Before Lucifer could assimilate this bit of information, Huth had
stopped before the first door.
Inside was a shrunken monstrosity of a creature. It had the torso of a
grown woman, but its legs were bone thin, twisted and scarcely eighteen
inches long. It was hairless; its face was one ovular blob of flesh, in
which the eyes, mouth and nostrils were knife-edge slits. It seemed to
be watching the rain-streaked window.
There were two beings in the next room, apparently male and female.
Both were naked, and seated cross-legged on a thick mat. They were
playing a complicated game with marked and colored blocks. The woman's
body was covered with a fine, brown hair. Her breasts were tiny for the
dimensions of her body. Her head was also small out of all proportion,
as was the male's. Lucifer saw that though both were eyeless they were
playing their game rapidly and skillfully. Their hands were lumps of
flesh, with just rudimentary fingers.
"They are quite sentient," Huth observed. And he added with pride, "You
would classify them as definite psi positives--altogether our most
successful experiment of this type!"
As they neared the next door, it suddenly became opaque. Huth led
them past it without comment. Nina winced, and her fingers tightened
convulsively.
They were led quickly down the rest of the corridor. Some of the doors
were opaque. Through others, they caught glimpses of more grotesquely
distorted creatures, some asleep, some lurching or crawling about their
rooms.
The corridor ended in a large multi-purpose type of room in which
semi-human creatures of all shapes and sizes were milling about.
Huth opened the door. "Go on in," he said.
It took all of Lucifer's will to control his revulsion and trembling
and step through that door. Nina followed. Her fingers rigid in his
hand.
One of the creatures nearest them turned nimbly around on one leg and
hopped closer. It reached out a long arm, touched Nina's forehead. A
harsh, croaking sound came from its mouth. Nina's lips quivered, but
she smiled and patted the leathery hand.
Others bounded and crept around them, jibbering, feeling their faces
and hair, probing at their bodies with stumps of arms or with hands
that seemed all fingers.
"All of these people show some traces of psi," Huth explained. Again
there was quiet pride in his voice.
A wracking cry came from one corner of the room. A huge shape hurtled
into the group around them, knocking others out of its way. Lucifer saw
the wildly flopping head, then long arms reached for him and a crushing
weight bore him to the floor. There was a choking odor of hot, oily
flesh.
And then the weight was gone. Two attendants led the creature, still
mouthing angry cries, out of the room.
Huth helped Lucifer to his feet. "You must forgive Tetla. He shows up
well in some basic psi tests, but certain other faculties were lost in
the manipulation of his chromosomes. We never quite know what he will
do."
The other beings had fallen back in silence during the assault. Now
they began to babble in wild disharmony, each gesticulating in its own
way.
Lucifer's cheeks were grey, but his lips were compressed into a thin
line under the stubble of his mustache. He took Nina's arm and strode
out of the room. Huth followed, without comment.
Out in the corridor, Lucifer confronted him. A sweep of his arm
encompassed the long corridor, the room they had just left.
"This--this is a monstrous inhumanity--a terrible perversion of
science!"
His voice was flinty with rage. Deep within him, the conscience of his
puritan ancestry was revolted.
Huth raised an admonishing hand. "Don't forget your scientific
training, Dr. Brill. You can't impose the value judgements of one
culture upon the framework of another."
"There must be certain principles basic to all cultures!"
"A true Aristotelian fallacy! Form is actual reality, matter is
potential reality and the form is ever in the matter! Surely, Dr. Bill,
you can rise above such ontology!"
"Can you justify what you have done to these people even from your own
value judgement basis?"
"You treat justification as a valid entity, which leads you deeper
into the morass of attempting to substantialize abstracta. We do not
justify, we do! Let me clarify:
"With the future of our evolution in the balance, with the unbounded
horizons of the universe that will be opened by psi, we have taken
certain measures. Once we postulated the genetic characteristics of
psi, there was no limit to possible methodology. You have seen only two
of many methods we are exploring: One, of course, is the Earth project;
the second is an attempt to induce psi mutations in the offspring of
certain of our own people. Naturally, since the external results of
such experiments are often unpleasant, we bring the newly born infants
directly to our laboratory on Melus."
