Lynne disliked the man from Mars
on sight. Yet drawn by forces
beyond her control she let him
carry her off to the Red Planet.
_A new magazine should bring a new name to science fiction--and
in this very novel and moving story we believe we are launching a
career that will help make 1953 memorable._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Universe June-July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Lynne Fenlay had had a few headaches in the course of her twenty-four
years. But she had never had a headache like this.
There had been one as a result of her first field-hockey practice
at the seminar, when she was twelve and the hard rubber ball caught
her squarely above the left eye. There had been another, five years
later, when she had used a guided trip to Manhattan during the
Christmas holidays to experiment with a bottle of crême de menthe in
the unaccustomed solitude of a hotel room. There had been a third as
the result of overwork, while she was adjusting to her job with the
group-machine.
Each of them had been the result of an easily discovered cause. This
headache had come out of nowhere, for no perceptible reason. It showed
no signs of going away. Lynne had visited a health-check booth as soon
as she could find the time after the discomfort became noticeable.
The stamped response on the card had been as disconcerting as it was
vague--_Psychosomatic_.
Lynne looked across the neoplast tabletop at Ray Cornell and wondered
with mild malevolence if her fiancé could be responsible for her
discomfort. His spoonful of Helthplankton halfway to his mouth, Ray
was smiling at something Janet Downes had said. In her self-absorption
Lynne had not heard Janet's remark. Knowing Janet as she did, however,
she was certain it had undertones of sex.
With his fair height and breadth of shoulder, his tanned good-looking
features beneath short-cropped light hair, Ray wore all the outward
trademarks of a twelfth-century Viking chief or a twentieth-century
football hero. But inside, Lynne thought, he was a Mickey Mouse. His
very gentleness, his willingness to adjust, made him easily led.
Lynne forced herself to down another spoonful of Helthplankton and
thought it tasted exactly like what it was--an artificial compound
composed of sea-creatures, doctored up to taste like cereal.
Mother Weedon looked down at her from the head of the table and said,
"What's the matter, Lynne--don't you feel well?"
"I'm all right, Mother Weedon," she said. She felt a pang of fear that
stirred the discomfort between her temples. If she were really sick,
mentally or physically, Mother Weedon might recommend that she be
dropped from the team. After therapy she would be reassigned to some
other group--and the thought was insupportable.
"Don't worry about our Lynne." Janet's tone bore a basis of mockery.
"She has the stamina of a Messalina."
Damn Janet! Lynne regarded the other third of the team with
resentment. Trust her to bring a name like Messalina into it. Even Ray
caught the implied meaning and blushed beneath his tan. Mother Weedon
looked at Lynne suspiciously.
"Better take things a bit easier," Mother Weedon suggested tolerantly.
"After all, the team comes first."
"I know," Lynne said listlessly. She pushed her food away from her and
waited sullenly while the others finished theirs. Unable to face the
possibility of mental illness, she concentrated on Janet, wondered what
the girl was trying to do.
There was always danger of conflict, she supposed, when two young
women and a young man were set up as a team. Usually the members were
balanced the other way or were all of one sex. But mentally at any rate
Lynne and Janet meshed perfectly with Ray. So they had been assigned
to live and work together on the group-machine under Mother Weedon's
watchful eye. They had been together now for eleven months.
The trouble with Janet, Lynne thought, was that she wasn't the sort of
girl who registered on men at first sight. She was tall, her lack of
curves concealed by astute willowiness of movement, her half-homely
face given second-glance allure by a deliberately and suggestively
functional use of lips and eyes. Janet was competitively sexy.
Lynne, who was as casually aware of her own blond loveliness as any
well-conditioned and comely young woman, had not considered Janet
seriously as a rival when she had fallen in love with Ray Cornell. Now,
rubbed almost raw by the discomfort of her headache, Lynne decided she
had underrated Janet. She was either going to have to get Ray back in
line or turn him over to the other third of their team. Either way
promised complications for the future....
The three of them walked the thousand meters to the brain-station,
avoiding the moving sidewalk strips that would have sped them there in
three minutes instead of fifteen. Lynne, who usually enjoyed the stroll
through the carefully landscaped urban scenery, found herself resenting
its familiarity. Besides, her head still ached.
As they moved past the bazaar-block, halfway to their destination,
Lynne found herself wincing at the brightness of the window-displays.
Usually she found the fluorescent tri-di shows stimulating--but
not today. Nor was her mood helped when Janet, nodding toward the
plasti-fur coats in one of them said, "I wish I'd lived a century ago,
when a girl really had to work to win herself a mink coat."
And Ray replied with a smile she could only interpret as a leer, "You'd
have been a right busy little mink yourself, Jan."
Janet gurgled and hugged his other arm and Lynne barely repressed an
anti-social impulse to snap, "Shut _up_!" at both of them.
