw Curves?
It was nice to work with his hands, to strip old receivers of their parts and try to build one receiver that would work. As to the transmitter, a portable radio transmitter of the type once used by the armed forces for field operations was already here. It was powered by a hand-operated generator. Crenshaw found oil and soaked it into old bearings. When these were free and turning, he knew the old generator would work. But it was designed to operate on the Morse code, on a system of dots and dashes which he had never known!
While James Crenshaw worked on top of the mesa, down below in the big room just off the wide corridor, J. Edward Palmer took care of a man, a woman, and a child. A mass of bones and shrunken tissue, the child was near death. Both knew this. Palmer, however, did not know anything he could do to prevent death from coming. The child seemed to have no will in the matter, one way or the other. Or if she had a will, it was perhaps to leave this place of cold and damp and horror and to return to some place that she called the shining sea where the bright fish swam.
The woman had the will to live but had no means to implement it. The dread leukemia was back in her as it was back in the child. All during the cold, the disease had lain dormant, to awaken when life had come back to the body.
Palmer wondered how he could give the child the will to live again and how he could help the woman implement the will she still possessed. Cindy Northcutt was not pretty, not really. She had never been beautiful. But love had always been strong in her and it had given her a kind of beauty all its own.
Love! Palmer thought about this word and its many meanings. At this thought, there came into his mind the image of a stream with mists rising from it. Beyond the shining water were mountains rising tier on tier into cloud masses of beauty ...
"If I could only remember!" He heard Cindy Northcutt say, for perhaps the twentieth time.
"What is it you are trying to remember?" he asked.
"How to cure leukemia seven," she answered. "I know I was taught how to cure it, over there . . ."
"Oh," Palmer said. "Well, keep trying. Perhaps the memory will return."
Leaving Cindy, he went to Roland Green, alone in one of the small rooms. The bearded man had pulled himself to the edge of the bed and was trying to sit erect there. Palmer hastened to him, to help, but was waved away.
"Thanks for the offer, Pop," Green said. "But I'm going to make it myself, as long as I can. When I can't do it myself, I'll let you help me."
"I understand. Oh, believe me, I understand," Palmer said. His feelings were not hurt by this rebuff. He watched the bearded man stumble into the room which held the woman and the child. At this, he protested.
"Go away, Pop," Green answered. "I'm not going to hurt them."
The bearded man dropped to his knees beside the bed. Palmer saw it was not the woman who held his attention but the child. Green stared at her closely, then looked up at Palmer. His eyes said, mutely, "She's going to die unless somebody does something to help."
Palmer spread his hands, helplessly. "I know," he said. Before his inner vision, like a dim message from some lost fairyland where dreams came true, rose again the picture of the mountains rising tier on tier of massed beauty beyond the little river.
It seemed to him that this vision was trying to tell him something, but if there was a message, he could not grasp it.
"Why don't somebody do something?" Green demanded.
"I guess it's mostly because nobody knows anything to do," Palmer said.
"She's just a child," Green said.
"I know," Palmer said. "And I am just a man, not God!"
Green glanced at him as if he was out of his mind, then the bearded man turned his full attention to the child. Somehow, his face found a way to smile.
"I'll bet your daddy calls you honey," he said.
Mary Jones opened dull eyes. The bearded face seemed to frighten her for a moment, then she seemed to look beyond the face to another face that only she could see. A wan smile crossed her face and was gone when she spoke.
"Daddy?" She spoke the word as if it sounded very strange to her. "I never did have a daddy."
Green looked startled. "You're making a joke with me," he said, quickly. "Every little girl has a daddy."
"They do? Oh!" Memory flicked across the face of the child. "Yes. I did have a daddy once. But he went away." The smile came back, then was gone again.
Watching, Palmer thought: Right here, right now, what can I do to help that child and that man?
Again the vision of the stream and of the tiered mountains came into his mind. If this was the answer to his question, he did not understand the answer.
Beside the bed, Green moved, sliding down to a sitting position. Keeping one hand on the bed, he caught the child's hand.
"Honey, you get well, and I'll . . ." Green hesitated and seemed to search in the depths of his mind for the words he wanted to use. "I'll . . . I'll be your daddy!"
Had he found the words? The eyes of the child came to his face, held there while longing showed on her face. She seemed to be trying to match the face of the bearded man against another image held deep within her mind. The two images were not the same.
In the silence, Cindy Northcutt began to speak. "About this leukemia seven, I've been thinking. I keep coming back to one idea, that I goofed somewhere . . ."
Green looked toward her. "How did you goof?" he asked.
"Just that I did is all I can remember so far," she answered.
He turned his attention back to the child. "Is it a deal, honey? If you'll get well, I'll be your daddy." Somewhere in his voice was now the rumble of a friendly mastiff benevolently asking a favor, certain in advance that the favor is going to be granted.
"What is a deal?" the child asked.
"It's a . . . it's something you and I decide to do together. If you will get well, I will be your daddy. That's a deal," Green tried to explain. "I always wanted a little girl . . ."
"You did?" He had her full attention now. To her, being wanted was important. "Then why didn't you have a mommy and a little girl?"
"I ... I don't know," Green answered. Bitterness crept into his voice. "I guess I was too busy trying to make myself important by defying the world ... to think much about little girls."
"Then you didn't really want one," the child said. She turned her gaze from Green's face.
"But I did, honey," Green protested quickly. "I just didn't know it."
His bitter voice went into silence. The child was not looking at him. Her gaze was fixed on a spot in the air directly above her bed. Clapping her hands, she cried out in glee.
Pulling himself to his feet, Green stumbled over to where Palmer was now sitting in a chair.
"What's happening to her?" Palmer asked.
"She's talking to a blue fish that lives in a crystal sea," the bearded man said.
"In another word, she's hallucinating?" Palmer asked.
"Yes. And in still another word, she's getting ready to die." Green answered. Stumbling into the next room, the bearded man flopped on the bed there.
Sitting quietly in his chair, Palmer tried to think. He had something of his own to remember from the land beyond the cold. But what was it? No, it was not the memory of the child that had died beneath the wheels of his car. The horror, the pain, and the guilt had been washed out of that part of his life, which was now simply a memory of something that once had happened. But there was something else, something that had to do with the look of the sky as seen from the top of a mountain . . .
Somewhere a man was yelling. The sound annoyed Palmer. It disturbed his effort to remember.
Crenshaw rushed into the room. It was Crenshaw who had been yelling. Crenshaw was beside himself with excitement.
"I've got a receiver working!" Crenshaw shouted. "I heard a radio message! The planet is not dead!"
At this moment, the little biophysicist who had specialized in the correlation of geometrical form and energy must have felt somewhat as Noah had felt when the dove had returned with the green leaf in its beak.
"There are still people alive on Earth!" Crenshaw shouted. Looking around, he seemed to realize for the first time that he was in the equivalent of a hospital. "Or something . . ." he ended. His voice fell away to a whisper, either because he had realized where he was and did not wish to disturb the sick by shouting . . . or for some other reason.
The child ignored him completely. To those who lived in a crystal sea, what was on the surface of the Earth did not matter. Cindy Northcutt looked at him as if he had sprung full-sized from some nightmare. Palmer and Green got quickly to their feet, to ask questions. Green got his attention.
"What did you hear, Crenny?" the bearded man asked.
Blankly, Crenshaw stared at him.
"Well, go on and answer," Palmer prompted. "We want to hear about it."
"I don't know," Crenshaw answered.
In the silence that followed, the only sound was that of a child talking softly to an invisible purple fish.
"What do you mean—you don't know?" Green asked. "You heard a radio message, didn't you?"
"Yes." Crenshaw answered. "But ..."
"Was it in code?" Palmer questioned.
"I ... I don't know," Crenshaw repeated. "When I heard it, I got so excited I rushed right down here to give you the good news that . . . well, maybe it was in code. What I heard was brrret! brrt. Zzzzzrt! Like that! It was so fast I couldn't understand it at all."
"Perhaps it was code mechanically transmitted so fast it had to be taken down on tape and put through a specialized decoding machine," Green said. "They were doing things like that in the Air Force, I know. Also, ships going out to Mars use that kind of transmission so they can say a lot in a short time."
"I know about that," Crenshaw said. "This wasn't code."
"Then what was it?"
"Voice, I think," Crenshaw said. "But what a voice!" Excitement lit fires behind his eyes. "I don't have time to stand around here talking. I just wanted you to know what had happened."
At a run, he started toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Green demanded.
Crenshaw gestured upward. "Up on top to get a transmitter working!"
On the run, he went out of the room. Long after he was gone, the sound of his hurrying footsteps came back from the wide corridor outside.
Green looked at Palmer. "What do you suppose he heard, Pop?"
"I have no idea," Palmer said. He went back to his chair. Pushing it near the wall, he leaned back in it so that it was in a slanting position. Here he settled himself down.
Green went again to the child.
"Are you ready to be my little girl now?" he asked. "I'd like awfully well to have you."
The child's eyes looked at him without recognition. Green sighed.
"If I could only remember all of it," Cindy whispered. The bearded man looked at her and sighed again. He walked over to where Palmer was sitting in the chair against the wall. Palmer did not notice his presence.
"This, stream and this mountain . . ." Palmer was saying.
Green shook him by the shoulder. Palmer's eyes came to rest on the face of the bearded man. Green jerked a thumb toward the child.
"Pop, if you know anything to do, now's the time to do it. If something isn't done, she's going to stay in that crystal sea."
"I know," Palmer answered.
"And Mrs. Northcutt is not much better. And I'm not any good at all. And what are you going to do?" There was no defiance in Green's voice. More than anything else, he seemed to be pleading for understanding, if not for help.
"There's one thing I can try," Palmer said.
"What is it?" Something like eagerness came into the eyes of the bearded man.
"Prayer!"
"Oh," Green answered. The eagerness faded from his eyes. Hope went with it. He stumbled into the next room and fell upon the bed.
Palmer sighed. He had not really expected the bearded man to believe in prayer. For that matter, he had little faith in it himself. But this that he was going to do was not exactly prayer unless Agape itself was the very core and heart of deepest prayer! And he had no other choice. It was either try this, or watch people die! Perhaps it was try this, and still watch people die. But he had to try!
In his mind, he began to remember the stream and the mountain! And what had happened there!
"If you try this and are successful, you may not live through it!" a voice said, in Palmer's mind.
"Who speaks?" he said. The voice startled him. He opened his eyes and looked around to see who had spoken. No one was there.
"I know that desperate men will try anything," the voice continued. "But do you want to try this?"
"Yes," Palmer said.
"You want to try it knowing your arteries are fragile and your heart is weak and that they may not withstand the stress of the power you are seeking?" the voice said.
"Yes," Palmer answered. To him at this moment this conversation with a voice that he knew existed in his own mind, though possibly not only in his mind, seemed entirely reasonable.
"So be it," the voice said. Palmer was not certain but he thought this voice sounded very pleased with him.
"The body may be weak but the spirit is strong," Palmer said.
