_Flight from Asylum_
James Forrest Carroll was very careful in the days that followed. With
meticulous care he watched those about him in the asylum, always wary
of showing either too much interest or too much neglect. The other
inmates did not bother him particularly nor did they irritate him. Not
even the fact that he was committed to an insane asylum caused him to
lose heart.
Carroll cared little for his immediate surroundings for he knew that
once he made his point and carried it to the awakened Solar System, not
only would all of the past suspicion be forgotten but he would receive
an even greater reward for having suffered to carry on.
Then, as the flush of newness wore away, the guards and attendants let
him alone more. All of them were trained in handling the insane and
they treated each new inmate with considerable suspicion until the
exact nature of the patient's instability was known.
Carroll's main and only argumentative period came when he was not
permitted to work as he pleased. And so long as no one mentioned the
word 'alien' in any way he was silent--lost in his thoughts and his
plans.
As soon as they furnished him with working space, Carroll knew that his
incarceration was a godsend. For--barring the chance that one of the
guards might be alien--if he could not get out they could not get in.
This was security.
The one off-chance worried Carroll. It would be hard enough to
segregate the few humanoid aliens from the mass of humanity. But with
the aliens occupying human bodies it was impossible. Just how it was
done Carroll could not say but he considered the problem and arrived at
a solution from sheer deductive reasoning.
It was pathologically impossible to consider surgery--the gross
transplantation of a brain. For one thing--among many--there is the
matter of blood supply. Incorrect blood matching causes death in a
transfusion. This is not because of the mismatch in the blood stream
per se, it is because the metabolism of the entire human body is not
matched to the different type of blood.
To transplant a brain would require that something be done about the
blood supply--if changed to match the brain the body would die, if not
the brain would die. And there was no remote possibility that any alien
brain would match human blood.
It is even difficult in many cases to graft skin from one part of a
human's body to another, let alone grafting skin from one to another
body--and the possibility of cross-grafting across the line of
demarcation between Terran species was unthinkable.
Just with common skin.
The brain?
Impossible!
There was, however, the whole matrix of mental gadgets, hypnotic beams,
educators and other gewgaws of the alien culture. The old thought
patterns could easily be erased and replaced by a new system. That
would--despite theological arguments to the contrary--result in a new
person. For all beings are what their experiences and their training
makes them.
A sentience produced in a humanoid body on a remote planet and mentally
hurled into a human brain will change the human to an alien in thought
and deed--but capable of living as a human! There is nothing in
thought that is inimical as there would be in the sheer complexity of
biochemistry.
Thoughts, even nasty vagrant thoughts, do not kill. But how large is
the lethal dose of polio virus or potassium cyanide or unmatched blood?
* * * * *
An autopsy they might some day perform, but unless they could read her
thoughts, they would find nothing! How then to identify the alien?
_Nay! How then to prove that there were aliens!_
There were both excitement and suspicion when Carroll built the
teleport in his asylum laboratory. It was too much like incarcerating a
man who had the ability to walk out of the place without half-trying.
In fact, as one of the guards put it, that's exactly what it was.
It was Majors who smiled and shook his head. He pointed out that so
far there were but two of them, one in the office of the psychologist
Pollard and the other in the Wisconsin home of the inmate himself. Both
were turned off.
Majors, not really understanding the principle of the things, had
them both placed in a sealed room. Whether Carroll could turn on an
inert machine from a remote place he did not know and he was taking no
chances.
But Carroll's experiments with his new teleport seemed innocuous
enough. For several days he fiddled with the tuning and synchronizing
controls that were used to tune one teleport to the other.
He kept constantly 'ON' the switch that remotely operated any distant
teleport that his own happened to be tuned to but his work did very
little good. He found the two that were sealed in the tiny room and
knew them for what they were. Carroll was seeking the teleports of the
aliens.
For days he searched the--subspace?--for the alien teleports and found
none. Then in a desperate measure, Carroll finally went through to the
room in the Lawson Laboratory and, using some of his store of tools,
broke the sealed door.
Brashly Carroll stole an automobile. Equally rash, he drove at
breakneck speed along the roads that led him up into the Virginia
mountains along the back-path that he had traversed only once before
in a conscious condition, and then from the opposite direction with
Rhinegallis pointing out the way.
It took many hours before he came to the little side-road that led
like a mountain goat's retreat up into the top hills. It changed from
a side-road to a mere trail and then branched from a mere trail to an
unkempt, rutted footpath that jounced the automobile terribly.
Miles along this rocky path, Carroll turned into a clearing--a
well-remembered clearing, and he looked across it--in surprise. The
building itself was gone! No wonder he could find no teleports!
And the words of Kingallis returned to him. "You won't live long
enough!" the alien had said. "The universe isn't big enough for both of
us!"
