Masterpieces Page 5

  “I have been making meaningless tinkering motions,” said Cornelius, “but what I waited for was a highly emotional moment, a time when I can be sure Anglesey’s entire attention will be focused on Joe. This business tomorrow is exactly what I need.”

  “Why?”

  “You see, I have pretty well convinced myself that the trouble in the machine is psychological, not physical. I think that for some reason, buried in his subconscious, Anglesey doesn’t want to experience Jupiter. A conflict of that type might well set a psionic amplifier circuit oscillating.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Viken rubbed his chin. “Could be. Lately Ed has been changing more and more. When he first came here, he was peppery enough, and he would at least play an occasional game of poker. Now he’s pulled so far into his shell you can’t even see him. I never thought of it before, but . . . yes, by God, Jupiter must be having some effect on him.”

  “Hm-m-m,” nodded Cornelius. He did not elaborate: did not, for instance, mention that one altogether uncharacteristic episode when Anglesey had tried to describe what it was like to be a Jovian.

  “Of course,” said Viken thoughtfully, “the previous men were not affected especially. Nor was Ed at first, while he was still controlling lower-type pseudos. It’s only since Joe went down to the surface that he’s become so different.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Cornelius hastily. “I’ve learned that much. But enough shop talk—”

  “No. Wait a minute.” Viken spoke in a low, hurried tone, looking past him. “For the first time, I’m starting to think clearly about this . . . never really stopped to analyze it before, just accepted a bad situation. There is something peculiar about Joe. It can’t very well involve his physical structure, or the environment, because lower forms didn’t give this trouble. Could it be the fact that—Joe is the first puppet in all history with a potentially human intelligence?”

  “We speculate in a vacuum,” said Cornelius. “Tomorrow, maybe, I can tell you. Now I know nothing.”

  Viken sat up straight. His pale eyes focused on the other man and stayed there, unblinking. “One minute,” he said.

  “Yes?” Cornelius shifted, half rising. “Quickly, please. It is past my bedtime.”

  “You know a good deal more than you’ve admitted,” said Viken. “Don’t you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You aren’t the most gifted liar in the universe. And then—you argued very strongly for Anglesey’s scheme, this sending down the other pseudos. More strongly than a newcomer should.”

  “I told you, I want his attention focused elsewhere when—”

  “Do you want it that badly?” snapped Viken.

  Cornelius was still for a minute. Then he sighed and leaned back.

  “All right,” he said. “I shall have to trust your discretion. I wasn’t sure, you see, how any of you old-time station personnel would react. So I didn’t want to blabber out my speculations, which may be wrong. The confirmed facts, yes, I will tell them; but I don’t wish to attack a man’s religion with a mere theory.”

  Viken scowled. “What the devil do you mean?”

  Cornelius puffed hard on his cigar; its tip waxed and waned like a miniature red demon star. “This Jupiter V is more than a research station,” he said gently. “It is a way of life, is it not? No one would come here for even one hitch unless the work was important to him. Those who reenlist, they must find something in the work, something which Earth with all her riches cannot offer them. No?”

  “Yes,” answered Viken. It was almost a whisper. “I didn’t think you would understand so well. But what of it?”

  “Well, I don’t want to tell you, unless I can prove it, that maybe this has all gone for nothing. Maybe you have wasted your lives and a lot of money and will have to pack up and go home.”

  Viken’s long face did not flicker a muscle. It seemed to have congealed. But he said calmly enough: “Why?”

  “Consider Joe,” said Cornelius. “His brain has as much capacity as any adult human’s. It has been recording every sense datum that came to it, from the moment of ‘birth’—making a record in itself, in its own cells, not merely in Anglesey’s physical memory bank up here. Also, you know, a thought is a sense datum too. And thoughts are not separated into neat little railway tracks; they form a continuous field. Every time Anglesey is in rapport with Joe, and thinks, the thought goes through Joe’s synapses as well as his own—and every thought carries its own associations, and every associated memory is recorded. Like if Joe is building a hut, the shape of the logs might remind Anglesey of some geometric figure, which in turn would remind him of the Pythagorean theorem—”

  “I get the idea,” said Viken in a cautious way. “Given time, Joe’s brain will have stored everything that ever was in Ed’s.”