"Then go ahead, spirit," the voice said, and was silent. J. Edward Palmer went ahead. Leaning further back in the chair against the wall, he settled himself until he was quite comfortable. Closing his eyes, he began to remember the little stream in Tennessee across which he had splashed in the early morning on his way to the mountains where beauty was piled in towering, sky-high masses. As he went through this process, he felt an emotion begin to come into him. Faint and far away, like beautiful music heard from a great distance, Agape came. As the emotion came into him, he felt his heart leap. His pulse grew stronger. Perhaps it was too strong. He did not know and did not care about this.
Palmer heard bed springs creak. Opening his eyes a fraction, he saw that Green had risen again and had come into the main room, where he sank to the floor beside the child.
"But I need a little girl like you," the bearded man said. Oddly—and this knowledge shook Roland Green as he realized it was true—his voice held a pleading note that was almost a begging tone! Never in his life had Roland Green begged for anything. Always, he had taken what he wanted. But he was begging now! And his begging was not for himself. It was for someone else, for the sake of a child.
"If you will be my little girl, you shall have the finest playhouse ever built," Green continued. "It shall be your very own and no one shall enter it without your permission."
Watching, Palmer could see the bearded man and the child. He could also see the woman. All three figures were becoming blurred. He suspected this meant that his eyes were slipping out of focus. Pain in his eyeballs confirmed this suspicion. A gentle ache was there.
As he became aware of the ache, a change took place in his eyes. A film seemed to slip over them. As the film came down, it wiped out the sight of the bearded man trying to cozen a child into staying alive and the sight of a woman trying to remember something she had forgotten. Another scene replaced this one.
The scene was that of mountains in eastern Tennessee. Again the dawn was coming. Again he was splashing across a little river, reaching hungrily toward as fair a dream as any man had ever dreamed.
This did not seem to be vision. It seemed to be real. He saw the trees, the rising mist, he heard and he felt the water splash against his legs.
"Agape!" J. Edward Palmer whispered.
At this moment, without realizing what he was doing, Palmer was in the deepest kind of mystical prayer. This was not the kind of prayer sent on words as a petition to some deity. Instead, this was the kind of prayer in which the one praying became the thing prayed for!
Praying in the name of Agape, J. Edward Palmer became Agape. A sense of wonder rose in him, of reverence and of awe; the love that gives with no thought of return to the giver and with no regard for the merit of the receiver filled him to overflowing! It was as if he was suddenly made into one plate of a heavily charged electrical condensor. The other plate— two are needed—was the world. Palmer did not remember that the underground in Unit 41 still existed, or that Unit 41 had ever existed. Time was telescoping. An hour was becoming a minute. A minute was becoming as small as a second and was passing with the speed of a second. And in each second was enough time to house all eternity!
His heart was racing, his pulse was pounding, his breathing was labored. He knew that during any of these enormously prolonged seconds, an artery might burst. To him, nothing could have mattered less. What really mattered was that Agape was again in him!
He could not see the room; he did not know what was happening there. At one time, he was dimly aware that Crenshaw had entered the room and had talked rapidly, for a second, then had gone away. Crenshaw had said he was going to have a transmitter operating any time now.
"I've got one operating here right now," Palmer tried to say. His lips were thick and heavy. No words came. He heard Crenshaw speak again. Amazement was in the voice of the little scientist.
"Say, there's a field here too! It's a love field!" In Crenshaw's voice the amazement was so intense it was approaching wonder. "Is it possible to generate a love field just as you generate a magnetic field?" He seemed to be thinking aloud. "No. No. That can't be done, I ... I guess. Well, I got to go back on top now!"
Mumbling, Crenshaw hurried from the room. As no one had noticed him enter, so no one noticed him leave. Green continued talking softly to the child, promising her now that if she would come and live with him, they would go to the circus every week. She was listening. And was beginning to smile. Cindy Northcutt, who had been lying very quietly, suddenly sat up.
"I've got it!" she gasped. "I wanted to die! That's why I developed leukemia seven! So I could die and be important!"
"Shut up!" Green said, glancing at her.
But she was too excited to hear him.
"I never would have had the courage to look at this if it hadn't been for him!" She pointed to Palmer, apparently asleep in the chair tilted against the wall. "He's doing something there . . . pouring love into this place. When I felt the love begin to come into me, I had the courage to look at myself."
Her eyes were wide. Sitting up, she was panting for breath. Sweat was on her face.
"Don't you feel the love that's coming from him?" she asked.
For an instant, Roland Green was confused. He looked suspiciously at Palmer.
"I don't mean that!" Cindy snapped at him. "I mean a real love. Open up your heart and you will feel it coming into you. You're feeling it, aren't you, Mary?"
"Yes, Aunt Cindy," the child whispered. "It's coming from two places. One place is the nice old man asleep there, the other place is this man." She looked at Roland Green. Her voice was like a whisper from some faraway land where elves lived in forests and where fish of many colors swam in a crystal sea.
Green looked at the child. Perhaps, if she said she could feel this emotion, it was all right for him to feel it too! "Well, maybe, I feel it, a little," he admitted. "But how's he doing it? I mean, is this something you can send out into the air, like a radio message?"
Cindy either did not hear him or chose to ignore his question. She was seeing what she had done. To talk about it, to reveal it, perhaps to confess, was all important to her at this moment.
"I wanted to die! I see it now!" Cindy's voice was like that of a witch speaking from some world of misery. It was a creaking sound that told a tale of pain and suffering. "Why would anyone want to die? There are many reasons . . ." Her eyes went to the child, then came away. "In my case, I wanted to die because I had decided, when I was very small, that this was a fine way to be important. When I was a little girl, a teensy small girl, I was taken to a funeral."
Her voice slipped into silence. Cindy herself seemed to slip away with her voice into some faraway land. Her voice lost its adult qualities and took on the fragile lisping tones of a small child.
"It's so pretty here ... the flowers smell so good ... the woman in the box is so beautiful . . . everybody says how pretty she looks . . ."
This was the voice of a child reporting the thought processes of a child at a funeral.
"The woman in the box . . . everybody loves her now . . ." the thinking of the child continued. "It's so wonderful to be loved!"
To the child Cindy, and to the adult Cindy, love was utterly important. A woman lying in a casket was greatly loved. This made the woman very important.
This was the reasoning of a child's mind. The adult forgot the incident of the funeral, forgot how pretty the flowers had been, forgot the body in the casket, forgot everything except the importance of love. When the time came the adult felt she was not loved, or was not loved enough, something slipped a cog in the hidden depths of her mind. Like a lost circuit going into operation far beneath the surface, her unconscious mind remembered how to be loved. The solution was very simple. All that had to be done was to die! Then you would get to lie in a beautiful white casket; people would send you lots of beautiful flowers, and everyone would say nice things about you!
But how to die? The unconscious mind knew all about dying and about being born. It knew so many ways to die even it could hardly remember them all!
"Great God!" Cindy Northcutt whispered. "I didn't see any of this until now. That's how leukemia seven got started in me. There was a period of a couple of months when Tom was worried about his business. Lots of times he forgot to tell me how pretty I was and I got to feeling blue. I didn't think anybody loved me! Right there is where the child mind went into operation below the surface. Its way to be loved was to die! Then my doctor found I had leukemia seven. Once started, it could only end in a funeral but all I was looking for was a way to be loved!"
Her voice caught and tied itself into a knot, then went into silence. As she sat up on the bed, her eyes were wild.
"That's crazy!" Green was on his feet, shouting. "Cut it out!"
"It may be crazy but it's also true!" Cindy answered. "It can't be true," Green answered. "There's no truth in it anywhere! It's crazy! I tell you it's crazy!"
"If it's crazy talk, why are you shouting?" Cindy answered.
"Because . . ." Green hesitated, sudden alarm rising in his mind.
"You told us you killed a man," Cindy continued. "The first time you were tried you were found guilty. The judge sentenced you to the cold. Your lawyers fought this strange judicial decision. They beat it and you were given a new trial. At the second trial, you were found innocent. Then you entered the cold of your own choice. Why?"
"Well . . ."
"Because you were guilty of murder and you knew it!" Cindy was shouting now. "You were trying to punish yourself for the crime you knew you had committed!"
"Damn you!"
"But that is not important, not really," Cindy continued. "What is important is the reason, the real reason, why you killed somebody in the first place."
"If you don't shut up . . ."
But she would not be quiet. Relentlessly, again and again, as if intuitively she had already sensed the answer and was only forcing him to bring it to the surface of his mind, she pounded the same question at him, demanding to know why killing somebody was a way to be loved!
At first, he shouted back at her, then suddenly he stopped shouting. His gaze fixed itself on the floor near the wall.
"There's a mouse!" he said.
"A mouse?" Cindy answered. Her voice dropped from a shout to a whisper. She looked toward the spot where Green was pointing, then looked again, then looked back at him. Her gaze had grown hard.
"Who are you kidding?" she demanded.
"I'm not kidding anybody." As Green spoke, his voice was subtly changing, shifting from the full tones of an adult to the lisping voice of a startled child.
"There is no mouse there! In here, all the mice have starved to death. If any were ever here in the first place! Stop this foolishness . . ." Her voice trailed away as she realized he was not really listening to her.
"And a woman is screaming," Green continued. He hesitated before continuing. Beneath his beard a shy smile was trying to come into existence at the corners of his lips.
"Mom?" Green said.
On his face, sudden terror replaced the smile. Inside him, some psychic change seemed to be taking place. He screamed again, a sudden wailing sound that had all the terror of the Banshee wail in it. And also something of the quality of a woman, so that it was not Roland Green screaming as an adult, nor was it Roland Green screaming as a child, but was something of a woman.
"There's a mouse! Homer! There's a mouse! Homer!" Horror mixing with terror on his bearded face, Roland Green stared at some scene visible only to his eyes, a scene which seemed to include a man named Homer, a woman whose name was not given but who seemed to be the wife of Homer, and possibly the mother of Roland Green. Watching him, Cindy Northcutt knew she was seeing some inner conflict working itself out in dramatization on the stage of the soul. Finally she saw relief appear on his face.
At this, Green's face changed. Somehow it lost its impossible feminine quality and became that of a child. The change was mostly in Green's eyes. Longing appeared there . . .
Many times, when her young son had wanted something very, very badly, Cindy had seen such longing in his eyes as she was now seeing in the eyes of the bearded Roland Green. Many times, seeing this intense longing in the eyes of her small son, she had yielded to it, knowing that when the male wanted something so very, very badly, it was not good to thwart him. Now she was watching this same longing in the eyes of a bearded adult male.
Green shook his head. In his mind, some scene righted itself. He shook his head again and began to speak in a whisper. "My mom was scared by a mouse. My old man killed it. Mom threw herself in his arms and began hugging and kissing him. Maybe I was one year old when this happened . . ."
His whisper had an eerie, out-of-touch quality about it. The tones were those of a child and of an adult, mixed. "My old man's name was Homer," he said. He looked at Cindy without really seeing her. "What I wanted, I guess, was for my mom to hold me and to kiss me the way she held and kissed my old man!" His voice grew tight. A rattle appeared in it. "I wonder, after that, did I think that the way to be loved was to kill something . . ." Seeing nothing, his gaze went around the room. "My old man killed a mouse. Mom hugged and kissed him. I wanted her to hug and kiss me. I thought ... I thought that the way to be hugged and kissed was to kill something ... or somebody!" The rattle grew louder. "What stupid thinking has my mind done!" he said. "What stupid thinking!" Pain made a rusty, metallic rasp in his voice. "What stupid thinking . . ." he repeated.