Lynne wondered what was wrong with her. Surely by this time she ought
to be used to Janet's continuous and generally good-humored use of the
sex challenge on any male in the vicinity. It hadn't bothered her much
until the headache began two days ago. Nor had Ray's good-nature seemed
such a weakness. Hitherto she had found it sweet.
On impulse she said, "You two go ahead. I'm going to have a colafizz.
Maybe it will knock some of the beast out of me."
"You could stand having a little more of it knocked into you, darling,"
said Janet. This time Ray said nothing.
Lynne entered a pharmabar and pressed the proper buttons, sipped the
stinging-sweet retort-shaped plastitumbler slowly. The mild stimulant
relaxed her a little, caused the ache in her head to subside to a dull
discomfort. She felt almost human as she took one of the moving strips
the rest of the way so as not to be late to work.
Their studioff was situated halfway up the massive four-hundred meter
tower of the brain-station. It was shaped like a cylinder cut in half
vertically and contained a semicircular table with banks of buttons in
front of each seat-niche. The walls were luminous in whatever color or
series of colors was keyed to the problem faced by the team. At the
moment it was blank, a sort of alabaster-ivory in tone.
Ray and Janet were already in their places. Their conversation ceased
abruptly as Lynne entered and slid into her lounger and slipped on the
collar that keyed her to the machine. She wondered what Janet had been
saying about her, what Ray had been replying.
_I'm turning into a paranoiac_, she thought, managed a smile of sorts
and said aloud, "What's today's problem?"
"Feel better, honey?" Ray asked her. Lynne nodded.
Janet, obviously uninterested, said, "Disposal of waste-foods so as
to be useful to highway construction in Assam--without disruption of
traffic-loads in Patagonia."
"Another of _those_!" said Lynne with a sigh. But she got to work
almost automatically, keying her impulses to fit those of Ray and
Janet. For the time being personal and emotional problems were laid
aside. They were a single unit--a machine that was part of the greater
machine--that was in turn part of the administration of Earth. For this
work they had been trained and conditioned all their lives.
* * * * *
Early in the century--some fifty years back--when the cybernetic
machine had been regulated to their proper functions of recording and
assemblage only, of non-mathematical factors, the use of human teams,
working as supplements to the machines themselves, had been conceived
and formulated by the Earth Government.
No machine, however complex and accurate, could reflect truly the
human factors in a problem of social import. For such functions it
possessed the fatal weakness of being non-human. Hence the integration
of people _and_ atomo-electrical brains. Thanks to their collars the
human factors received the replies of the machine-brains through mental
impulses instead of on plasti-tape.
By means of the buttons before them they could key their questions
to the portion of the machine desired. For specific requests and
interkeying with one another they used, respectively, a small throat
microphone attached to their collars and direct oral communication.
Janet was the analyst of the team--it was a detail job, a memory job,
one which usually went to a woman. And she was good. She culled from
the messages given her by the machine those which bore most directly
upon the problem.
_Assam--vegetarian culture--grain husks unused for plastics because
of blight-weakness following second A-war--could serve as fifth-depth
foundation for second-run non-moving byways.... Patagonia first-line
producer of non-weakened grain husks--transportation limited by
seasonal deep-frost--atomic heat considered uneconomical for this
problem--transportation limited to third-class surface vehicles--_
Ray checked the stream of information selected by Janet. _Seek
possibility of using synthetic mesh on temporary laydown basis._... Ray
was team coordinator, who assembled the facts selected by Janet, put
them in shape toward solution of the problem.
Then it was Lynne's turn. In a way, save that all three of them were
vital to team-success, she was top-dog. It was up to her to listen to
Janet's stream of information, to follow Ray's assembly job, to say,
"This will work," or, "This will not work," or perhaps, "This will work
if we do such-and-such, rather than thus-and-so."
There weren't many who could fill this job of synthesizer without
too-wide variance from the judgments of the machine itself.
Consequently there weren't very many teams actually at work--perhaps
a score, give or take a few, at any one time. Such synthesization
demanded a quality almost akin to intuition--but intuition disciplined
and controlled to give results as often as needed.
She concentrated now, though her head was troubling her again, keying
her whole being to Janet, then to Ray. And to her horror she began
to get a picture--not of the problem of using waste matter to abet
highway construction in Assam without disrupting the climate-limited
transportation of Patagonia, but of the thoughts and feelings of Janet
Downes.
It was frightening to realize that she was reading everything Janet
kept carefully concealed behind the sardonic mask of her personality.
It was disturbing to discover how much she herself was resented and
hated and feared by Janet. It was horrifying to learn how hungry was
Janet, how she thirsted to smash Lynne's attachment to Ray, how she
planned to use the problem of the headache to discredit Lynne, not only
with Mother Weedon and the Mind-Authority but with Ray himself.
_I must be going crazy_, Lynne thought and became sickeningly aware
that she had missed a query from Ray. She turned her attention toward
him, found herself enmeshed in a confused jumble of thoughts in which
Janet figured with shocking carnality, while she herself was fully
clothed and placed on a pedestal resembling a huge and grotesquely ugly
frog. _Why_, she thought, _Ray fears me--almost hates me!_
Once again she had lost the thread. Desperately she strove to catch up,
found herself issuing an answer. _Suggest employment of sea-transport
to solve problem._
Where had that one come from? Lynne wondered. The ocean lanes had not
been used for two-thirds of a century, save for fishing and excursions.
But hundreds of the old double-hulled cataliners of the pre-atomic
air-age were still in their huge cocoon-capsules in various nautical
undertakers' parlors.
She watched the large indicator breathlessly, wondering what the
machine would answer. Almost certainly a 1.3 variation--which would
mean the problem would be shunted to another team. An 0.2 variation was
considered normal. Lynne's decisions, over the eleven months of her
assignment, had averaged 0.13. Her best mark had been an 0.08.
She caught a flash of Janet's thoughts ... _lucky SSG so-and-so! She
wasn't even paying attention!_ Rigorously Lynne forced herself to
concentrate on the large indicator. It flashed a warning blue, then
yellow, then red--and then showed a round single 0!
It was, Lynne thought, impossible. No team had ever, in the entire
history of human-cybernetic integration, produced an answer without a
single variance with the machine. The best on record was an 0.056 by
Yunakazi in East-Asia Center. And he had never come close to it again.
Lynne nodded to the rest of them and unfastened her collar. She felt
a little sick to her stomach. An 0-variant answer was supposed to be
impossible. But she had attained one, and at a time when her mind had
been wandering, thanks not only to her malaise but because of her
shocking telepathic experience. She wondered dully if the two factors
were integrated in her incredible result.
"... like the monkeys with fifty million typewriters composing a
Shakespearean sonnet, probability ultimately favors it," Ray was
saying. "Lynne, let's try another. What's the next problem, Jan?"
"Poor reaction of 11th age-group children in Honduras to gnomics during
the months of July and August," Janet said promptly. "Wanted--its
causes and cure."
Lynne listened in a sort of stupor. When she felt telepathic messages
impinging upon her mind she forced them out. She only half-heard
Janet's smooth assemblage of facts. Ray's coordination and selection of
those most relevant. And then she thought quickly, _Climate change to
42 per-cent lower humidity, expense contained by use in schools only
and segregation of children during crucial months._
Again the flashes from the indicator--again the zero.
Janet regarded Lynne with odd speculation in her hazel eyes, Ray looked
a little frightened. Lynne said, "I don't know what's going on but my
head is killing me. I'm going home and rest."
"What about our date tonight?" Ray asked quickly--too quickly.
She studied him a long moment. She _did_ love him, she _did_ want to
marry him, she _did_ want to bear his children--or did she? She was
going to have to face the problem squarely and do it soon. She said, "I
guess you'd better give me a rain-check, honey."
She walked out the door with a vivid picture of what Janet was
thinking. Janet was going to do her damnedest to take Ray away from
her that night by the oldest and still the most effective weapon a
woman could use. And if Lynne tried to make trouble about it she
intended to make trouble for Lynne.
As for Ray--he didn't seem to have any thoughts at all. He was a sort
of Thurber male, cowering in his corner while the dominant females
fought over him. The only hitch, Lynne decided, was that there wasn't
going to be any fight. Janet could have him ... in spades!
* * * * *
She took the moving sidewalk back to Mother Weedon's. For almost a
year the trim white dome with its curved polarized picture windows
and pink Martian vines had represented home and shelter and a prized
individuality after the group-existence of school dormitories.
Now it looked like half an egg of some menacing unearthly bird, half
an egg into which she must crawl and hide, unsure of how long it would
afford her shelter. Even Mother Weedon, a shrewd and kindly widow of
sixty whose strength and good-humor made her the ideal team-matron,
looked alien and oddly menacing.
She caught the older woman's thoughts as she entered the house. _What's
happened to Lynne? Always thought that girl was too bottled up. She
should have married Ray six months ago. He's not the sort of male even
a girl as pretty as Lynne can keep on a string indefinitely--not with
a harpy like Janet in the picture...._
Mechanically Lynne ran her fingers down the magnezipper of her blue
plastifleece jacket, deposited it carefully against the magnetic hook
on the wall of the entry. She felt a renewed weakness, a sickness that
made her head throb more severely than ever. All the way back from the
brain-station she had been seeking reassurance in the probability that
her sudden telepathic ability was caused by some stimulation of the
machine, would vanish when she broke contact with it.
Now she knew better--and her panic increased. She almost ran to the
escalator so she wouldn't have to exchange chatter with Mother Weedon.
She literally had to be alone.