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

"Nonsense. I mean your question is a contradiction in terms. Quantity has nothing to do with it. What you see there is something in the land of might-have-been. That it happens to be something unpleasant makes no difference."

"It does to me," said Yancey positively.

"Then be thankful that you aren't hyperspatial Siamese twins with a corpse, like the survivors among the ordinaries. Or all dead any way you figure it, like Star."

She rubbed her hands over the calculating machinery, again in its neat rows and aisles. Experimentally she punched keys here and there, abstractedly fishing for the stolen knowledge which worked her fingers.

Suddenly, furiously, she set to work, immersing herself in figure-tapes, swinging around herself a mighty rampart of the basic machinery.

Yancey and Will tiptoed away, superfluously. For it would have taken a hammer blow on the head to interrupt the combined willpower of two such formidables as the late Star Macduff and the present Madame Mamie Tung.

The Executive Officer visited the ordinaries that were left, found a few men of strong fiber who had refused to succumb to the terror that had gripped the ship. He explained simply what had happened, and they accepted the explanation as their due after a very difficult time. He taught them the technique—which they had stumbled on by themselves in a haphazard way—of concentrating on one path of probabilities and the advisability of staying there, since any moment the other might vanish into the great unknown.

Only then did he begin to puzzle himself over what had happened—

who their boarders had been, how they had done this to Sphere Nine.

He recalled what they had said, which was little comfort but sound sense. They had assured him that he could not possibly understand their motivation for behaving as they did. Yancey told him that if this was a sample of their own behavior she most heartily agreed.

Madame Tung emerged from the calculations room with a splitting headache and a fistful of formulae from which tubes could be constructed to build up something new in electromagnetic phenomena—a probability field which could be applied in this one very special case to good effect.

They constructed the thing with ease, hosed the ship with it, and were gratified to see the other path vanish—the path of the lunatic Yancey, the skull-split Star, the murdered ordinaries, and the cataleptic Mamie Tung and Will Archer.

"Landing?" asked Mamie.

"Why not?"

"I can't argue on those grounds, Will. But what happened on your stern resolution to take a sample of the protosphere and run back to Earth?"

"You're the Psychologist. You tell me."

"Those strangers had some violent impact on us. Behind their fronts was something enormously intriguing. You're full of what killed the fabulous cat."

"Right. And I'm not going to rest until I find out how that protosphere came about, and what it means to us."

"Oh, I can tell you that," said one of the visitors stepping through the hull. "Insofar as anyone can tell anyone else anything in this symbology of yours."

"Talk fast," said Will stiffly. "Our time is important."

The stranger chuckled delightedly. "I could give you all the time you want," he said. "I gave you all the probabilities you wanted. I could have given you an infinite number, practically. How much time did you say you wanted—twenty thousand years? A hundred thousand? And in the past, present or future?"

"No thanks," said Will hastily. "You were going to tell us about the protosphere."

"I was. It's our garbage-can, in a way. We had our neat little solar system, well-balanced around two suns; and then the most appalling junk came flying into it, blowing things out of kilter, tipping the balance one way or another …so we invented protoplasm and started a ring of it out in space, gave it directives, fed it on rubbish, finally curved it around so it was a perfect shell. If we'd known the trouble it'd cause, really, we wouldn't have bothered. We thought it was an advantage that it reproduced automatically; that saved us making all the stuff ourselves. But apparently it shoots off spores, too, and they land on planets outside; and the most appalling things—like you—happen along a few million years later and want to change everything to suit yourselves. Was there anything else?"

"May we land on one of your planets and look about?"

"Why? It's so much simpler this way."

"This" was almost too theatrical to be convincing. There appeared on the wall of the office a busy little motion-picture complete with sound of a planet which had two suns in its sky.

It was a city scene, sleek vehicles buzzing along the streets, well-dressed men and handsome women strolling past, greeting each other with a grave nod, smiling, dashing children, here and there an animal suggestive of the horse.

One of the buildings, apparently, was on fire. The scene wavered a little, then angled upward to catch flames shooting from a window, a woman leaning out and calling for help.

The streamlined equivalent of a fire-truck roared up, shot up a device that resembled the Indian Rope Trick; a valiant male swarmed up it and packed the female down. When they reached the ground the end of the Indian Rope Trick squirted water at the fire, the rescued woman kissed her fireman enthusiastically, and the wall was blank again.

Madame Tung was the first to laugh cynically.

Their visitor looked at her more in sorrow than anger, his eyes heavy beneath their brows. "So? You would rather see the truth?"

"I think I would," said the golden-skinned woman.

"You shall."

Madame Tung prepared herself for more home movies, but they were not forthcoming. Instead there grew and spread in her brain an image of power, power inconceivable, roaring in noise, flaring in light, sparking in electric display, fusing in heat, running a mad gamut of the spectrum in every particle. She shut her eyes the better to contain it, for it was magnificent.

The display softened, shrank, seemed to cool. She had an image then of a sort of personified lightning, a tight etheric swirl packed with electrons and alpha particles in rigid order—a great thing twenty feet tall and five feet wide by five feet, with six radiating arms that burned what they grasped and blasted what they struck to powder. There were no feet; she saw the object travel somewhat as Sphere Nine traveled—

by aiming itself and discharging sub-atomically.

There were features of a sort, something that she would call a mouth at the very top of the body, a member which ingested occasionally bits of matter which would rebuild it indefinitely or until some trying task.

There were sensory organs—a delicate, branching, coraline thing that apprehended radiations of any order.

And in the very center of the electric vortex and a little above the midriff was one incalescent blaze of glory that carried to the dazzled inner eye of Mamie Tung the idea of BRAIN. It bore intelligence, appreciation, art, beauty—all the diffuse concepts packed about by man as surplus baggage.

She saw the thing bend its sensory organ at her, study her, saw the corresponding pulsations of the brain within it. She felt it reach out to establish contact with her mind, and welcomed it eagerly.

It must have been a glorious death, especially so for a mind like that of Madame Tung, new, brave and challenging. But death it was, and her friends caught her body in their arms. Silently and reproachfully they regarded their visitor.

"You too," he asked softly, "would you too rather see the truth?"

They let the golden-skinned woman to the floor.

"Before you go," said the man who had come through the hull, "is there anything I can do?"

"There is. It is what we came for. You may have noticed that we emit certain rays characteristic of protoplasm. As we are the fruit, so your protosphere is the core. It emits rays of great intensity which interfere with our genetic experiments. Could you mask those rays?"