"I am afraid we all do stupid thinking when we are small," Cindy said. "We have little knowledge and we reason incorrectly from it. We reach wrong conclusions. When we grow up, we are too busy to look back and see these wrong conclusions and we keep using them until . . . until they kill us . . ."
"And our stupid thinking comes true just as much as our straight thinking?" Green asked.
"I'm afraid it works that way," Cindy said. "Then the universe cannot see any difference between a fool and a wise man!"
"Let's say instead that the universe lets every man be as big a fool as he wishes, for as long a time as he wants . . ." Cindy said.
In the chair against the wall, Palmer lifted his head. He seemed to speak from some enormous distance.
"The only god I know is big enough to make every man . . . Not to let every man be a true man, if the man so desires."
Turning they saw that Palmer had come out of his trance. He was smiling at them.
"That nice man is shining," the child spoke. Sitting up on the bed, she was pointing at Palmer. "He's just smiling, honey," Cindy said. "No! He's shining. And it's with love," the child answered. Minutes before, she had been watching invisible fish swim in a crystal sea. Then, she had seemed not to have the strength to lift more than an arm. Now she rose from the bed. Walking over to Palmer, she stood looking at him. He smiled at her.
"Thank you," the child said. "Thank you for the love." "It was not mine, my dear," he answered. "It only flowed through me."
"Now that I know so much love is here, I won't have to go back to live with the fish in the shining sea!" the child continued. Her voice had in it the tones of a suddenly happy elf beginning to pipe gay music.
"Thank you," Palmer said. "That . . . that was part of the purpose in giving it, I suspect. Now go say to the big man what is in your heart."
Moving to Roland Green, the child looked shyly up at him. "If you want me, I will be your little girl," she said. Green tossed her to the ceiling. Her squeal of joy was a burst of pure happiness.
"Look at him!" Cindy said, pointing at Palmer. "He is glowing."
In his chair tilted against the wall, Palmer's head had dropped forward on his chest again. He looked as if he had gone back to sleep. Surrounding his whole body and forming a kind of a halo around his head was a pale blue light.
For a moment, they stared at the light in awe and wonder. But Cindy had too many other wonderful things on her mind to be long awed by a dim blue light.
"The leukemia seven that I had, it's gone!" she gasped.
"How did that happen?" Green asked.
"I ... I don't know," Cindy answered. "Unless in realizing I had caused it in the first place, I also realized I didn't have to have it if I didn't want it."
She looked at the child, laughing in Green's arms. "Honey, are you well too?"
"Yes," Mary Jones answered.
"Well . . ."Roland Green said. "Well . . ."
"What are you trying to say?" Cindy Northcutt demanded.
"I guess . . ." Green's voice faltered. "Well, that can be true for you two but as for me . . ."
"What about you?"
"The disease that killed the doctors and the nurses here, I've got it," Green answered. "You don't get over it so easy . . ."
His eyes went to the child in his arms. "Honey, would you mind if I set you down for a while? I'm . . . I'm a little tired."
Setting the child on her feet, he moved to the nearest bed, and collapsed on it.
"The disease that killed the doctors and the nurses, it's tough," he said. "What I'm wondering is . . . you two are cured of leukemia seven, maybe, but . . . but . . ."
"But have we got this other disease?" Cindy demanded.
Green nodded.
In what had once been a radar and radio shack beside the area where huge helicopters had once landed, Crenshaw worked. He started work each morning as soon as the first glimmer of illumination from the east gave him enough light to see what he was doing. He quit when darkness came. The lights had failed here. There was plenty of power down below but he was afraid of the stuff and he did not attempt to get the lights working. For food, he drank a cupful of the syrupy liquid that had been left in Unit 41 in large quantities, pending the time when the sleepers would awaken. His stomach, protesting this diet, wondered if it would ever have honest food to digest again, a steak, a salad and a baked potato, to be followed by a sweet liqueur and endless cups of sweetened coffee, all of this with good companions to talk with through all the long night about the endless and fantastically wonderful curves described by higher mathematics. Or if not higher, by different mathematics.
Had steak and a baked potato gone from the Earth, Crenshaw found himself wondering as he worked.
What had happened out there in the wastelands beyond this mountain? Had too many H-bombs been exploded? Had the ships that were going out to space found other lifeforms out there, lifeforms which had followed the Earth ships back to the Home Planet, to destroy all life on it? Or had something else taken place? Crenshaw had no delusions that his civilization was the first on the planet. No! In remote times, other peoples had risen to greatness, to vanish eventually without leaving intelligible traces behind them. Would his own civilization go the same way? Was there a vast cycle of expanding and contracting life on Earth, perhaps also in the Solar System? Did lifeforms spring up like mushrooms after a spring rain, to die in a regular rhythm when the summer heat arrived?
The portable transmitter had been built to send code, not voice. Crenshaw had seen similar transmitters in museums but his knowledge of how they worked was theoretical rather than practical. He got the bearings free so that the crank would turn. The armature of the generator turned freely but he was not certain the transmitter would actually put a signal into the air. Transmitters such as this had been used in the field under conditions of fluid warfare. If it worked at all, it would transmit a broad band signal.
Earphones over his head, turning the crank of the generator with his left hand, Crenshaw forced the fingers of his right hand to grasp the key.
At this point, he realized he did know the Morse code. Or any other code! All he knew was that such codes had once existed.
In James Crenshaw, at this moment, hope almost died. Inside him, a faintness came into existence. To keep from toppling over, he had to catch the edge of the crude work bench he had constructed.
Could he go any father, he wondered. So far he had gone, so much he had suffered, so much pain he had known!
"I can stand more of it!" he told himself. Catching the crank, he began to turn it. The whine of the bearings grew louder. On the small panel, the needle of the meter began to move.
He thought: If I had only learned the Morse code. As if in answer to his question, from the depths of his memory came a fragment of that code, three dots, three dashes, then three more dots. SOS! So much he remembered from an adventure tale he had read as a boy.
Desperately, he began to put these symbols into the air. He doubted if they would be heard, and even if they were heard, would the hearer be able to translate the dots and dashes into letters of the alphabet? If he could translate them into SOS, would he know the meaning of these letters? Crenshaw decided that anyone who could translate the dots and dashes into letters would know their meaning.
Over and over again, forcing strength into a tiring left arm, he put on the air his call for help.
"Brrrt! Brrtttt!" an answer came into his earphones. Crenshaw was so startled by the sudden blast of sound in his earphones that he stopped turning the crank. Even with nothing but a crystal of galena lead used as a detector, the signals were so loud they hurt his eardrums. Before he could even think of a way in which to answer, the roar came again, louder now.
"BRRTER? BERTLLEERR?"
Beyond any doubt, Crenshaw knew that these flashing sounds were a question. Or were they a challenge? Had someone picked up his SOS and was now demanding to know by what right was he intruding on the air of this planet? Cold went up his spine. He had sent out a call for help into the air of what looked like a dead planet. Something had answered! He was suddenly aware that he was not at all certain that what had answered would be of any help to him or to the others down below. Perhaps, discovering that humans in deep-freeze were still alive on the planet, it would come to destroy them too!
Through the windows of the radar shack, Crenshaw searched the sky for some glimpse of the ship from' which he suspected this powerful signal had come. He saw nothing.
"BRRTT!" This blast of sound was even louder, so loud that he snatched the phones from his ears to stop the pain.
As he was doing this, he saw the ship appear. He stared in dazed wonder at what he had seen happen, knowing it could not have taken place, but also knowing it had happened.
The ship had not flown in. He had not seen it coming. It had simply appeared on the plateau; it had leaped into existence; it had puffed out of nothing as if some unseen black magician had created it instantaneously!
One instant, the mesa top had been bare. The next instant the ship had been there. Now it was large before his eyes, a round bubble made of a shining transparency. Looking at it, he clapped his hands over his eyes and cried out in pain. The ship was of so bright a shining that it hurt his eyes.
Rubbing them fiercely, he opened them a slit to stare toward this vessel.
Someone, perhaps the pilot, had left the ship and was coming toward the radar shack. Quickly, Crenshaw dropped out of sight beside the work bench.
Light footsteps sounded outside the shack. Someone out there moved so easily that the sound of his steps gave the impression he was walking on air.
Crenshaw realized that someone was looking in through the closed door.
"Vrrrt?" a question came from outside the shack.
Now Crenshaw recognized that this sound was actually a language with the vowels and the consonants spoken so quickly that they gave the impression that there was no separation into syllables. Or even into words! He also realized that this had been done to speed up communication, to make it possible for minds moving at very great speed to talk to each other in words.
"Vrrtbrr?" the sound came again, slightly different. The wrecked door was shoved to one side.
Crenshaw got to his feet. In his mind was the thought that the least he could do was to die facing an enemy. He saw what was standing in the door.
At first impression, what he saw looked like a human being. Like a young man. Or did it look like a young woman? Or was it an old man? Or perhaps it was an old woman!
"Vrrt!" it said. The face shifted and changed as it looked at Crenshaw. "Don't—be—alarmed—old—fellow," it said. "I— am—Michael—of—the—Many Faces."
The words came both slowly and quickly. Confusion rising in him, Crenshaw had the impression that this Michael of the Many Faces was making a mighty effort to slow a fast-moving mind to the pedestrian pace of Crenshaw's mind. Crenshaw heard the words but they did not really carry meaning to him. He stared at this creature.
Michael was perhaps six feet tall. Dressed in a single garment that was made of shining cloth, a belt circled his waist. From the belt hung something; Crenshaw could not decide whether it was a tool or a weapon. Nor was he much concerned about such things. Tumult was inside him. If from no other source—and it had other sources—the tumult rose from trying to understand how this Michael could be both young and old at the same time, and—even more confusing— how he could seem to be both male and female. There were other problems. So many words were clamoring at Crenshaw's lips that he could not choose which to use first. When he spoke, his voice was a babble of noise, of sounds that his conscious mind would not have chosen to utter but which seemed to spring from some deep well within his subconscious.
"That ship . . ." he gestured at the shining vessel. "It just appeared there! I was watching. It just puffed into existence. I saw it happen. How . . ."
"How?" Now the many faces of Michael showed confusion. "How? I don't understand. It—came—in—on—the—Crenshaw—Curves. How else could it—have—come?"
"On the what?" Crenshaw babbled. "What did you say? I mean . . . what?"
Crenshaw's confusion seemed to transfer to the face of the intruder, appearing there as many shifting expressions, all of them revealing a baffled, bewildered feeling.
"The—old—talk!" Michael said. "It—I—do—not—understand—well. So—slow—it goes. My—mind—does—not—like —such—slow speed."
The confusion gave way to alarm.
"But—you're—hurt, old fellow. You're sick!" All of the many faces were now showing alarm, a sight which frightened Crenshaw. Michael stepped back out of the shack. Looking toward the ship, he shouted what sounded like a single word.
"Thomvelbrrrt!"
Like a faithful dog obeying an order from a beloved master, the ship moved upward. And vanished as it moved.