Nina's eyes were still wide with horror.
"How do you do this thing?"
"Really, Mrs. Brill, it's nothing to be so shocked about. As a matter
of fact, it's only a further step in what your own experimenters do
by exposing Drosophilae to X-rays and plants to colchicine. We are
endeavoring by many methods not only to mutate a gene by re-arranging
the atoms in its molecules, but also to increase the quota of
chromosomes in certain cells. The difficulty, as yet, is to single out
the right string of chromosomes or to hit the right gene and influence
it toward the desired psi mutation. We are still groping in the dark,
simply increasing the chances that one or another gene, at random, will
psi mutate."
As Huth spoke, he had been leading them toward a side exit. A vehicle
was waiting. Huth put his hand on Lucifer's shoulder.
"We did not bring you to Melus, Dr. Brill, merely to reproduce your own
psi characteristics. We feel that your background will enable you to
make many notable contributions, once you become oriented. Already you
have justified this feeling. Your people will do things for you and
Mrs. Brill that they would not willingly do for us."
"I want nothing more to do with this project."
"I am sure you will recognize your present reaction as purely
emotional, and come quickly to realize that here you have the answer to
a true scientist's dream--a laboratory on the scale of life itself! For
twenty years you have taken timid steps around the periphery of your
science. Now you are at the heart of it!"
* * * * *
What should he think?
What should he believe?
What should he do?
Lucifer walked slowly around the small clearing behind their quarters.
He stared, for the most part unseeingly, through the force field and
into the shadows of the forest.
His shoulder brushed the invisible barricade, and the shock broke the
rhythm of his stride.
What should he believe?
This question bubbled most frequently to the roiled surface of his
thoughts. With belief would come the mental framework, the pattern
for action. It was disturbing and confusing that credo should be so
important to a scientific mind. Couldn't facts take form without credo?
Did facts shape the framework, or were they molded to conform to it?
Einstein made truth relative to its own framework, but which came
first--the framework or the truth? And if the answer was framework,
could there be truth? Perhaps the childhood riddle of the chicken
and the egg could have cosmic implications. A vagrant phrase from a
long-ago literature class came back to prod him now: To an egg the
chicken is merely the means of producing another egg. Samuel Butler.
A shaft of sunlight speared down through the whispering canopy of
branches high above him. It kindled to life a spot of riotous color in
the perpetual shadow world at the base of the great trees. Blossoms of
delicate blue, petals flecked with orange and gold. Leaves so green
they brought an ache of loneliness for a forgotten spring morning of
youth.
What should he believe?
With sudden percipience, Lucifer knew that he had moved in the shadows
for a long time. The riotous dreams of youth, the exciting sense of
being a pioneer among pioneers, had become like a bit of stop-motion
film. It preserved the form, without the life or action. A dream cannot
be framed and kept behind glass. It cannot be static. To remain, it
must change.
Parapsychology had been the high road. The glorious adventure. It had
made the son of a New England minister an explorer on a new frontier.
But does a frontier of science have purpose other than to lead to an
infinite succession of new frontiers? Had he remained too long on one
frontier?
The unorthodox becomes the orthodox. The theory crustifies into the
dogma. The method becomes methodology. Was this forever to be the
entrapment of science? There were an infinite number of exploratory
possibilities on this frontier of today; and, for all their challenge,
they could be a soporific. The frontier itself was finite. But what
about the next frontier? And the next? And the next?
Huth could be right, in this at least: Perhaps parapsychology had been
too long exploring the unknown of its present frontier. Some must
remain behind to develop and consolidate. But others must keep moving
on!
To look forever beyond the next horizon! There was the challenge. There
was the dream forever bright.
Lucifer thought of his crude experiment with the psi positive children,
and he admitted now what he had denied at the time: Not for a decade
had he been so excited by any experiment; it had brought back the
wonder of the moment when an aimless undergraduate had first come upon
the Rhine card tests. Lord, that was more than twenty years ago! For
twenty years he had been walking in Rhine's shadow. And his personal,
private dreams had never lived to see sunlight.