  “Correct. Now a functioning nervous system with an engrammatic pattern of experience—in this case, a nonhuman nervous system—isn’t that a pretty good definition of a personality?”

  “I suppose so—Good Lord!” Viken jumped. “You mean Joe is—taking over?”

  “In a way. A subtle, automatic, unconscious way.” Cornelius drew a deep breath and plunged into it. “The pseudojovian is so nearly perfect a life form: your biologists engineered into it all the experiences gained from nature’s mistakes in designing us. At first, Joe was only a remote-controlled biological machine. Then Anglesey and Joe became two facets of a single personality. Then, oh, very slowly, the stronger, healthier body . . . more amplitude to its thoughts . . . do you see? Joe is becoming the dominant side. Like this business of sending down the other pseudos—Anglesey only thinks he has logical reasons for wanting it done. Actually, his ‘reasons’ are mere rationalizations for the instinctive desires of the Joe-facet.

  “Anglesey’s subconscious must comprehend the situation, in a dim reactive way; it must feel his human ego gradually being submerged by the steamroller force of Joe’s instincts and Joe’s wishes. It tries to defend its own identity, and is swatted down by the superior force of Joe’s own nascent subconscious.

  “I put it crudely,” he finished in an apologetic tone, “but it will account for that oscillation in the K-tubes.”

  Viken nodded slowly, like an old man. “Yes, I see it,” he answered. “The alien environment down there . . . the different brain structure . . . good God! Ed’s being swallowed up in Joe! The puppet master is becoming the puppet!” He looked ill.

  “Only speculation on my part,” said Cornelius. All at once, he felt very tired. It was not pleasant to do this to Viken, whom he liked. “But you see the dilemma, no? If I am right, then any esman will gradually become a Jovian—a monster with two bodies, of which the human body is the unimportant auxiliary one. This means no esman will ever agree to control a pseudo—therefore the end of your project.”

  He stood up. “I’m sorry, Arne. You made me tell you what I think, and now you will lie awake worrying, and I am quite wrong and you worry for nothing.”

  “It’s all right,” mumbled Viken. “Maybe you’re not wrong.”

  “I don’t know.” Cornelius drifted toward the door. “I am going to try to find some answers tomorrow. Good night.”

  THE MOON-SHAKING THUNDER of the rockets, crash, crash, crash, leaping from their cradles, was long past. Now the fleet glided on metal wings, with straining secondary ramjets, through the rage of the Jovian sky.

  As Cornelius opened the control-room door, he looked at his telltale board. Elsewhere a voice tolled the word to all the stations, one ship wrecked, two ships wrecked, but Anglesey would let no sound enter his presence when he wore the helmet. An obliging technician had haywired a panel of fifteen red and fifteen blue lights above Cornelius’ esprojector, to keep him informed, too. Ostensibly, of course, they were only there for Anglesey’s benefit, though the esman had insisted he wouldn’t be looking at them.

  Four of the red bulbs were dark and thus four blue ones would not shine for a safe landing. A whirlwind, a thunderbolt, a floati
ng ice meteor, a flock of mantalike birds with flesh as dense and hard as iron—there could be a hundred things which had crumpled four ships and tossed them tattered across the poison forests.

  Four ships, hell! Think of four living creatures, with an excellence of brain to rival your own, damned first to years in unconscious night and then, never awakening save for one uncomprehending instant, dashed in bloody splinters against an ice mountain. The wasteful callousness of it was a cold knot in Cornelius’ belly. It had to be done, no doubt, if there was to be any thinking life on Jupiter at all; but then let it be done quickly and minimally, he thought, so the next generation could be begotten by love and not by machines!

  He closed the door behind him and waited for a breathless moment. Anglesey was a wheelchair and a coppery curve of helmet, facing the opposite wall. No movement, no awareness whatsoever. Good!