Watching, Crenshaw knew just exactly what that ship had done, knew beyond any thought of doubt. This was knowledge that scared him so badly that he bolted out the back door of the shack. From this position, he darted around the shack. While Michael was re-entering the little building, Crenshaw raced across the flat top of the mesa and ran down the steps to the entrance of the underground sections of Unit 41. There, he burst into a room filled with silence and fragrant with the odor of an impossible perfume, a room in which one man sat very still in a chair backed against the wall and a woman with a child beside her knelt beside a bed that held Roland Green.
The woman looked up at Crenshaw. "He's dying," she said, pointing to Green.
Crenshaw, his mind bursting with what had just happened, did not realize what she had said.
"I—uh—," he pointed upward. "Up there!"
Cindy Northcutt did not seem to understand him any better than he had understood her. She pointed toward Palmer in the chair tilted against the wall, pointed and tried to speak. Her words sounded very strange to Crenshaw.
"Do you smell the fragrance of love?" she asked.
"What?" Crenshaw said. And then repeated, "What?"
"If you could smell the kind of love he was talking about, it would smell like what is here now," she continued. "It's a blend of the fragrance of every flower that ever bloomed, roses, and orange blossoms, and honeysuckle, and apple trees in the spring."
The fragrance seemed to become stronger as she spoke.
"What?" Crenshaw repeated. It seemed to him that he was using this one word much too often.
"He called it Agape," Cindy continued. "He said it was that kind of love which gives with no thought of return to the giver and with no regard for the merit of the receiver. When he was giving it, he proved his point . . . about the merit of the receiver, I mean. None of us had any merit but he gave just the same."
Her voice choked. In the silence the only sound was that of a child sobbing beside the bed on which the black-bearded man was dying.
Cindy continued, in a whisper. "But the love that he gave saved the life of a child and it saved my life, at least for a little while. And even if the giving of it cost him his own life, I do not believe he would have counted the cost."
She nodded toward the silent figure in the chair. J. Edward Palmer seemed to be sleeping. Around his head was a fringe of white hair. Like a halo in white, it seemed to glisten with a shining light.
"He saved your lives, for a little while?" Crenshaw said.
"Yes. He gave us love, enough of it to give us the courage to cure ourselves of leukemia seven. But . . ." She nodded toward the bearded man, toward Roland Green. "Even the love he gave was not strong enough to cure him. And we've got the same disease, whatever it is. As it is now killing him, so it will kill us."
Her voice had the tones of prophecy in it.
Crenshaw barely heard her words. In the distance, coming from the wide corridor, he heard a shout. This reminded him that he had had a reason for coming here.
"It doesn't make any difference," he said, speaking very fast. "We're all going to die anyhow. What I mean is, there is a black magician up above. He came in a ship that just puffed into existence! When he wanted the ship to leave, he shouted at it. And it puffed out of existence."
"What?" Cindy Northcutt said.
"He'll kill us all anyhow," Crenshaw continued. "Or he can, if he wants to."
"He will hardly bother to kill people who are already dead or dying," Cindy said, listlessly. She looked toward the doorway. "Yes, I hear him coming. And I'm not even going to try to run."
The footsteps came in a rush, to stop as Michael stood in the doorway.
"Vrrerrrrt!" his voice came. Then, as if remembering, he seemed to shift gears, and to speak more slowly. "Please! Do —not—be—afraid."
He looked at Crenshaw and seemed to read his mind. "Please! I am not—a—black—magician, old—fellow! No! I —am—a friend!"
Crenshaw gulped and was more frightened than ever, this because of the clearcut evidence of mind reading. He watched. Michael glanced around the room. His eyes came back to Crenshaw.
"Is—this—Unit—41?" he asked.
Crenshaw found the strength to nod.
"Good!" A smile lit all of Michael's many faces. "Then we've found it. The old records were destroyed in an earthquake and a fire and we didn't know where . . . Excuse— me. I forget—and—talk—too—fast. Sorry!" Michael looked apologetic. Again he looked at Crenshaw. "Don't—let—yourself—become—alarmed, old—fellow! I'm—your—friend. Really—I am. Friend! Do—you—understand? Friend!"
"But you can read minds!" Crenshaw protested.
"Not—very—well. Not—well—enough. Anyhow—under —the—alarm—in—your—mind—is—something—I—don't— grasp!" Michael appeared to probe deeper. A startled expression appeared on his many faces. "What—are—you? Who—are—you? Such—a mind—I have—never—touched —before. Who— Who—are—you?"
"My name is Crenshaw," the little biophysicist said.
"Crenshaw?" Surprise grew stronger on Michael's face as he repeated the word. "Crenshaw! Not . . . not—James Crenshaw,—the—biophysicist!"
Gulping, Crenshaw said this was his name and his occupation. He wanted to know what of this. To him, and to the world in which he had lived, being James Crenshaw had never been a matter of great importance. Or of any importance at all!
"What of it?" Shock was on all the faces of Michael. "This —of—it, sir! This—of—it! You—asked—how—the—ship-could—just—puff—into—existence, sir. This—should—have —told—me—who—you—were!" Michael forgot himself in growing excitement and ran all of his words together. "I should have guessed your identity from your question. No one else from the old time would have known enough to ask that question. How very stupid am I! How—very—stupid. You— may—not—know—it, sir, but your mathematics—of—the —inner—surfaces—describes—the—way—that—ship—puffs —into—and out—of existence, sir!"
"What?" Crenshaw said, gulping. It seemed to him as if all the world was standing on tiptoe waiting to hear good news.
"You—sir—are—the—mathematical—genius—whose— work—made possible—the—flight—of—that ship!" Michael said. Real respect was in his voice. He bowed.
Aghast, Crenshaw stared at this man—if man he was. "My mathematical genius? Are you . . . are you . . ." Just in time he remembered not to ask if this strange man was insane. "I mean—I was so poor a mathematician that my request for an extension of my grant was refused! What ... I mean, you must be mistaken!"
"I am not mistaken, sir!" Michael answered, firmly. "I know the history of this planet. In my time, sir, you are an honored genius. We didn't know what had happened to you, sir. We assumed you were dead. And to think we have found you here, in Unit 41, alive!"
Joy made a shining light on all the faces of Michael.
Confusion was in James Crenshaw. He had the vague impression that all the world was insane and that he was the only sane human left alive. This Michael of the Many Faces was obviously out of his mind. Calling him a genius! Starvation had been his lot!
Then another thought came into Crenshaw's mind. "Where . . . where are you from?" he stammered. "And . . . what has happened outside? What year is this?" Perhaps, if these questions were answered, Michael might not seem to be so insane!
"I am from Unit 47," Michael answered. "The fourth deep-freeze following Unit 41. You never heard of us because we went into the cold after you did. We were the last unit. After us, legislation stopped humans from entering the deep-freeze. As to what year it is . . ." Concentration frowned and furrowed Michael's forehead. "Unit 41 went into the cold in May 2030. Unit 47 went into the cold four years later, in October, 2034. Just by coincidence—and someday in some time I am going to understand the why of that astounding coincidence, sir! Just by coincidence, Unit 47 was located in a mine in the one spot on earth where there was a very high incidence of subtle radioactivity of a very unusual type . . ."
"Subtle radioactivity of a very unusual type?" Crenshaw asked.
"It goes zzzzzzzz, sir, in our inner ears, and it produces great changes in human nerve structure. Everyone in Unit 47 was changed, sir. I was changed and am still changed. We went into Unit 47 and awakened in sixty years, sir, of our own choice, as a result of the changes that had taken place in us. To get the time straight, sir, this was 36 years ago. The time is now 2130."
"Just one hundred years after we entered the deep-freeze!" Crenshaw said.
"Right, sir."
"And when you awakened?"
"We found ourselves changed, by the radioactivity, sir. We also found, outside, that the earth had been swept clear of life, human, animal, even the birds, sir, are gone. Oh, perhaps, in some swamps, in some deep forests, some forms of life have managed to survive. There may even be a few humans alive. We have been too busy trying to find the old deep-freeze units to search the whole planet."
"The whole planet, life gone?" Crenshaw faltered. "What ..."
"An organism that came in from space," Michael answered. "It came floating in from beyond our system, in clouds that looked like spider webs but which were actually made up of billions upon billions of tiny turquoise filaments. Breathed in with the air, these filaments had found a perfect host. Never having encountered this form of virus before, no life form on this planet had any resistance to it. The filaments were so small they would pass through the best filters. So . . ."
Michael of the Many Faces spread his hands in an expressive and very sad gesture. "So a world went."
"And this turquoise thing . . ." Horror was rising in James Crenshaw. "It's still here. We've all got it. We're dying of it! What I mean is, stay away from here!"
Michael smiled and did not move.
"But this is a plague spot!" Crenshaw shouted. "Don't you understand? You will be infected. You must save yourself. The world needs you ..."
"It needs you too, sir," Michael said. "The people of the old time could not stop that virus. But we can. We belong to a different kind of men, sir. One of our first actions, after awakening, was to learn how to destroy that turquoise virus, that blue death . . ." He paused to look at Crenshaw.
"You remember that I shouted at the ship—your ship, sir, since your mathematics made it possible—and that it vanished? Do you wonder where it went?"
"Yes," Crenshaw whispered.
"As soon as I saw you up above, I knew you were infected. So I sent the ship back to Unit 47, to pick up doctors and nurses and everyone else who can possibly be spared, to return here to lick that blue virus, and to help those in Unit 41 awaken, sir."
Michael lifted his head and turned an ear toward the corridor. Out there running feet could be heard.
"Ah," Michael said, smiling. "Here they come now, to help, sir! Are you . . ." Concern was on the face of Michael. "Do you feel all right, sir? Remember, you must take care of yourself. We are going to need your mathematical genius in the new world that we are building."
"No," Crenshaw answered. "No. I don't feel all right. But it doesn't matter any longer."
He knew his strength was failing and that he was failing. He also knew that Michael had taken a quick step forward and had caught him as he fell. Michael carried him to a bed.
"Save the life of this man!" Michael shouted to those who were entering. "Vrrert! Thrrr! Quickly! Quickly. This man is James Crenshaw! He is the greatest mathematical genius who ever lived on our planet. I want his life saved! Do you understand me? Vrrrt!"
Crenshaw, with joy and wonder and amazement rising in him, realized again that this incredible Michael of the Many Faces was talking about him. He also realized that as he had slept here in Unit 41, something like a cloud of silk filaments had come in from deep space and had swept the planet clean. And that out of this, in a place called Unit 47, a new race of men had been born, created under the forced draft of unusual radioactivity that went zzzzzzzzz, so that, unlike the usual mutation, even adults had been changed!
Crenshaw's joy began to fade as he realized that Roland Green was getting to his feet. Shoving Cindy and the child behind him, Green was turning to face with bared teeth and lifted fists those who were entering to help him.
Backing against the wall, Roland Green made fists out of his hands. Somewhere in the depths of his mind the impulse to protect the mate and the family had come to life. It gave him the strength to stand. Courage to face these intruders he did not need to find anywhere. This he had always had.
Crenshaw was too stunned to try to protest. And too weak to make any protest effective. Palmer was still sitting in the chair against the wall. Whether he was alive or dead, no one knew or cared. Either way, he could take no action to stop Green.
Surprise to the point of shock on all of his many faces, Michael looked at the bearded man. Palms held outward to indicate his friendliness, he moved toward Green.
