C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

Yancey Mears explained that she was a woman and calmly went into details, interrupted occasionally by gurgling noises from the boarders.

Finally it was too much; the three visitors broke into cries for mercy between bellows of laughter.

"And you thought they were humorless!" accused the third.

"This one's probably a comic genius. Though why they'd send a comic genius on an expedition of this kind I don't know. You—you don't suppose that it's all true—do you?

Suddenly sobered they inspected Yancey and the Psychologist, exchanging significant nods.

"Well …though you things are the most ludicrous sights of an abnormally long lifetime we're prepared to be more than equitable with you. Our motivation is probably far beyond your system of ethics—

being, as it is, a matter of blowing things to powder—but we can give you a hint of it by saying that it will help as a sort of self-discipline.

Beyond that, you will have to discover for yourself.

"What we propose for you is a thing much more gentle than being blown into powder. With courage, ability, common sense and inspiration you will emerge unharmed."

"Go on," said the Psychologist.

"Go on? It's begun already. We'll take our leaves now."

As his two companions slipped through the hull of the sphere, the last of the boarders turned to Yancey Mears.

"Er—what you were saying—it was a comic monologue, wasn't it?"

"No. It was strict biological truth."

The boarder wistfully asked: "I don't suppose I could see it done?

Thought not. Good day." The three departed abruptly as they had come.

"What's begun already?" Star Macduff asked the Executive.

"I don't know. What do you suppose we've come into contact with now?"

"They're hard to size up," said Mamie Tung. "The humor—it's very disturbing. Apparently it didn't take them more than a few minutes to pick up our entire language and system of thought. It wasn't a simple job of mind-reading; they obviously grasped symbology, as well. They said so themselves."

"And what do you suppose they really look like?" asked Star in a thin, hysterical tone.

"Shut it," ordered Will Archer. "That's panic-mongering, pure and simple. Normally, I'd order you back with the ratings for a comment like that. Since we're up against extraordinary circumstances, I'll stay execution for the duration of the emergency."

The Calculator did not reply; he seemed scarcely to have heard the rebuke. He was staring abstractedly at nothing. The notion overcame the three other Officers slowly—very slowly—that something was amiss.

Yancey Mears first felt physically sick; then a peculiar numbness between the eyes, then a dull, sawing pain that ran over her whole skull.

She blinked her eyes convulsively; felt vertiginous yet did not fall; felt a curious duplicate sensation, as though she were beside herself and watching her body from outside—as though all lights she saw were doubled, as though the mass of her body was twice what it had been.

Alarmed, she reached out for Will Archer's arm. It was not till she had tried the simple gesture that she realized how appallingly askew everything was. She reached, she thought, but her hands could not coordinate; she thought that she had extended both hands instead of one. But she had not. Dizzily she looked down, saw that her left hand lay against her body; that her right hand was extended, reaching for Archer; that her left hand was extended and that her right hand lay against her body …

"Will, what's wrong?" The dizziness, the fear, the panic, doubled and tripled, threatened to engulf her. For her voice was not her own but a double voice, coming from two throats, one a little later than the other.

"Will …" No, she couldn't outrace the phenomenon; her voice was doubled in some insane fashion. She felt cold, tried to focus her eyes on Archer. Somehow the blackness of space seemed to come between them.

She heard a scream—two screams—from Star. She saw him, blending with the space-black cloud in her vision, staggering in the officers'

quarters, yawing wildly from side to side, trying to clutch at a stanchion or a chair. She saw two Stars, sometimes superimposed, sometimes both blurred, staggering wildly.

She saw Will Archer drag himself across the floor—both of him, their faces grim. The two Will Archers blended somehow with the space-blackness, waveringly. They methodically picked up a cabinet from the desk and clubbed at the raving figures of Star Macduff.

The two Archers connected with one of the Macduffs, stretching it out on the floor.

Yancey saw the other Macduff, distance-obscured, stop short and rub its head amazedly, heard it say in a thin, faraway voice: "Sorry I made a fool of myself, Will …" then look about in terror, collapsing into a chair.

Only Madame Tung was composed. Only Madame Tung crossed legs on a chair, shut her eyes and went into a deep, complicated meditation.

"Close your eyes, everybody," she called in two voices. "If you value your sanity, close your eyes and rest quietly."

The Clericalist tried to walk across the floor to a chair, had the utterly horrifying sensation of walking across the floor in two different directions and sitting down in two different chairs. Realizing only that there were two of her, she tried to make one rise and join the other, found that she could not.

"Stop it, Yancey," said the two voices of Madame Tung. "Sit down. Shut your eyes." Yancey Mears sat down and shut her eyes—all four of them.

She was trembling with shock, did her best not to show it.

"Will," called the Psychologist. "You have the best motor control of any of us. Will you try very hard to coordinate sufficiently to prop up Star?"

The Executive Officer grimly, carefully stepped across the two floors. As vertigo overcame him he fell sprawling and hitched the rest of the way.

The problem loomed enormously in his mind: Which one was him?

Which of the two Stars he saw was real? Which Will had knocked down which Star?

He tried to reach out and touch the Star that lay on the floor as the other Star watched, horrified, from against a stanchion.

He tried to reach out and touch this Star, snatched back his hand as though coals of fire had burned it, for there swept over him the blackness of space, the dead-black nothingness of something unspeakable and destroying.

Madame Tung, watching his every move, snapped: "No—the other you—see if you can control and differentiate."

Will reached out again, again he recoiled. He tried to blank out his mind completely, feeling that he was losing himself in a welter of contradictions impossible for anyone in his confused state to handle.

Lying on the floor, breathing deeply, he succeeded in calming himself a little—enough to send the slow oblivion of self-hypnosis flowing through his mind. He forced the Nepenthe on himself, leaving only a thin thread of consciousness by which to govern his actions.

When it was over, he remembered that one of his duplex person had remained on the floor and that the other had carried the unconscious Star to a seat.

"Good work, Will. Very good. Now see if you can superimpose yourself."

He tried, tried like a madman to bring those two parts of himself together. He tried, though a world of blackness lay between them and the very attempt was full of horror and dark mystery. By the same technique as before, he succeeded—at a cost that nearly left him shattered in mind. He breathed heavily and sweated from every square inch of skin.

Mamie Tung focused her eyes on the two figures, noted that there was the feeling of strabismus. As closely as she could figure it, the two into which everything had separated were divided by some unimaginable gulf. It was not space, for all the sense of blackness and cold. It could not be time; the mind rejected the insane paradoxes of "time travel"