When would science learn to use genius without being smothered by
it? Freud and Einstein had left a vision to their sciences, not a
citadel. They had tried to cast a light, not a shadow. Rhine had
brought psi into his laboratory to demonstrate its scientific validity.
Now, the physicist, the biochemist, the mathematician and, yes,
the geneticist--all of them, must take this validity into their own
laboratories. The parapsychologist must become the physical scientist;
the physical scientist must become the parapsychologist. Only from the
total crucible of science could psi emerge in a useful form.
But what of Huth, and Mendel's Planet?
However it had been brought together, whatever one thought of it, this
living laboratory was now a fact. Psi was being mated to psi; children
were being born, children with a psi potential that could be trained
into a power of unknown magnitude. Huth had described it well: A
laboratory on the scale of life itself!
Huth knew his semantics, all right. The barbs of his words got under
the skin, hooked and held fast. How pallid an Earth laboratory would
seem after Mendel's Planet. The symbol cards seemed to have lost their
meaning.
A dozen projects clamored to reach the surface of Lucifer's thinking.
Each cried out its siren challenge; each demanded experimentation. How
much there was to do here on Mendel's Planet!
Now, Nina was at his side, and she said gently, "It's raining again,
Lucifer. Won't you come in?"
The rain had returned, and the big, splashing drops hadn't fallen
into his thoughts. But they were coursing in streams down his cheeks,
dripping from his eyebrows. He brushed them away, and stared at the
forest. The shadows had merged. The flowering beauty was like a mirage
that had never been, and never could be. There was only the wash of the
rain on the forest roof, the drip-drop-drip on the molding carpet of
dead leaves.
* * * * *
Albert Fetzer came back that night. The click in the visagraph, the
deeper blackness of the walls, the silent opening of the casement
window--these were the now recognizable signs of his coming.
Lucifer hadn't been able to sleep. Nina had already gone to bed, after
pressing her lips to his cheek in a swift gesture that left him more
unsettled than ever.
When he realized that Fetzer was coming, Lucifer sat up on the couch
and drew the sheet around his shoulders. In a moment the stocky figure
squeezed through the window.
"Hi, there," Fetzer called softly. "You awake, Dr. Brill?"
"I haven't slept."
"How'd things go today?"
How had things gone?
"I'm not sure," Lucifer evaded.
"You got it all figured out?"
"Well--not exactly."
Lucifer was stunned at his own reluctance to discuss matters with
Fetzer. Anything less than total frankness was a new facet of himself.
It was one he didn't like. But how could he share his indecision?
"We had an organization meeting after I left here last night," Fetzer
said. "All the section leaders made it this time. We're set to pull the
plug any time you say?"
"Pull.... Oh, I hadn't realized.... What do you think you can do?"
"Plenty. We've learned to short-circuit the force fields in a hurry,
and we can spring over a thousand men inside of two minutes. Within
five minutes more, we'd be able to hit Center and the landing field."
Lucifer felt himself withdrawing even more. He could see the whole
psi project swept away in turmoil. Then he thought of Huth's men, so
towering in their stature, so well organized, so completely equipped
by a fantastically advanced technology. The revolt would be brutally
crushed.
"You can't do it!" he told Fetzer.
"Huh?" The stocky figure tensed. "Spell it out, Doc."
"You wouldn't have a chance!"
"We've got a few tricks. There's a lot of vets in this bunch."
"It would be suicide."
Fetzer hunched closer to the couch.
"Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But a man can't always stop to
think of things like that. You do what you got to do."
The words triggered a release, and Lucifer started to talk.
With an eloquence that would have astounded his graduate students at
Western University, Lucifer drew a word picture of the psi project and
the theory behind it. As he talked, Nina came in quietly and sat on the
couch beside him, drawing up her knees inside her short gown.
Lucifer spoke of their own experiments with the babies, and of the
sweep of five million years of evolution foreshortened through
understanding and application of Hardy's Law. Only when he came to
the radiation and chemical phases of the psi project, to the pitiable
_Goolies_, did his flow of words falter. He tried to pick up quickly
with analysis of what training would do for their own children. But the
nagging awareness of this second dishonesty, the knowledge that Nina
knew what he had done and was watching him in the darkness, broke the
flow of thought and his explanation trailed off into awkward silence.
Albert Fetzer didn't say anything. He squatted on his heels, a humped
blur in the darkness of the room. Lucifer could feel the probe of his
eyes and darting mind.
"So that's it," Fetzer said at last. "We guessed some of it, but we
couldn't fill in the missing pieces. You learned a lot, Doc."
"There's so much I haven't yet learned."
"You learned enough."
"Enough for what?"
"We're going to pull that plug, remember?"
"No!" Lucifer stood up in his agitation. "There must be another way--a
better way."
"You name it."
"Well--naturally I'd have to think more about it. Everything here is so
new to me."
Fetzer stepped closer to him. His shadow was shorter even than
Lucifer's, but it bulked with unseen strength.
"Anything else, Doc?"
"I don't understand."
"You've gone for this stuff, haven't you."
Lucifer recoiled from the bluntness of the question.
"I am a scientist," he replied. "Or at least I have always assumed
that. These ideas are as strange to me as they are to you, but I'm
trying to understand and evaluate them. Isn't that important?"
"Not to me it isn't--not right now. I think the other boys will feel
the same."
"You don't care what all this may mean?"
"Nope. Not yet, anyway. I'm not a scientist, Dr. Brill. Maybe I'm not
even a very smart guy and maybe I'm just as glad of it, because my feet
are on the ground and I know where I want them to go. Sure, this psi
stuff could be big, mighty big. Our kids could go a long way with it.
I can see that. But I'm a man, not a guinea pig. I happen to go for
the woman they teamed me up with, and she feels the same way about me.
That's true of most of the folks here. But we're not breeding kids for
someone else. We'd rather run our own show. Guess you professors have
been away from ordinary people too long to realize that. You should
listen to some of our boys who fought with the underground in the last
war. Makes you feel kind of good about people."
"Don't you realize that Huth can destroy all of you?"
"I'm not the hero type, Dr. Brill. In the war, I always kept my head
down and squeezed as deep in the mud as I could. But there's some
things you have to do, no matter how cold your stomach feels about it."
"When do you plan to do this?"
From the forest came a wild, plaintive cry. Fetzer took a quick step
toward the window, then paused.
"You better come with me--both of you."
Lucifer drew back.
"Where? Why?"
"I don't like to do this, Doc. But I don't like the way you sound,
either. We can't take any chances."
"You don't think ..."
"I don't know. I'm sorry, but I don't know enough about your kind.
Hurry up, now."
Lucifer still held back, but Nina stood up and moved wordlessly toward
the window. Fetzer's voice toughened.
"Make it easy on yourself, Doc. You're coming along, one way or the
other."
His legs shaking, Lucifer followed Nina through the window.
* * * * *
The warp in the force field was at the far corner of the enclosure. At
a command from Fetzer, they dropped to their knees and crawled through.
A voice whispered a challenge. Fetzer answered, and they proceeded,
single file, deeper into the forest. The leader guided them with a
pinpoint of light escaping from his cupped hand.
They followed a winding course around the root structures of the trees.
Lucifer tripped once and fell sprawling into the wet, leathery leaves.
As he got up, the spider loop of a vine caught him around the throat
and flipped him again.
"Pick up your feet and keep your head down," Fetzer warned impatiently.
Their direction took them to a shallow stream, and they splashed
up the middle of it for a hundred yards. The cacophony of night
sounds retreated before them, closed in behind them. The rooftop of
intermeshed branches and leaves dripped endlessly. Some alien creature
followed them through the branches, yapping in a strident monotone.
They emerged from the stream to crawl into a semi-cave formed by the
enjoining roots of two great trees. Vegetation had webbed over the
roots until even the dropping of water was cut off.
The light of a guttering torch showed several men waiting for them. A
few carried strange weapons stolen from Huth's men. Others were armed
with vicious looking clubs, and long, needle-pointed stakes.