"Stay away from me or I'll kill you!" The snarl of a great beast was in the voice of the bearded man.
Surprise froze all of the many faces of Michael. Starting to speak, he deliberately slowed his voice. "Please old fellow, we —mean—no—harm. We—are—friends. We—come—to— help. But—you—all of you—are—sick—and—very weak. We—must—act—quickly—to—save—your—lives. Here— are—physicians . . ." He gestured toward those now crowding through the door behind him. "You—can—trust—us."
"Trust you! What kind of a fool do you make me to be? You come in here from nowhere ..."
"We—come—from—Unit—47."
"I never heard of it," Green answered.
"Of—course—you—have—not—heard—of—it. It was— set—up—after—you—came—here—to—sleep. You—can—believe—me. We—came—to—help—"
"Believe you!" Green's laugh was bitter with haunted memories of trusts broken and of faiths betrayed. "You can't believe anybody!"
"Perhaps—that—was—true—in—the old—times—among —the—old—men. It is—not—true—among—the new men— in—the—new—time—that—has—come," Michael said.
"New men? New time?" Green answered. "What new lie are you thinking up now?"
He was aware that the child was pulling at his leg and was trying to attract his attention. He spoke quickly to her, telling her to be quiet.
"But there is love in these people," the child insisted. "I can feel it. So much love . . ."
Facing Michael, Green did not hear her.
"But—I—haven't—time—to—explain—all—that—has happened," Michael protested. "Nor—do—you—have—time —to—listen. This—disease—this—blue—death—believe me, you—can—drop—dead—at—any instant—"
"Who are you trying to bluff?" Green demanded. He swayed and almost fell as he spoke. Behind him, Cindy Northcutt tried to help him stand.
"I—am—not—bluffing—" Michael began, then realized that there was no possible way to convince this man of his good intentions by talking. His hand went down to the belt at his side, toward the tool or the weapon that was holstered there, a movement that was lightning fast. Freeing it from its carrying case, he lifted it toward the ceiling, and proved that it was a weapon instead of a tool. The weapon hummed. Blue light leaped from it and struck the ceiling. Smoke spurted there. The concrete yielded sand and gravel. Michael brought the weapon down and looked at Green to see if this display of power had impressed the bearded man.
It had impressed Green so much that he was leaping at Michael's throat!
With one hand, Michael caught the bearded man by the shoulder, held him at arm's length.
Green was a powerful man but he could not break the grip on his shoulder.
"Brave man!" he screamed. "I haven't got anything but my fists to fight with and you threaten me with a gun that shoots blue light and knocks holes in concrete! Big man!" He struggled, futilely, against the single hand that held him.
"But—I—didn't—threaten—you—" Michael protested.
"No?" Green twisted his head to look at the hole in the ceiling. "That's not a threat? How big a fool do you think I am?"
"That shot was fired to prove to you that the weapon works," Michael said, his voice quickening. ". . . this before I—gave—it—to you."
Green stared at him. Michael released his grip on the shoulder of the bearded man. Green began rubbing the shoulder. "Before you gave it to me? What kind of talk is this?"
"The—true—kind," Michael answered. "Here! I—will— prove—I—speak—true!" Butt foremost, he extended the weapon to Green.
The bearded man looked at the weapon as if he did not believe his eyes. He lifted his gaze to Michael and stared at the shifting expressions that gave the impression that this was a man of many qualities, of many abilities. He did not attempt to take the weapon held toward him. Instead, he seemed to recoil from it. He looked around at Cindy Northcutt as if seeking help from her in making a decision in this incredible situation that had been thrust upon him.
"He has called your bluff," Cindy said. She was quite calm.
"But I wasn't bluffing . . ."
"Take the gun or let him keep it," Cindy said. "But make up your mind. If you are as near dead as I am—and as I think you are—you know the gun doesn't make any difference. Once a man—or a woman—is dead, you can't make him any—or her—any deader by shooting."
Torn by ancient fears, Green still protested. "But how do I know I can trust him?"
"You don't know it," Cindy answered. "You're trying to predict the future and guarantee it. This, you can't do. The time has come for you to trust another human being, yourself, and the future, all at once!"
"But . . ." Deep in the mind of Roland Green was fear and uncertainty and distrust. All of his life, these had been with him. Perhaps, as dim memories of days when real giants had been upon the Earth, these whispers had come down to him from not-quite-forgotten ages. Certainly, in the manner of Oedipus, they had come along with him from his childhood. He was distrustful.
But something else now had come into his life, something that he very dimly recalled from the land beyond the cold, and recalled very clearly as having been present in this room but recently as a fragrance of many blooms, a memory of that type of love that someone had called Agape. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at Palmer. In this instant, for reasons he did not begin to understand, he made up his mind.
"You keep the gun," he said to Michael. Looking up, he saw that all of the faces of this very strange man of the future were smiling. Inside the mind of Roland Green, an answering smile began to form. It was as if this smile had waited for him to make up his mind to trust himself and the future and when he had once made up his mind to do this, the smile had come into existence in his own mind as an answer.
Michael helped Roland Green to a bed.
Michael also helped Cindy Northcutt and a girl child named Mary Jones to other beds.
To Cindy Northcutt, this was the beginning of a period of vast confusion. She did not understand this Michael at all, but she liked him, had liked him the instant she had seen him. As had Mary Jones, she could feel the love in him. It was a tangible thing, outflowing from him in the same way it flowed from J. Edward Palmer, a thing of giving and of thanksgiving, a tone of wonder and of joy, a happiness that warmed the depths of a human. As he helped her to lie down, his voice was snapping in the quickest talk she had ever heard to the others who were coming from the wide corridor outside. These men obeyed Michael instantly, obeyed him without question. They moved faster than she had ever seen humans move, bringing in equipment from some land of miracles beyond the wide corridor. Vaguely, she understood that this equipment was coming from a place called Unit 47 and that it was being conveyed here by a strange ship that moved along the lines of Crenshaw's Curves—whatever these were— and that it obeyed these new men as they obeyed Michael, instantly and without question, going out of existence just outside the exit to the corridor, puffing back into existence at Unit 47, being loaded there with equipment, puffing back into existence here at Unit 41. She tried to understand how Crenshaw's Curves could describe a way to move that outside space as she knew it—or perhaps were inside it—but gave up the effort as being beyond her mind at the present time.
Hurrying men brought big bottles into the room, set them up beside her bed, Cindy knew. She hardly felt the bite of needles going into her arm.
"We have to give you strength," Michael explained. "In addition, we have to destroy the virus space brought to us. Some of our treatment methods may seem strange to you but I hope you will be able to trust us."
"I will," Cindy answered. "Oh, indeed, I will!"
She knew that not only were medications and food being fed into her bloodstream but that in addition fast-moving technicians were setting up strange funnel-shaped coils beside her bed. These fed energy into her. And always, puffing into her from some unseen source, was what she clearly identified as love.
This she did not understand at all. It was as if these people of the many faces could create love, could call it into existence, could set it in motion.
Cindy Northcutt wondered about this, then stopped wondering. To her, calling love into existence was such a miracle that she could hardly dare let herself think about it, lest it go away. Also, she felt drowsy. From the drowsiness, she guessed they were feeding mild sedatives into her bloodstream along with the liquids. She knew they were working with Roland Green too, and with the child, Mary Jones. And they had taken J. Edward Palmer from his chair and had laid him very gently on a bed. But beside Palmer they had set up no equipment. Instead, Michael had spoken quickly—and sadly—and now he seemed to be waiting, for what or for whom, Cindy could not discern. She saw however that a man had entered and was standing beside the bed occupied by James Crenshaw. Like Michael, he was one of the people of the many faces. Clutching a big loose leaf notebook that looked to be very old, he waited beside Crenshaw's bed as if he dared not breathe for fear of disturbing the frail little biophysicist who had also been, it seemed, a kind of mathematician.
Another man entered, to ask a question of Michael, who directed him to the bed occupied by J. Edward Palmer. This man spoke sharply to two technicians, who spread their hands in a helpless gesture in reply. The man snarled at them and they went quickly on about their tasks. With Michael clucking behind hint, the man went to Palmer's bed. There he dropped to his knees and conducted an examination of his own. When he finished his examination and looked up at Michael, his face had the saddest expression on it that Cindy had ever seen.
She knew from this that J. Edward Palmer was dead and had died in releasing into this room the love that had given her the strength to face her past, to look at what she had done, the love that had distilled into the fragrance of all the flowers that had ever bloomed in all the springtimes that had passed over the world. Cindy was sad about this too, but not too sad. She could not understand why Michael and this new man should be so sad about it. Had J. Edward Palmer been anybody of any importance that supermen of a new race emerging here on Earth should know about him and should be sad to learn of his passing?
"Did you do everything you could to save him?" the new man demanded of Michael.
"We did," Michael answered. "But the spirit had decided . . ."
"But this is J. Edward Palmer! Here in this place be was still alive when you entered . . ."
"No," Michael said. "When I found my way here, the spirit had already gone."
"But this is Palmer! There never was another like him!"
"I know, Ellman. ..."
"Think what he gave us!" Ellman continued.
"I know what he gave us," Michael answered. "But when the spirit had decided . . ." He spread his hands again.
"I am sorry," Ellman said, instantly apologetic. "Perhaps, if we tried again . . ." He looked toward the technicians busy around the beds.
"Sorry. When the spirit has decided, we must not try to interfere," Michael said. While Ellman moved slowly from the room, Michael walked to look down at Cindy.
"I'm all right," Cindy said, in answer to his question. "But, tell me, this place . . ." Trying to decide which question she wanted to ask first, she hesitated.
"Probably there are hundreds of people here in this mountain, all of them in frozen sleep," Michael said. "We will begin awakening all of them as quickly as we can. This is a great discovery! There are enough people here to start a whole new colony, perhaps in South Africa, perhaps in Asia."
"But this was not what I wanted to ask. What I wanted to know was . . ." she gestured toward the bed where Palmer's body lay. "Who was he? I mean, was he really a big man, really important?"
"He was," Michael answered.
"And we didn't guess it! I mean, to us he seemed just like a nobody . . ."Cindy said.
"A common fate of greatness is not to be recognized in its time," Michael answered. "However, I suspect more often than not, the great ones who remain unrecognized want it to be that way."
"But what did he do?" Cindy continued. "Perhaps it was a matter of what he was. As to this, I will ask Ellman to return and talk to you." Michael spoke to a technician, who hastened out the door to return a moment later with Ellman.
"Who was J. Eward Palmer? What did he do? Why was he great?" Ellman repeated the questions, turning them over in his mind as if he wanted to make certain of the words he wanted to use in answering. "First of all, he went every night to a place called Pershing Square in the old city of Los Angeles. In those days, I was very intent on learning. I went there too ..."
"Then you knew Palmer?" Cindy asked. "That I did. And I now consider this to be the greatest stroke of good fortune that ever came my way. I listened to him talk there—or try to talk when the drum and the horn would let him—about a god big enough to make every man a true man—"
"A what?" Cindy said. "Every man a true man . . ."
"That's what he said was true and that's what he meant!" Ellman said, his voice fierce as if he thought she was trying to defy him.
"I meant no harm," Cindy said quickly.
"What else did Palmer say?" Michael suggested. "What else did he talk about?"
"All the time he talked about Agape," Ellman continued. "He said this was the kind of love that includes a sense of wonder, reverence, and awe, and which gives with no thought of return to the giver and with no regard to the merit of the receiver."
Cindy stared in wonder at this Ellman. Awe was in her. From some of the machinery surrounding her, she felt gentle and regular pulsations of . . . love. This, she could not understand.
"I was very young then," Ellman continued. "Many times I jeered at Palmer. Often I kept my ear to my transistor radio instead of listening to him. Later, after he went away—I know now he left to go into the deep-freeze—I ate the free sandwiches and drank the beer his will provided."
Ellman's voice slipped into silence and he seemed to grieve within himself for lost opportunities.
"Go on," Michael urged.
"Much later, I went into the deep-freeze myself. When I awakened there, to find that I and all the others in the unit had been changed by the strange radiations present in the ground at that spot, I remembered J. Edward Palmer and his talk about love. I then realized how important what he had been trying to say really was. So I began building a machine ..."
"We are good at Unit 47 in building machines," Michael said, diffidently. "But tell her. What did your machine do?"
"It . . . It . . ." Ellman was suddenly very shy.
"It's all right to tell her," Michael said, his voice very gentle. "She may not believe you but I am sure she will understand how important this is."
"It generated love," Ellman said.
"What?" Cindy gasped. "A machine that brings love into existence! A machine!"
"That's what I said and that is what I meant!" Ellman answered, his chin rising.
"Show her, Ellman," Michael said.
Thus urged, Ellman brought from around his neck a tiny golden chain. Hanging on it, like a pendant, was a crystal ball. He held it down for Cindy to observe. Inside the outer ball was another, smaller one. Inside the second was a third. Then a fourth, then a fifth, all of them going down in size until looking hurt her eyes.
"This is a machine?" she questioned.
"You can call a printed circuit in a radio set a machine," Ellman answered. "Yes, this is a machine. On each inner surface, love comes into existence. Truly, love comes from one great central source and this little ball only serves as a kind of transformer for the radiation, reducing the speed and the frequency to a point where our brains can detect it. Here, hold it in your fingers."
Wonderingly, she took it. Deep inside her, she felt the pulsations of an energy. "This . . . this is love!" she whispered. "It is also coming from that!" She gestured toward a cone held on a stand beside the bed.
"That cone contains one of these little transformers," Ellman said. "You need love as badly as you need the medication that is destroying in you the virus of the blue death."
"Yes," Cindy whispered. "Yes." She had no question now that this man was telling the truth.
Ellman gestured over his shoulder at the body of Palmer. "He opened my mind to the importance of Agape. I want it clearly understood that he gets all of the credit. I am only a tinkerer, a mechanic . . ."
"If we only had more mechanics like you . . ." Cindy whispered.
Ellman, made very shy at this praise, moved hastily away.
"I agree with you," Michael said to Cindy. "Without those little crystal spheres, those of us who have been through the mutations produced in Unit 47 would be just a bunch of destructive supermen, all brains and no heart. In the long run the universe would have to destroy us, as perhaps ... as perhaps it destroyed the old world that lies behind us."
Michael of the Many Faces shook his head. "It would not matter how high our IQs were, without love, we would be nothing, less than nothing."
"Somebody said something very like that once before," Cindy said.
"Probably," Michael answered, embarrassed. "I did not claim to be original."
Other technicians had entered the room. They wrapped the body of J. Edward Palmer in a plastic cover and laid it on a stretcher for removal. Ellman, very sad, watched this happen. Michael moved to place his hand on Ellman's shoulder.
Knowing they were mourning the death of Palmer, Cindy Northcutt felt protest rising within her.
"But he isn't dead," she tried to say.
As she spoke she was aware that a fragrance had returned to the room. She gasped at it.
"Don't you smell that fragrance?" she demanded. "That's J. Edward Palmer. He's still aware of us! He's sending us a message saying everything is all right with him."
Michael and Ellman stared at her. "I smell that fragrance," they said, in one breath.
"If you could smell love, it would smell like that," Cindy said.
Ellman, his voice suddenly furious, was speaking again. "Why was I sad? Men like him never die, not really. Their spirit goes on with us into the future, into tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."
The technicians had lifted the body on the stretcher and were carrying it away. Falling into step behind them, Ellman's whole manner was no longer that of a mourner. He walked with his chin up, with his head held high, in the manner of a man looking into masses of cloud-clear beauty rising above the tops of far-off mountains, into future worlds waiting for him and for the people of the future to which he belonged.
"Palmer lived to know a promised land existed," Michael said, softly. "But not to enter it."
His eyes went to the doorway through which Ellman had now vanished. "A god big enough to make every man a true man . . ." Michael's voice had a note of wonder in it. He looked down at Cindy again. "There is so much I don't understand . . ."
"You too!" Cindy gasped. "But you were just saying you were one of the supermen of the future! I thought this meant you knew everything!"
"Alas, not so," Michael answered. "To understand one little segment of this fantastically wonderful universe is to see other segments opening up beyond, segments which are not understood." He shook his head.
On another bed, James Crenshaw was creating a commotion as he awakened. At the foot of his bed, the man with the big notebook was watching very eagerly. Michael moved in that direction. Cindy watched.
The technicians would not permit Crenshaw to sit up. Finally he ceased resisting them and became aware of the man standing at the foot of his bed. His gaze went to the book, recognition came into his eyes, and he looked accusingly at the man holding it.
"Where did you get my notebook?" Crenshaw demanded.
The face of the man holding the book glowed. Something wonderful had happened to him. Perhaps this something wonderful was just being addressed by the man lying on the bed!
"I—uh—that is—I mean . . ." The man holding the book stammered badly as he tried to speak.
"That's my notebook," Crenshaw said. "Where did you get it?"
"From an old trunk," the man answered. "I took it into the cold of Unit 47 with me."
"You got it where and you did what with h?" Crenshaw, answering, seemed dazed.
The man repeated what he had said.
"That was my old trunk that I couldn't get out of the pawn shop!" Crenshaw's gasp was clearly audible. Clearly, he was not understanding very well.
Stepping forward, Michael of the Many Faces, tried to explain. He bowed to Crenshaw, a sight which seemed to upset the little biophysicist, turned mathematician.
"With your permission, sir," a wave of Michael's hand indicated the man holding the big notebook, "I would like to introduce Tomas, who is a disciple of yours."
"A disciple of mine! What damn-fool talk is this? Get your hands off of me! Don't try to stop me from getting up!" The last sentences were spoken to the alarmed technicians. In spite of the technicians, who did not dare use real force on him, Crenshaw sat up in bed.
"What is this talk about a disciple?" Crenshaw shouted, glaring at Michael. "Why is everybody calling me sir?"
"Vrrrbrrt!" Michael answered, shaken by these questions.
"I don't understand that talk," Crenshaw answered. He turned his attention to Tomas. "You got my notebook from my old trunk, you say? Did you steal the trunk? What good would the notebook be to you? You couldn't understand it."
While Michael gasped, Tomas answered, speaking very quickly but taking care to keep his voice slow enough so Crenshaw could understand what he was saying.
"One of my biggest problems, sir, is that I don't understand all of the equations in your notebook, sir. Some of them I have grasped, perhaps. But not all, sir, not all! Now that we have found you, I hope, sir ... we all hope, sir . . ." This last was spoken with a quick glance at Michael. "That you will be so kind as to explain your mathematics, sir."
Crenshaw blinked at Tomas. That this was the purest of praise did not seem to occur to the little biophysicist. "Explain my equations?"
"Yes, sir," Tomas said. "Some of them I don't understand, sir. No one understands them, sir. It is that . . . well, I guess we just don't have the mental capacity needed, sir. I hoped . . ."
"We all hope," Michael said.
"Then you do understand some of them?" Crenshaw said, looking at Tomas.
"I think so, sir," Tomas said, doubtfully. "We hope you will check us out on this, so we can be certain we do understand. They are too important for us to miss even the smallest part, sir."
Crenshaw looked at Michael but gestured toward Tomas. "This man . . ."
"Tomas is our greatest mathematician, sir," Michael said, hastily. "He is the genius who developed your equations in such a way that we were able to build the ship that flies the Crenshaw Curves, sir."
"A genius as my disciple!" Crenshaw said.
"He is the best we have," Michael said quickly. "If we had a better mathematician in Unit 47, we would send him to you, sir, to be your disciple. We hope he will be able to grasp at least part of your meaning, sir."
"Ah," Crenshaw said. He looked at Michael, then at Tomas, then back to Michael. "Did you or did you not say that the ship which puffs into existence flies the Crenshaw Curves?"
"That I did," Michael said.
"And he developed my equations enough to make possible the building of that ship?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you claim he needs me, or needs anybody, to explain my mathematics to him?" Crenshaw demanded. "What kind of foolishness is this? And what kind of a fool are you trying to make me out to be?"
All of the many faces of Michael turned slightly red from embarrassment.
Tomas was also looking very uncomfortable. Crenshaw turned his attention to the mathematician. "That ship . . ." he began.
"It is the greatest invention in transportation ever made, sir," Tomas said. "It starts instantly, goes instantly to full speed, comes instantly from full speed to a full stop, sir. This is why it seems to appear and to disappear, sir."
"I know that" Crenshaw said. "All of that was implicit in my equations. But there is one thing I don't know and don't understand at all. Perhaps you will be kind enough to explain it to me."
"I will explain anything I can, sir," Tomas said, doubtfully.
"If you have developed my equations in such a way as to make possible the building of the ship I saw, I want to know why you need me to explain anything to you," Crenshaw said.
The face of Tomas seemed to blur.
"In other words," Crenshaw continued. "You are pulling an old man's leg. You are trying to give me a reason for going on living when there is no reason. You are pretending you need me to help you understand my equations when you already understand them far better than I ever did."
"Not so, sir!" The voice of Tomas rose in a shout. "It is true that I understand them in ways you perhaps did not anticipate, sir, but I do not understand all of them. The parts I do not understand I need you to explain, sir. I am hoping you will stoop to explain."
Crenshaw looked up at Michael. "Is he telling the truth?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," Michael answered. "In part, sir. In another part, sir, it is that he, and I, and all who live in Unit 47, all who are alive in the world today, are trying to do you honor, sir."
"To do me honor?" Crenshaw whispered.
"Yes!" Michael said. "In your mathematics, you laid the foundation for what we have built, sir. For this, we wish to do you honor."
Tomas could contain himself no longer. "It is a deserved and earned honor, sir. If you will permit me the analogy, sir, you lived and worked in darkness. In spite of that darkness, you had the persistence, you had the mental ability, you had the faith, to lay a solid foundation on which we could build! Sir, we live in the light, we have enormously greater mental ability than you had. We have enough light and enough mental ability to understand the really great job you did, sir, and the difficulties you faced in doing it. Not only for this do we do you honor, sir, but also because . . ." Tomas seemed to reach the limit of his ability to express himself.
"Also because we see an even greater light coming to shine in the future, sir," Michael picked up the meaning. "It is our hope that when you have lived in a few years in the radiation that saturates Unit 47, you will have developed enough to help us create this greater light that will shine on some other tomorrow that is coming, sir."