  It would be awkward, perhaps ruinous, if Anglesey learned of this most intimate peering. But he needn’t, ever. He was blindfolded and ear-plugged by his own concentration.

  Nevertheless, the psionicist moved his bulky form with care, across the room to the new esprojector. He did not much like his snooper’s role; he would not have assumed it at all if he had seen any other hope. But neither did it make him feel especially guilty. If what he suspected was true, then Anglesey was all unawares being twisted into something not human; to spy on him might be to save him.

  Gently, Cornelius activated the meters and started his tubes warming up. The oscilloscope built into Anglesey’s machine gave him the other man’s exact alpha rhythm, his basic biological clock. First you adjusted to that, then you discovered the subtler elements by feel, and when your set was fully in phase you could probe undetected and—

  Find out what was wrong. Read Anglesey’s tortured subconscious and see what there was on Jupiter that both drew and terrified him.

  Five ships wrecked.

  But it must be very nearly time for them to land. Maybe only five would be lost in all. Maybe ten would get through. Ten comrades for—Joe?

  Cornelius sighed. He looked at the cripple, seated blind and deaf to the human world which had crippled him, and felt a pity and an anger. It wasn’t fair, none of it was.

  Not even to Joe. Joe wasn’t any kind of soul-eating devil. He did not even realize, as yet, that he was Joe, that Anglesey was becoming a mere appendage. He hadn’t asked to be created, and to withdraw his human counterpart from him would be very likely to destroy him.

  Somehow, there were always penalties for everybody, when men exceeded the decent limits.

  Cornelius swore at him, voicelessly. Work to do. He sat down and fitted the helmet on his own head. The carrier wave made a faint pulse, inaudible, the trembling of neurones low in his awareness. You couldn’t describe it.

  Reaching up, he turned to Anglesey’s alpha. His own had a somewhat lower frequency. It was necessary to carry the signals through a heterodyning process. Still no reception . . . well, of course, he had to find the exact wave form, timbre was as basic to thought as to music. He adjusted the dials, slowly, with enormous care.

  Something flashed through his consciousness, a vision of clouds rolled in a violet-red sky, a wind that galloped across horizonless immensity—he lost it. His fingers shook as he turned back.

  The psibeam between Joe and Anglesey broadened. It took Cornelius into the circuit. He looked through Joe’s eyes, he stood on a hill and stared into the sky above the ice mountains, straining for sign of the first rocket; and simultaneously, he was still Jan Cornelius, blurrily seeing the meters, probing about for emotions, symbols, any key to the locked terror in Anglesey’s soul.

  The terror rose up and struck him in the face.

  PSIONIC DETECTION IS not a matter of passive listening in. Much as a radio receiver is necessarily also a weak transmitter, the nervous system in resonance with a source of psionic-spectrum energy is itself emitting. Normally, of course, this effect is unimportant; but when you pass the impulses, either way, through a set of heterodyning and amplifying units, with a high negative feedback—

  In the early days, psionic psychotherapy vitiated itself because the amplified thoughts of one man, entering the brain of another, would combine with the latter’s own neural cycles according to the ordinary vector laws. The result was that both men felt the new beat frequencies as a nightmarish fluttering of their very thoughts. An analyst, trained into self-control, could ignore it; his patient could not, and reacted violently.

  But eventually the basic human wave-timbres were measured, and psionic therapy resumed. The modern esprojector analyzed an incoming signal and shifted its characteristics over to the “listener’s” pattern. The really different pulses of the transmitting brain, those which could not possibly be mapped onto the pattern of the receiving neurones—as an exponential signal cannot very practicably be mapped onto a sinusoid—those were filtered out.

  Thus compensated, the other thought could be apprehended as comfortably as one’s own. If the patient were on a psibeam circuit, a skilled operator could tune in without the patient being necessarily aware of it. The operator could neither probe the other man’s thoughts or implant thoughts of his own.

  Cornelius’ plan, an obvious one to any psionicist, had depended on this. He would receive from an unwitting Anglesey-Joe. If his theory were right, and the esman’s personality was being distorted into that of a monster—his thinking would be too alien to come through the filters. Cornelius would receive spottily or not at all. If his theory was wrong, and Anglesey was still Anglesey, he would receive only a normal human stream-of-consciousness, and could probe for other trouble-making factors.