It's fantastic, thought Lucifer. Cavemen prepared to challenge a
mechanized force. Cavemen forty light years from home.
When they saw Nina, the men stood up, surprised, uneasy. Fetzer went
into some detail on what Lucifer had told him. One of the men swore,
and smashed the head of his club on the sodden floor of the cave.
A balding man seated Nina on a hummock in one corner of the cave.
Ignoring Lucifer, they plunged into discussion of their plans. None
could see any reason for further delay. The supply ship had been gone
for some time, and might return soon. Its crew would add strength
to Huth's base force, which numbered around eight hundred, including
nurses, doctors and various technical personnel.
To Lucifer, the plan sounded bold. Pathetically bold. A sizeable group
would break out of their quarters and flee into the forest, drawing a
portion of Huth's men in pursuit. Another group would attack Center,
making it appear that this was the chief point of concentration. After
delaying as long as possible, the main force would hit the landing
field and try to capture the auxiliary spaceship. The men knew they
couldn't handle the ship, but their work around the field had taught
them enough about it to know that its armament could give them control
of the base.
As Lucifer listened, a sense of familiarity kept tugging at him. It
was a strange sensation that he had been through something like this
before. But that was ridiculous. He'd never been any closer to military
action than rejection by his draftboard, which had stupidly considered
parapsychology non-essential.
The feeling persisted, and suddenly he identified it: Hempstead House,
New London, Conn. The stories he had been told in childhood about the
underground railroad and the abolitionist meetings held by the few who
believed men should be free and were willing to do something about it!
The memory came to him across thirty-five years of his life, and half
the span of the galaxy. It came with an impact that snapped something
inside him, to bring the entity, the changing personality that was
himself, into focus again. But it wasn't the same focus as before. It
would never be. Yet he felt more a whole person than ever before, and
within him there was a surging current that could not be held back.
Hempstead House had been a verity that could not be fitted into any
neat cubicle of orthodoxy. New England ministers and spinsters,
businessmen and farmers--all of them motivated by a life force that
couldn't be duplicated in any laboratory. The same life force was in
this tree cave tonight, far away from Earth. It would go with men
forever, through all space and time.
It would go with Lucifer Brill, too--to the end of this experience,
to whatever new frontiers of science he might live to reach. It would
prevent the vision from becoming the still-life picture, the theory
from crystalizing into dogma. As long as the force lived in any man,
it had the potential of leading all men to freedom. Psi was an unknown
part of that life force. It could not always remain in the laboratory.
It must bring freedom from blindness, freedom from the cubicles that
restricted each man, each science. It was a weapon ...
A weapon!
Good Lord, why not?
Lucifer stepped into the center of the group before he knew what he
was going to say. But the words came: "Wait ... there may be a better
way--if you have the courage to try it!"
Fetzer eyed him sceptically.
"We don't have much time, Doc."
"Then you must make time! It's your only chance--our only chance!"
The men were silent, uncertain.
"Go ahead," Fetzer said. "But make it fast."
"Would you fight with a knife if you had a machine gun? Would you
attack on horseback if you had a jet loaded with atom bombs?"
"Keep talking," said Fetzer.
"The answer is obvious. You would use the best weapon available.
Yet here you sit with clubs and wooden spears, ignoring a weapon so
potentially powerful that it makes our H-Bomb, or some undoubtedly
greater weapon of Huth's, seem like an old crossbow!"
He had their attention now. He felt the force of concentration on his
words. He sensed the awareness in Nina, though her eyes were hidden in
the shadows beyond the wavering circle of torchlight.
"Think of what I learned from Huth--what Albert Fetzer has told
you. Every person was brought here because they were psi positives,
because they possessed some individual psi talent. Some of you have
been ashamed of that talent. Perhaps you tried to hide it back on
Earth--because it made you different from other people. But you
know something about it. You may have learned more about it--even
experimented with it--during your months and years on this planet.
You may know what even limited talents have done in perception,
clairvoyance and the moving of objects through telekinesis.
"These things were done by individual people, operating, as we might
say, on single generators.