The whole room was silent as Michael finished speaking. As if sensing the importance of this moment, the technicians moved on quiet feet. Crenshaw's gaze went from Michael to Tomas and that man seemed to stop breathing.
"Ah," Crenshaw said. "Uh. That is ... I mean." A frown crossed his face, then was replaced by a shy smile. "Was there actually ... I mean perhaps I did not make everything quite as clear as I should have . . . was there ... I mean . . . was there really some small part of my equations that you perhaps overlooked and failed to understand fully?"
"Yes, sir," Tomas said.
"You have them there in my old notebook?"
"Yes, sir!" Tomas said.
"Would you be so kind as to show to me the parts that seem obscure?" Crenshaw said. "Perhaps if I see them again, I can explain ..."
"Yes, sir!" Tomas said. As if he dared to breathe again, he opened the notebook and laid it on the bed in front of Crenshaw's eyes. The technicians beside the bed looked at Michael for instructions. Furiously he waved at them to go away.
"Yes, yes, son," Crenshaw said to Tomas. "Yes, yes, I see where I was obscure. If you have a pen . . . Ah, thank you. If we continue the development in this way . . ."
The pen slid easily over the paper of the ancient notebook. While the engrossed Tomas was looking as if he dared not breathe again, Michael tiptoed back to stand beside the bed of Cindy Northcutt. He gestured toward Crenshaw and Tomas, now deep in ancient equations that, inexplicably, were also the equations of tomorrow. The head of Crenshaw and the head of Tomas were very close together.
"I give you my word that Tomas is a mathematical genius," Michael spoke to Cindy as if he did not really notice what he was saying. "Yet ... but ... I know that Tomas works with high energy and the fast associational mechanism the radiations in Unit 47 gave to all of us. I know this to be true!" Bewilderment crept into his voice.
"I don't understand what you mean by high energy and fast associational mechanism," Cindy said.
"High mental energy and quickness in organizing facts into concepts," Michael said. He hardly seemed to notice her but went on speaking as if to himself. "Sometimes, in moments of ego-centered delusion, we of Unit 47 like to think of ourselves as the giants of the coming day. And this is true thinking. We are those giants. But what that James Crenshaw did with his equations awes me, bewilders me, shakes me, makes me humble. He had the old, slow brain of Homo sapiens, the old, slow plodding mind that works on one volt, the associational mechanism that creeps from mental point to mental point. Yet with this old, slow, mind, he developed the mathematics of the future and wrote equations that even Tomas cannot grasp!"
Shaking his head, Michael continued. "All I can say is that there must have been a few giants in the old days too, even if nobody recognized them."
He pointed toward Crenshaw and Tomas.
"And there sits one of those giants now, teaching mathematics to a man of the future!"
Smiling, Crenshaw was making rapid motions with the pen as he traced equations on airy spaces in his old notebook.
"And while he was doing his great work, he faced poverty!" Michael said. "Well, that is ended, that is done, forever! Here in our world he will be honored and rewarded."
"He is being rewarded now, I think, all the reward he wants," Cindy said. "A chance to talk about the subject he loves and a bright young mind to listen to him! Would he want more of a reward than this? I think not."
"I agree," Michael said. "But in his time, he was nothing. This thought still shakes me."
"Remember, I come from his time too," Cindy said.
"What was it like, then, that no one noticed . . ." Michael began.
"No one noticed anything, then!" Cindy said. "We were all so busy with our job or our family or our social position or how soon we could get a new car, to notice anything. Then, while we weren't noticing, something happened off-stage. When we looked up, those of us who thought of ourselves as being so unlucky as to have to enter the deep-freeze, the old world had been swept away, all of it except those of us in the deep-freeze."
Her voice shifted and took on a far away note. "And a new world had come into existence. All of this happened when we weren't noticing! And the unlucky ones in the deep-freeze turned out to be the only ones left alive on the world we hadn't really noticed."
"Something like that," Michael said. "To us, too, much of the story was off-stage."
"To you too?" Cindy gasped. "But I thought you knew everything!"
"On the contrary, we know very little. And to us, Unit 41 and J. Edward Palmer and James Crenshaw, were events happening far away, and completely off-stage. Some of us had even begun to believe that Palmer and Crenshaw were legends."
Watching Crenshaw and Tomas talking together, their heads so very close, Cindy Northcutt found that she was wishing she could be a legend too. There was something about the closeness of the two that made her feel very, very lonely. That Crenshaw could be an unknown genius, famous for his work in mathematics rather than in biophysics, she could understand. Wonderful things sometimes came wrapped in poor packages, she knew. The outer side, the exterior surface, of Crenshaw was the rough wrapping of such a package. But where he really lived, on the inner surface, Crenshaw was something far, far different.
But she still felt lonely.
"Tell me about the slow mind and the fast mind," she asked Michael. "And tell me about Unit 47."
Michael tried. Days later, he was still trying. And Cindy Northcutt was still trying to understand.
She understood that the ship that went puff out of and into existence, it seemed, was busy bringing the whole population of Unit 47 here and that Michael's people had instantly organized a gigantic rescue operation for the people of Unit 41. She knew that all the sleepers would be awakened and would be taken in what she thought of as the magic ship back to Unit 47.
But what was at Unit 47?
Again and again, Michael explained to her what was there.
"Unit 47 was located in an old copper mine in Arizona. Present there was a radiation . . ."
"A what?" Cindy asked.
"A radiation ... a wave . . . like radio-waves, like television, like light that acts both as a wave form and as particles—"
"One thing can be two different things?"
"Yes," Michael answered. "Only, unlike light, you could not and cannot see this radiation with the eyes. Nor could you feel it or smell it. Only very recently have we been able to build an instrument which reveals it. This radiation moves much farther than light and has great power in it. It impacts our brain cells, all of our nervous system, in fact, and gives them the energy to move faster, so that mentally we go at a greater speed, we understand quicker and better."
"Do you mean it upsets the emotions?" Cindy asked.
"Quite the contrary. It gives us really great control over our emotions so that they never run away with us. This is of the greatest importance. Between the stabilizing effect of this radiation, and the radiation flowing from the little nest of crystal balls that Ellman showed you, each of us is able to remain at all times in an emotional state similar to that of a lover going to meet his beloved."
"Oh!" Cindy said, suddenly wide-eyed.
"Ah!" Michael said. At last he had found an experience common to both and could communicate. "But in our case, the love flows not to a woman but to all of this fantastically wonderful universe."
"Uh," Cindy said.
At this point, Crenshaw entered the conversation, claiming that Michael was talking about mutations produced in the adults of Unit 47. "Such mutations are a result of heavy radiation such as those from radium or from cosmic rays or from fallout impacting a fertilized ovum. This takes place while the baby is still in the womb. Most mutations are harmful. Now and then, however, one is beneficial and is retained by the individual."
"Vrrrt!" Michael answered, then hastily dropped back to the old, slow language that Cindy and Crenshaw understood. "It is true, sir, that mutations take place as you indicate. But this radiation at Unit 47 brings the nervous system to life, strengthening it so that higher, more powerful, and more subtle energies can flow over it."
"But . . ." Crenshaw protested.
"If you please, sir," Tomas said quickly, wishing to save his teacher possible embarrassment. "This is Michael's field, sir. Michael is really the best specialist we have in the field, sir."
"Um," Crenshaw said. "Umh! Then I guess my time to listen and to learn has come." He smiled at Michael.
"Er-uh," Michael coughed in embarrassment. "You are very kind, sir. I know you are concerned about the coincidence involved in the location of Unit 47 in the one place on Earth where this frequency existed. This is a question that has made us all pause to think, sir. Why would the very last deep-freeze unit ever built, why would it be located in the one spot on Earth where existed an unknown frequency that produced supermen? Was the location of Unit 47 in this place the last desperate hope of something?"
"Well . . ." Crenshaw said, as Michael fell silent. He looked up at Tomas. "It was also very strange that Tomas should find my old trunk and my old notebook . . ."
"I have often had the impression that some of these coincidences are . . . well, that they are planned," Michael said, slowly.
"By what?" Crenshaw demanded.
"By I don't know what," Michael answered. "Something that is never seen or heard but is sometimes felt! Perhaps something that functions on an inner surface."
"Ah!" Crenshaw said, and was silent.
As if by mutual consent, this subject was dropped. Cindy wanted to know more about Unit 47. "Who awakened you?" she asked.
"We awakened ourselves. When this radiation had produced sufficient change in us, we began to awaken spontaneously."
"And you found you had become smarter and could love better?" Cindy asked.
"I would not put it so crudely," Michael answered. "At first, we only had the ability to think faster. Then Ellman, remembering Palmer, invented the little balls which generate the higher love. These three must go together, higher energy, higher mental function, and the higher love."
"But there is so much I don't understand," Cindy protested.
"Patience, Mrs. Northcutt," Michael answered.
"Such as when I am going to be allowed out of this bed? I'm not sick any longer."
"Again, patience, Mrs. Northcutt," Michael exited.
Left to her own thinking, Cindy tried to understand. Michael's words had given her tantalizing glimpses of actions off-stage and far away, as remote as the movements of the stars in their courses, but actions to which she reacted unknowingly, actions which had perhaps greatly influenced her life. She knew she had gone into the deep-freeze in an effort to save her own life. This effort had been her own, she alone had made the decision. Yet once she had made this decision, had something off-stage used her to help accomplish some vaster, some greater purpose of which she was totally unaware? She did not know the answer to this question but just the thought sent cold chills up her spine. Did something that always remained off-stage sometimes manipulate men, women, children, and events in such a way that they served the future without knowing they were in such service? Those in the deep-freeze had lived. All, or almost all other humans, had died. Had something inspired the construction of the deep-freeze units in an effort to save the seed of what was to become a new race? Again cold winds blew up her spine.
Cindy Northcutt had no answer to these questions. All she knew for certain was that she was lonely. A hunger was in her for people and for a situation about which she would not permit herself to think. Watching what was happening in the big corridor outside, she knew that many of the sleepers in Unit 41 had been awakened and had already left, going to Unit 47 to submit themselves first to the strange radiation that existed in that spot, going on from there eventually to form new colonies on the Earth. Michael explained that she could go with these people to Unit 47, as soon as the technicians felt it was wise to move her. Yes, a mate could be found for her. Or she could find him for herself. Yes, she could have children. At this thought, her heart leaped, then subsided.
Sensing her feelings, Michael asked. "But don't you want to live in this new world?"
Her answer was to burst into tears. Failing to understand this strange reaction, Michael went sadly away.
From her bed, she watched Roland Green and the child, Mary Jones, leave Unit 41. With the child riding on the shoulders of the bearded man, they came to tell her goodbye.
"We're going to ride in the ship that goes puff," the child explained. "When are you coming too, Aunt Cindy?"
"I don't know," she answered, tears in her eyes.
Then Crenshaw was declared fit to move. The little bio-physicist came to tell her goodbye too. Followed by Tomas, he went out the door. Like the child and the bearded man, he was going to ride in the ship that went puff but because that ship rode on something called the Crenshaw Curves, Crenshaw walked very tall and very straight when he went away. Or he was standing very straight and for this reason he looked taller. Or was it that James Crenshaw had giant blood in him and for this reason he had already grown taller as he moved toward the future his mathematics had helped create?