The rats had deserted the doomed ship!
It was so pat--so perfect! Now they would say that there never had
been any aliens. At every turn Carroll was blocked and stopped and
frustrated. How long the aliens had been guarding Terra he did not
know. Perhaps about the time that the Lawson Radiation was discovered,
or perhaps even before.
No matter how good they were at intercepting things, the aliens could
not keep some things from leaking out. They might have been here for
centuries awaiting the man Lawson who was the discoverer.
They might have been covering information that would have led to the
discovery until they could no longer stop it. At that point in the
rise of any culture the discovery of such a factor would be almost
automatic....
Taking any science as a parallel, civilization makes its discoveries as
it is ready for them. The discovery of radio would have been impossible
before the knowledge of electricity. Nuclear physics would have been
impossible without a working knowledge of simple chemistry.
Each science stood upon the shoulders of the other. Electronics aided
astronomy, mechanics aided electronics and chemistry aided mechanics.
Physics gave men more information about chemistry and chemistry was a
foundation stone for electronics.
* * * * *
How long that had been here Carroll did not care. The pertinent thing
at present was the simple fact that _now they were gone_!
Gone because they dared not stay!
Carroll cursed. It was his fault. Whatever was being done to eliminate
Terra as a threat to the aliens' ideas of aggrandizement was being done
because James Forrest Carroll had been instrumental in uncovering their
schemes. Had he remained in ignorance there would have been no reason
for their latest plan--conquest for aggrandizement does not include
extermination.
To exterminate an enemy spells economic failure. There is little
glory in being the Lord of All when _All_ consists of burned planets,
dead cultures and the hollow grinning skulls of a billion billion
intelligences.
Homage comes not from a skull.
There, in the moonlight of the clearing where once stood a large
alien edifice, Carroll took from the back seat of his stolen car the
knocked-down teleport and set it up alongside the road. He stepped into
it and emerged in his asylum laboratory.
He ignored the fact that both car and teleport were stolen and
abandoned. The only thing of importance now was the safety--the
personal safety--of all Terrans, whether they believed or not. That he
alone had good reason to believe in the threat was unimportant. There
have been many cases in the world of history when one man alone stood
against the world and was right.
Let them scoff.
Yet Carroll felt the full impact of helpless frustration. He was pitted
against an alien culture capable of scientific marvels such as the
teleport and interstellar travel and other things. They were capable of
destroying the solar system while the only man who stood against them
was incapable even of discovering how they intended to do it.
He threw himself into his work and the days sped past as he built and
experimented and planned--and all too occasionally failed. When his
cohorts came to him with the announcement that the first sixty-foot
paraboloid of revolution was to be initiated that day at the Lunar
Observatory Carroll merely nodded and returned to his work.
He cared not at all that the new observatory was to be called the
Carroll Observatory in honor of the man who made possible the perfect
reflector. At that time, Carroll was busy with his invisible fields of
force and spacial planes of stress and did not want to be bothered with
trivia--especially trivia that he had really had no hand in inventing.
A lot of good the Carroll Observatory would be to mankind if the Solar
System were destroyed!
* * * * *
Majors entered Dr. Pollard's office with a large glossy photograph
in one hand. Pollard looked up amusedly as Majors said, "I'm getting
psycho, I guess."
"Yes? And what makes you think so?"
Majors laughed. "Because every time I get a problem I seem to come to
you instead of going where it can be answered by theoreticians and
physicists."
Pollard smiled. "I think you come here because this is one place where
you can hold your own with another man who can hold his own with you,"
he observed.
"Well," admitted Majors, "you don't understand theoretical physics as
well as I do and psychology is over my head. Anyway, what do you make
of this?"
The photograph was of a patch of sky. Pollard shook his head.
"Is this a test question?" he asked. "Remember, I'm the psychiatrist
and I'm supposed to hand the patient strange items and ask them what
they see in them."
Majors laughed. "This is a section of Boötes."
"Boötees," murmured Pollard irrelevantly, "are knitted gadgets you put
on babies' feet."
"All right, I'll leave quietly," chuckled Majors. "Seriously, though,
look at this." He pointed out a tiny smudge among the myriad of stars.
"Well?" asked the doctor.
"It shouldn't be."
"Maybe a flaw?"
"Nope," objected Majors. "It persists through twenty-seven photographs
made one minute apart--each exposed for one minute."
"Um. What is it?"
"Don't know," replied Majors. "But it is darned interesting."
"Boötes is the region from whence comes the Lawson Radiation, isn't it?"
Majors nodded. "That's why they sent it to me. It was taken by the
Carroll Telescope on Luna, a sort of tribute to Carroll that the first
photographs and work done by his invention be directed at that portion
of the sky he worked so long on--to his own downfall."
"Tell me, Majors, do you often get these kind of smudges?"
"Not this kind but there have been other kinds."
Dr. Pollard looked at the smudge. "Let's take this to Carroll," he
suggested. "Maybe it might mean something to that hidden portion of his
mind that refuses to admit what it knows about the Lawson Radiation."
"Through the teleport?"
"Why not? If it's not available at the other end, we'll just meet a
solid mirror and can't step through. That worried me for a long time,
that idea of not having a place to go to. Just step out into--heaven
knows what--because the other end wasn't connected. Come on!"
The teleport in Carroll's asylum laboratory gave the physicist warning
that they were coming through. He turned as they entered with an
annoyed smile on his face. Before him was a long paper record of Lawson
Radiation recordings that Carroll was studying through a magnifier.
Majors handed Carroll the photo, saying, "What do you make of this?"
"It's a bad blur--like a misfocused image," replied Carroll.
"Yes--but why?"
"You've heard of the Einstein Lens?"
"Vaguely, but thought it was just a dream--a probability that never
happened."
Pollard shook his head. "I don't know about it at all," he admitted.
Carroll smiled tolerantly. "Light has energy and energy has mass," he
said. "Ergo light has mass. Masses attract one another according to the
Newtonian Law of Gravitation. Ergo light is bent by passing close to a
mass."
"I see," said Pollard leaping to the right conclusion. "Then light
radiated from a very distant galaxy may pass close enough to a dark
mass--with Terra, the mass and the galaxy in line--to have the distant
galaxy focus itself here?"
"Yes," replied Carroll. "The mass acts as a biconvex lens because it
bends all tangential light toward the center as the beam passes."
"But the Einstein Lens effect doesn't make smudges like this," objected
Majors.
Pollard whistled. "You mean to say that the Einstein Lens is known to
be a fact?"
"Right. Several cases are known and accepted as such!"
"Well!"
* * * * *
Carroll looked up from the smudge. "A negative lens," he said, "would
cause diffusion like this."
Majors blinked. "That would mean--oh, no!"
"Negative matter," said Carroll promptly.
"Um. You postulate a negative mass in line with the light from a star?"
Carroll nodded.
Majors smiled and took out a roll of thirty-five millimeter film. He
handed it to Carroll.
"I took the liberty of making smaller prints," he said. "Those
are the other thirty-five pix made near that area. You'll see the
initiation of the smudge on the second, and the completion of it on the
twenty-eighth. The others are just spares."
Carroll looked at the smudges, one after the other.
"You'll note that the thirteenth, the twentieth, and the
twenty-fifth have rather larger areas," said Majors. "Also, on the
thirty-first--after the body presumably has passed out of line--there
is one more faint flare-point. That was minutes after the thing passed
out of line."
Carroll read the pictures carefully and then without a word he turned
to the desk. He picked up the tape of Lawson Radiation recordings and
handed it to Majors.
"Here," he said, "is correlation between astronomical fact and the
Lawson Radiation."
There were four definite pips on the line. Four spikes that reached
up, with each spike labelled as to the time of reception. Though the
intrinsic time did not match by hours the spacing between the pips and
the flared photographs was perfect.
"Then what?" asked Majors, and Pollard held his breath.
"A mass of negative matter passing through space," said Carroll, "would
naturally be struck occasionally by meteors or small celestial bodies."
"But if negative matter is repulsive instead of attractive?" objected
Majors.
"Then," said Carroll simply, "the only masses that can strike the
repulsive celestial negative-mass are those other masses that possess
the velocity that corresponds to the velocity of escape in normal mass!"
Majors looked thoughtful.
"I get it," said Majors. "The velocity of escape is that velocity
attained by any mass in falling to the earth from an infinite distance.
Converted, any mass given that velocity upon the instant of departure
need have no more acceleration applied in order that the mass be driven
to an infinite distance against gravity. Follow?"
"Uh-huh," said Pollard.
"In the case of a repulsive mass--negative mass--in order for any other
object to strike it it must possess enough energy to overcome the
repulsion. This would be the inverted equivalent of the velocity of
escape!"
"Negative mass and positive mass would cancel one another?"
Carroll nodded. "Producing the Lawson Radiation!"
"Then all these years we have been following a bit of negative mass
getting hit by normal meteors."
Carroll shook his head. "You check the orbit of that mass," he said,
"and you'll find out that it is due to strike Sol!"
"You know?"
"I suspect," said Carroll. "The aliens must destroy us lest we destroy
them. This is their way. We must stop that mass!"
"Look," said Majors. "Let's find out the course of that celestial
object first!"
"It will be," said Carroll.
"Carroll," objected Majors, "why must you insist upon blaming the
aliens for something that is definitely a matter of celestial chance?"
"Because it is not celestial chance," snapped Carroll. "And I'll yet
prove it!"