"But now for the first time in history we have more than three thousand
psi talents grouped together in one small area.
"What if all the psi power here could be focused on one objective? All
the men and women of Mendel's Planet--all the children--especially the
children! ... focusing their combined power!
"Wouldn't that give us the force of three thousand generators--fused
into one unit? Instead of moving a chair across the room, making a
table jump, levitating a person--why couldn't a building be moved? A
spaceship crushed? An attacking force cut down like grass under an
invisible mower?
"Gentlemen, is there any limit to the power of a psi focus?
"If a psi focus is possible, we have our own world to win--the
frontiers of infinity to explore....
"Are you willing to try?"
* * * * *
The silence within the tree-cave lasted for an eternity.
Even the breathing of the men was hushed as each struggled with this
new concept.
His emotional fire spent in the greatest effort of his life, Lucifer
stood limp and awkward in the center of the circle, looking around at
the set faces. Their eyes were fixed on the humus beneath their crossed
legs.
Faintly, high above the tree-cave, the wind moaned over the forest
canopy, and a new wash of rain approached. It was a cold sound, though
the night was steaming hot.
There was a stir in the shadows, and Nina stepped between two men to
join him in the circle. Her fists were clenched.
"What's the matter," she cried, "don't you have faith in yourselves?
Are you afraid to fight with a new weapon?"
The faces turned up toward her.
"Look at that torch!" she commanded. "Now, put it out! All of us
together put it out!"
She turned toward the torch, which had been thrust into a fibrous root
structure. She half-closed her eyes. Her lips stretched taut; her
fingers knotted and unknotted in an agony of concentration.
The flame flickered violently in the still air of the cave, but it did
not go out.
"You're not helping me!" Nina cried: "I'm not strong enough alone--none
of us are! Please!"
Abruptly, the torch twisted in its base, the wood snapped with the
crack of a rifle shot.
The tree-cave was dark.
Nina's voice was spent, triumphant.
"See! Now do you have faith in yourselves? Didn't you feel what Dr.
Brill meant by a psi focus? Think of what it will be like to be in a
focus of three thousand minds! Are you still afraid?"
A man groped his way to the broken remnant of the torch. He re-lit the
upper portion.
"I'm thinking of my own kid," he said. "I've seen what he can do all by
himself."
Fetzer spoke up.
"I've tried it myself. I can't do it always, but sometimes it happens.
I don't know why, but it happens."
One after another the men spoke out, digging into hidden memories for
some personal or observed experience.
"My wife was a kick," recalled a scrawny little man with a huge nose.
"Not the woman I got me now, but the one I had back in Portland. She
never would read no cards, but when she got mad, all hell would bust
loose! Once we both got mad the same time, and you never saw so much
stuff zinging around! The neighbors called the cops."
They fell silent again, thinking.
Nina slipped her hand into Lucifer's. It was icy cold.
"You'd better sit down," he told her.
She shook her head.
Then Fetzer spoke up.
"How could we try this thing, Doc?"
It was the question Lucifer had been hoping for, and fearing. The
problems ahead were piling up. He was a teacher, a scientist, not a
leader. But he couldn't let his doubts show now.
"We can test it tomorrow night--if you can get word to all the people
by that time."
"We can."
Once committed, the men plunged quickly into new plans. The guard
tower on the hill behind the compound was picked for the first target.
Almost everyone could see it from their own quarters. And it was large
enough to provide a valid test for Lucifer's psi focus theory. The
searchlight that always blazed on with the coming of dusk would be the
signal.
"If it works," said Fetzer, "we've got to be ready to go all the way.
They might not know what happened exactly, but you can be sure they'll
move in and clamp down fast."
It was decided that a modified version of the original attack plan
would be followed if the experiment succeeded. Only this time the
diversionary forces would hit the Center and the small spaceport, while
the main effort would be concentrated on getting the rest of the people
into a clearing just outside the compound. From there they would try to
function as a psi unit.
The wail of a forest animal drifted through the night.
"The boys are getting ready to short the field again," Fetzer
explained. "We'd better get back."