She had no giant blood in her and had helped create no future, Cindy thought bitterly. A housewife and mother was all she had ever been, and though her kids had been healthy and her husband had rarely complained, she had not thought she had been really expert at either role. Was there a place for such as her in this wonderful new world that was coming into existence?
Michael of the Many Faces said there was, indeed.
"Good mothers don't grow on every tree," Michael told her.
Again, she burst into tears.
"We have many fine men who need mates," Michael said.
She screamed at him to go away, she swore at him, she jerked objects from the table beside her bed and threw them at him. The alarmed technicians had to restrain her.
Michael went away, hastily.
Then came the day when she and her bed were both moved, this without warning and without asking her permission into the wide corridor off of which the alcoves containing sleepers had opened. All empty now, the alcoves were. All the sleepers had gone to Unit 47. Except Cindy.
The technicians set her bed so that her head was against the wall. She asked them about Michael, who was absent, and they brrrped at her in their speed talk in an answer she could not understand.
As she lay in the bed, wondering what was to happen, she noticed that the long corridor was beginning to fill with men and women from Unit 47. Assembling quietly, they stood in small groups along the walls, and talked to each other in low, fast voices she could barely hear and could not understand at all. Suddenly, as if at some signal, the voices were quiet.
"What's going on here?" Cindy asked.
"Thrrrt, Mrs. Northcutt!" a technician answered, reprovingly.
"What does that mean?" she demanded.
"It—means—that—something—is—about—to happen." The technician slowed his voice so she could understand him. "And—will—you—kindly—shut—up—and—let—it—happen!"
"But what . . ."
"Thrrrrr!"
Now, far down the corridor but coming closer as she watched, she saw figures moving, two tall men. One tall man carried a small package. The second tall man had a child by each hand. As she stared at them, wondering what this meant, she saw that the man who was leading the two children was Michael.
"Children here?" she questioned.
"Trrrt!"
"I know that means for me to shut up. But I'm not going to do it." Then, remembering that Mary Jones had been here, she was silent. Perhaps someone else had sent children here rather than let them die.
As they came closer she looked again at the man carrying the package. About the way he walked, about the way his shoulders were set, was something vaguely familiar.
Cindy Northcutt sat up in bed.
"Don't trrrrt at me," she cried out. "I know that man with the package!"
As she was speaking, she was getting out of bed. To her surprise, no technician was moving to restrain her. It was as if they knew that no restraint was possible at this moment.
"That man with the package, that's Tom Northcutt!" she shouted at the technicians. "That's my husband. And that Michael has got our two kids with him. And I'm . . . I'm going to them. Don't any of you try to stop me!"
How this had happened, what wonder was here, what miracle had brought this about, she did not know, and at this moment, she did not care. Her kids here! Her husband here! Standing on her bare feet outside the bed, she shouted defiance at the technicians. Oddly, not a one of them moved to restrain her. Instead, they acted as if this defiance was what they had expected.
Wearing a wrapper which came to her bottom but which left her more naked than covered—for this she cared nothing, either—in her bare feet, with her arms outstretched as though it had been far too long a time since they had encircled the ones she loved, she ran along the corridor. In her was such tumultuous wonder as she had never known and had never expected to know.
Tom and the kids saw her at the same time. The kids broke free of Michael to come running toward her, so that they all met at the same time. She picked up a child in each arm and as she was hugging and kissing them, she was aware that Tom had picked up all three of them, so she began kissing him as he was hugging and kissing her. Then he set her on her feet and stood to look at her, just to look, as if she was the happiest sight he had ever known. In the same way, she looked at him.
All along both sides of the wide corridor the men and the women of Unit 47 watched in approval.
"We thought this would be a happy moment for you," Michael said. "So we assembled to share it with you."
"That's wonderful of you. I'm so glad . . ." Then the strangeness of it all came over her and she clutched at Tom and at Kathy and at Jimmy to make certain they were not clever tricks contrived by these giants of the future with the purpose of making her happy.
"We're real," Tom said.
"But . . ." Again the strangeness was on her. "You're here! Why? How?" She looked at Michael. "Were they here in Unit 41 all the time?"
"They were," Michael answered. "They could not be in the same alcove with you but they could be in the same unit. They entered Unit 41 to be with you when you awakened."
"But why?"
"For one reason, because I couldn't stand watching our two kids pine away and die because they had lost their mother," Tom answered.
"And you put them and you into the cold?"
"Yes," Tom answered. "And I had to bribe a lot of people to do it. But that wasn't the only reason."
"I know," Cindy glowed inside. "You and the kids love me. That was your best reason."
"You can say that again," Tom Northcutt answered- "But that isn't all, either."
"No? What . . ." She realized again that Tom was clutching a small package.
"To bring this," he said. "Within six months after you had gone into the cold a cure for leukemia seven was discovered. We went into the freeze to bring this cure to you, so you could have it when you awakened."
He handed the package to her. Wonder—because only love would have taken such great risks to bring this gift to her— she took the package. But there was concern in heir too. "Leukemia seven? But I found out that I had caused the disease myself. I also cured it in the same way. This cure you have brought . . ." She turned to Michael for an explanation.
"It is true that you caused the disease yourself. It is also true that you cured yourself by your own mental-emotional action. As to what is in that package, it is fraud. Pure and simple fraud."
"Fraud?" Tom shouted. "Why didn't you tell me this?"
"Because you would not have believed me. And as long as you had any hope that the package you had risked so much to bring to the woman you loved had a cure for a disease you thought she still had, you would have fought me to the death rather than give it up," Michael said. "It was best to Jet you keep the fraudulent cure until you could see Cindy well and happy. Then you could give it up yourself."
"A fraud!" Tom's face reddened. "I was taken in by a charlatan, by a crook . . ." His arm came up. The package flew through the air. Along the wall watching people ducked. Striking the stone, the package tinkled as it fell to the floor. "Damn that crook . . ."Tom began.
"But he wasn't a crook. Or not all a crook!" Cindy protested. Thoughts she could hardly recognize as her own were rising in her. Perhaps, when they were very, very happy, all people thought this way. Along with the new thought she was aware of an aroma, of a fragrance. "Listen, everybody!"
Elation was suddenly in Cindy Northcutt, elation which she wished to share. "A man was here, you all know him, who said his god was big enough to make every man a true man, given a little time. I thought this man was crazy. But he knew exactly what he was talking about!"
"I'm the one who is thinking you are crazy!" Tom said. "That crook who sold me a fake medicine a true man?"
"Yes," Cindy said. "In a way none of us ever dreamed. Didn't he bring you and the kids here to me? Without thinking you had a way to help me, you would never have come, would you? Now be honest, Tom Northcutt!"
"Well, the cure was the clincher in our decision to go into the freeze," Tom answered.
"Then that crook was used in a way he did not understand to make you and me and the kids very, very happy," Cindy said, triumphantly. "In this sense, he became a true man without ever knowing it, just like Palmer said."
As she finished, she was aware that Tom and Michael were silent. Now she realized that everyone in the wide corridor was also silent. Even the kids were quiet.
"What's that good smell, mommy?" Kathy asked, beside her.
As the child spoke, the fragrance seemed to grow stronger and to become a blend of all the springtimes that had ever passed over Planet Earth.
"That's Palmer!" Cindy whispered. "He's sending back to us one meaning of Agape. This is his way of telling us again about a god big enough to make every man a true man."
She looked at Michael but the man of the future seemed not to see her. Instead, Michael seemed to be looking at wonders in some other world, perhaps at cloud mass piled on top of cloud. mass in some future world which now was dream but which some day would be real.
Slowly, the fragrance vanished. Cindy looked again at Michael. This time he saw her.
"A day or two ago you said something about . . ." She blushed as confusion rose in her.
"I remember mentioning that life in Unit 47 is very pleasant," Michael said, gravely.
"Then reserve a place for Tom and me and the kids," Cindy said.
"I have already done that, Mrs. Northcutt," Michael answered.
Concern showed in her face as doubt rose in her mind. "That is, if I'm strong enough . . ." She stopped in confusion.
"If you are strong enough to lose a race to the bedroom?" Michael asked, his face grave and blank. "The answer is, Yes, Mrs. Northcutt. You are strong enough for this activity. I made certain of this before I permitted this meeting."
"You made certain?" Cindy gasped. She felt her face begin to turn red in embarrassment. "How did you know what 1 was thinking?"
"Phrrrt!" Michael answered.
"I think that phrrrt means he read the answer in your mind," Tom said, laughing. "For the past two or three minutes, I've been reading it clear enough myself. So any time you are ready to start running, Mrs Northcutt ..."
She blushed furiously, then burst into happy laughter. All along the corridor the men and the women of Unit 47 laughed with her, happy that she was happy, and happy for another reason too.
"That is their way of saying that they also enjoy running this kind of a race," Michael said, gently.
Looking at him, she saw that all of the faces of this enigmatical man of the future were expressing happiness.
Now that the poles of the threatened planet had been levered back into place, the genii of the inner surfaces felt he could rest. Really rest, that is. In the past, the short siestas he had taken had always been interrupted by clamor from the outer surfaces, where trouble always seemed to rule.
He was well-entitled to his rest, the genii felt. It had been very hard work to give key humans the right push at just exactly the right time so they would jump in the right direction, and after they had jumped, to make them think they had decided the whole matter themselves, and to feed them ideas and to make them think they had thought up these ideas with their own dull minds. Nor had it been easy to make certain that old trunks containing important notebooks got into the right hands and that charlatans with fake cures would find just the right victim to defraud and that executives deciding where to locate what they did not know was the last deep-freeze unit to be built would select the one spot on earth that went zzzzzz zzzzz zzzzz. As for a certain cloud of viruses that had come in from outer space and had found a race that had no immunity to them, they had died with their victims and had gotten exactly what they deserved, the genii felt.
Out of all these troubles, as was his custom, the genii had been able to make much fine magic and to secure really very constructive results. From what he had seen of the giants of the future who had come into existence where the earth went zzzzz zzzzz zzz . . . well, he rather liked them. They got things done! And they weren't always running back to him asking permission to take action. They went ahead without asking! True, they would get many bumps on the head in this way, but they would also become self-reliant individuals, which was what the genii really liked.
Perhaps sometime he would have to prod them a little with his ancient technique of the big lie and would again have to make much about how good things were up ahead. But not as much as in the past. No! These men of the future, these giants who had learned how to blend love and wisdom, really looked very competent. They even looked as if some day they might bring to reality one of the biggest lies the genii had ever told, the one about truths to be held self-evident. He had told them to hold these truths to be self-evident because he had known that they could not be demonstrated or proved in any way and hence they were not really true, as any idiot who thought about them would instantly realize. And that big whopper about certain inalienable rights with which their creator had endowed all men—which meant that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were always in danger of being alienated by being taken for granted—perhaps these giants would even make these big lies come true, on some far-off future world!
What was the difference between the big lie and the big dream? Neither was true. But men thought one to be impossible, and hence a lie, while the second might come true, and hence was a beautiful dream.
When love and wisdom went hand in hand, and the high energy and the fast mind worked with love as a third partner, then the genii knew his big lies were in the process of becoming big dreams and were in the hands of men competent to make them come true. And while supermen took over his job, an over-worked genii of the inner surfaces could get a little well-deserved rest.