A. van Vogt - The Empire of Isher

He walked forward, conscious that something was wrong with the picture. It was not quite as he remembered it. He realized abruptly what was wrong. Neelan had not been reading a letter when they first met.

Was it possible that this was something that had happened afterwards?

As he paused directly behind the seated Neelan, and glanced at the letter the other was holding, Hedrock realized that it was very possible indeed. The envelope had a Martian post-office mark on it. This was the mail that the Weapon Shops had offered to obtain for Neelan, and this was Neelan after the two of them had been to 1874 Trellis Minor Building.

But how was it being done? It was one thing to build up a scene which they had obtained from his memory, quite another to enact something in which he had not participated, and which had taken place countless light years away, and nearly two months ago. Yet there must be a reason why they were performing so difficult a feat for his benefit. He decided that his captors wanted him to read the letter that Neelan had received.

He was bending forward to read it when there was a momentary blur before his eyes. It ended, and he realized he was sitting down instead of standing, and that he himself was now holding the letter. The changeover was so startling that Hedrock involuntarily turned in the chair and looked behind him.

For long moments he stared at the body of himself that stood there, rigid, leaning slightly forward, eyes fixed and unwinking; and then, slowly, he faced about again, and stared down —at Neelan’s clothes, Neelan’s hands and Neelan’s body. He began to feel the difference, to become aware of Neelan’s thoughts and intense emotional interest in the letter.

Before Hedrock could more than realize that somehow—somehow— his “mind” had been put into Neelan’s body, Neelan was concentrating on the letter. It was from his brother Gil, and it read:

Dear Dan:

Now I can tell you about the greatest invention in the history of the human race.

I had to wait till now, a few hours before we leave, because we could not take the risk of the letter being intercepted. We want to present the world with a fait accompli. When we come back, we intend to shout our news from the housetops, and have endless film and other records to support our story. But to get down to facts.

There are seven of us, headed by the famous scientist, Derd Kershaw. Six of us are science specialists. The seventh is a fellow called Greer, a sort of general handy man who keeps the books and the records, who turns on the automatic cookers, and so on. Kershaw is teaching him how to operate the controls, so that the rest of us can be relieved of that chore—

Hedrock-Neelan paused there, sick to his soul. “The children!” he muttered huskily. “Those damned grown-up children.” After a moment he thought: So Greer was a handy man. No wonder the man had known nothing about science.

He was about to read on, when Hedrock momentarily disentangled his ego from that compound awareness. He thought, almost blankly, But Neelan didn’t know about Greer. How could he have a feeling about him? That was as far as he got. Neelan’s compulsion to continue reading the letter overwhelmed his will to separate thought. They read on:

I got into the affair as a result of Kershaw noticing an article of mine in the Atomic Journal, in which I described that I had been doing some contraterrene research exactly along the lines of an idea that he had for the development of his invention.

Right here I might as well say that the chance of this discovery being duplicated by other researchers is practically nil. It embraces, in its conception, too many specialized fields. You know what we were taught during our training period, that there are nearly five hundred thousand special science fields, and that undoubtedly by skillful coordination of knowledges countless new inventions would be forthcoming, but that no known mind training could ever coordinate a fraction of these sciences, let alone all of them.

I mention this to emphasize once again the importance of secrecy. Kershaw and I had a midnight conference, and I was hired under the most confidential terms.

Dan, listen—the news is absolutely stupendous. We’ve got a drive that’s so fast it’s like a dream. The stars are conquered. Almost as soon as I finish this letter, we leave for Centaurus.

I feel sick and shaky and cold and hot at the mere idea of it. It means everything. It’s going to blow the world wide open. Just think of all those people who were forcibly dumped on Mars and Venus and the various moons—it had to be done, of course; somebody had to live there and exploit their wealth—but now there’s hope, a new chance on greener, finer worlds.

From this point onward, man will expand without limit, and put an end forever to all those petty murderous squabbles over ownership of property. Henceforth, there will always be more than enough.

The reason we have to be so careful is that the Isher Empire will be shaken to its foundations by the unprecedented emigration that would begin immediately, and the Empress Innelda will be the first to realize, the first to attempt our destruction. We’re not even sure that the Weapon Shops will support such a change. After all, they are an integral part of the Isher set-up; they have provided the checks and balances, and so have helped to create the most stable governmental system ever devised for unstable man. For the time being we prefer that they also do not find out what we have.

One more thing: Kershaw and I have discussed the possible effect of light years of distance on your and my sensory relation. He thinks that our speed of withdrawal from the solar system will give the effect of an abrupt break, and of course there will be the agony of acceleration. We—

Neelan stopped there. Because that was what he had felt, the agony, then the break! Gil

wasn’t dead. Or rather—his mind rushed on—Gil hadn’t died that day a year ago. Somewhere

during the journey Greer had—

At that point, Hedrock once more tore his own consciousness clear of that integrated

reaction. “My God,” he thought shakily, “we’re a part of each other. He’s having emotions

based on my knowledge, and I’m experiencing the emotions as if they’re my own. It would be

understandable if I was his brother, with whom he had long had an established sensory

relationship. But I’m not. I’m a stranger, and we’ve only met once.”

His thought paused there. Because it was possible that to the alien scientists who were manipulating their two minds and bodies, there was no more difference between Neelan and himself than there had been between the Neelan twins. After all, most human nervous systems were structurally similar. If the two Neelans could be “attuned” to each other, then apparently so could any two human beings.

This time, having rationalized it, Hedrock offered no resistance to the re-merging of their separate identities. He expected to finish reading Gil’s letter. But instead the letter blurred. Hedrock-Neelan blinked, and then he started violently as fine, hot sand laced against his face.

He saw that he was no longer in the weapon shop, and there was no sign of the phantom city. He twisted in a spasm of muscular reaction and realized that he was lying on a flat red desert under an enormous bulging sun. Far to his left, through a thick haze of dust, was another sun. It seemed to be farther away and was smaller, but it looked almost the color of blood in that world of powdered sand. Men lay nearby on the sand. One of them turned weakly; he was a big, fine looking fellow, and his lips moved. There was no sound, but in a curious fashion his turning the way he did brought into Neelan-Hedrock’s line of vision boxes, crates and metal structures. Hedrock recognized a water-making machine, a food case and a telestat. His observation was interrupted.