  His brain roared!

  What’s happening to me?

  For a moment, the interference which turned his thoughts to saw-toothed gibberish struck him down with panic. He gulped for breath, there in the Jovian wind, and his dreadful dogs sensed the alienness in him and whined.

  Then, recognition, remembrance, and a blaze of anger so great that it left no room for fear. Joe filled his lungs and shouted it aloud, the hillside boomed with echoes:

  “Get out of my mind!”

  He felt Cornelius spiral down toward unconsciousness. The overwhelming force of his own mental blow had been too much. He laughed, it was more like a snarl, and eased the pressure.

  Above him, between thunderous clouds, winked the first thin descending rocket flare.

  Cornelius’ mind groped back toward the light. It broke a watery surface, the man’s mouth snapped after air, and his hands reached for the dials, to turn his machine off and escape.

  “Not so fast, you.” Grimly, Joe drove home a command that locked Cornelius’ muscles rigid. “I want to know the meaning of this. Hold still and let me look!” He smashed home an impulse which could be rendered, perhaps, as an incandescent question mark. Remembrance exploded in shards through the psionicist’s forebrain.

  “So. That’s all there is? You thought I was afraid to come down here and be Joe, and wanted to know why? But I told you I wasn’t!”

  I should have believed—whispered Cornelius.

  “Well, get out of the circuit, then.” Joe continued growling it vocally. “And don’t ever come back in the control room, understand? K-tubes or no, I don’t want to see you again. And I may be a cripple, but I can still take you apart cell by cell. Now—sign off—leave me alone. The first ship will be landing in minutes.”

  You a cripple . . . you, Joe-Anglesey?

  “What?” The great gray being on the hill lifted his barbaric head as if to sudden trumpets. “What do you mean?”

  Don’t you understand? said the weak, dragging thought. You know how the esprojector works. You know I could have probed Anglesey’s mind in Anglesey’s brain without making enough interference to be noticed. And I could not have probed a wholly nonhuman mind at all, nor could it have been aware of me. The filters would not have passed such a signal. Yet you felt me in the first fractional second. It can only mean a human mind in a non
human brain.

  You are not the half-corpse on Jupiter V any longer. You’re Joe—Joe-Anglesey.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Joe. “You’re right.”

  He turned Anglesey off, kicked Cornelius out of his mind with a single brutal impulse, and ran down the hill to meet the spaceship.

  Cornelius woke up minutes afterwards. His skull felt ready to split apart. He groped for the main switch before him, clashed it down, ripped the helmet off his head and threw it clanging on the floor. But it took a little while to gather the strength to do the same for Anglesey. The other man was not able to do anything for himself.

  THEY SAT OUTSIDE sickbay and waited. It was a harshly lit barrenness of metal and plastic, smelling of antiseptics: down near the heart of the satellite, with miles of rock to hide the terrible face of Jupiter.

  Only Viken and Cornelius were in that cramped little room. The rest of the station went about its business mechanically, filling in the time till it could learn what had happened. Beyond the door, three biotechnicians, who were also the station’s medical staff, fought with death’s angel for the thing which had been Edward Anglesey.

  “Nine ships got down,” said Viken dully. “Two males, seven females. It’s enough to start a colony.”

  “It would be genetically desirable to have more,” pointed out Cornelius. He kept his own voice low, in spite of its underlying cheerfulness. There was a certain awesome quality to all this.

  “I still don’t understand,” said Viken.

  “Oh; it’s clear enough—now. I should have guessed it before, maybe. We had all the facts, it was only that we couldn’t make the simple, obvious interpretation of them. No, we had to conjure up Frankenstein’s monster.”

  “Well,” Viken’s words grated, “we have played Frankenstein, haven’t we? Ed is dying in there.”

  “It depends on how you define death.” Cornelius drew hard on his cigar, needing anything that might steady him. His tone grew purposely dry of emotion: