Collected Tales Read online

  And the one hundred million people did not make much of an impression on the wilderness that had triumphed as the population dwindled under podian occupation. Here and there was a village, located near the mouth of a mine; and around the village were small cultivated fields. It was a world of contrasts: hunters with parabeams, atomic scientists, and farmers, isolated communities, and nomads who roamed the sky in small, simple but exceedingly fast planes.

  “Where did they have their headquarters?” Lura asked as they started out the following morning, tier face was less drawn and tired than it had been the previous day, and the scratches had all but healed under the expert medication of the villagers.

  “I know—approximately,” he admitted.

  She was worried. “Then we shouldn’t have stayed at the village last night. We know the podians will send for it. If we can’t go straight to it, we may be too late.”

  “I don’t think so,” he assured her with an ease he did not altogether feel. “They have many things to send for. It may be weeks before they get there. It probably isn’t very important to them.”

  Two days later they still had not located the building that had been both laboratory and home to Pawl’s sister and her husband. “Maybe I should take you to your uncle,” he suggested as they swept over the woodlands. “I can come back later and look for it.”

  She looked at him in amazement. “That would just be giving it to them. No, I’m staying with you until we find it.”

  His response was to notch the skycar into higher speed. He glanced appreciatively at the indomitable figure beside him and then resumed the endless peering at the terrain below.

  That evening, at sunset, they found the house, on a hillside, under the cover of great beech trees. They searched in haste through it. It was dangerous to be here at this time. Whenever possible the podians avoided sunlight. Radarlike perceptions enabled them to see at night as well as humans could in daylight. Their eyes, terrible though they were in appearance, had been evolved on a dark planet; they functioned well only under low intensities of visible radiation.

  Regular patrols went on ceaselessly, day and night; but special patrols, such as would be sent here, came preferably in darkness.

  Toward midnight they found the spool on which the calculations were recorded. They came out of the house and looked cautiously around. Far away a characteristic dim glow of light moved across the sky, and it was headed directly toward them.

  “We’ll have to get out of here fast,” he said. They ran to the skycar. “Do you know how to operate this machine?” he asked.

  She frowned. “Not: without instructions.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” he said.

  He could feel the familiar and dreadful numbness steal into the fringes and corners of his mind as the podian ship came swiftly nearer.

  He punched a space-time-direction sequence on the robopilot. Working against increasing mental pressure he dismantled the manual control and threw it out. He started the motor and notched it into full speed. The skycar leaped abruptly upward.

  He fell against the forward panel. He fumbled desperately in the compartment at his feet and found a heavy instrument. He thrust it into Lura’s hand; then he slapped her I viciously. The muscles in his body knotted convulsively as his senses gave way. “Hit me,” he said incoherently. “Hit me hard on the head.”

  When he regained consciousness the skycar was hurtling alone through the night. He rubbed the cramps out of his arms and looked at Lura. Her face was illumined faintly by the glowing instruments. He wiped the sweat gently off her forehead and ruefully touched the red welt on her face. Soon she awakened dazedly.

  “Sorry,” he said grimly. “I had to take the easy way out. I could fly it and you couldn’t. Was it bad?”

  She shook her head but could not speak.

  He peered intently through the darkness and then began to work on the robopilot. By this time she had recovered enough to speak: “Now what?” she asked.

  “Lucky for us. a robopilot is a sturdy instrument,” he said. “When I fell against it I damaged it a little. It’s going to be some job setting it down.” Nevertheless he managed to land the plane without incident. They slept exhaustedly until morning in the skycar.

  In a short time he managed to repair the robopilot and fashion a new manual control to replace that one he had thrown away.

  “We’re ready now,” he said. “Where do we go?”

  She grinned ruefully. “I know where he lives—approximately. That is, if he hasn’t had to move.”

  “That’s what they want,” he nodded soberly. “Independent experiments. New theories, new devices. But not enough co-operation to be dangerous. They keep us always on the move. But some day—” He did not give verbal expression to the old dream that sometime mankind would find a hideaway where the podians could not penetrate.

  They found the mathematician with little difficulty. He came hobbling out of a house that was much smaller than necessary, considering the abundance of cellulose all around. Pawl walked away in the woods, leaving the two alone for a while.

  He paced about under the trees. He was growing impatient. The idea which he had so casually conceived a few days before was growing in importance in his mind. Perhaps he was presumptuous in thinking that he might succeed where so many others had failed; yet there it was, he could find no flaw in his idea. He would have to investigate it.

  But not before he had seen to it that Lura would be safe—if there was such a thing as safety.

  When he got back to the house food was waiting for him. Old Vandergrift was in an expansive mood as they ate. “Took it up late in life,” he said, noticing Pawl’s glance at his white hair. “No one lives to be as old as I am if all he does is try to dodge them.”

  “Don’t have much social life, either,” continued the old man. “Nor much opportunity to see what some other person is doing in my line of work. We could make more progress if we could all work together. But, of course, if they took one of us, they would have all of our most advanced theory. As it is, one of us may discover a way to keep ahead of them, permanently.”

  “You’re a theoretician,” said Pawl. “I’d like to know your opinion of the patrols.”

  “Sure,” said Vandergrift, looking keenly at him. “I suspect your interest is more than casual.” Pawl nodded.

  The old man thought for a while before he spoke, “First of all the patrols are a compromise. A compromise between what they want in terms of safety for themselves, and what they can get from us in the way of scientific advancement. They control a good part of the galaxy. They could wipe us out easily if they wanted. But they don’t want to. We are their greatest natural resource. We are their brains.” Lura started to protest.

  “It’s true,” he said, ignoring her interruption. “They have some kind of mental or neural field around them that we don’t know anything about save for its effect on us. Within certain distances we are completely unable to resist them, and they can at will get any information from us they want. But their intelligence, though well organized, is not very high. In mental capacity we are far superior to them.

  “We perfected space travel, not the podians, although they use it now and it is denied to us. We took them off their dark, damp, cool planet and brought them here. It was an accident that we found them, but nothing thereafter was an accident, though we didn’t know it at the time.

  “A hundred years after we found them they are grown numerically stronger, and, acting in concert, took over before anyone realized what was happening. And when we were able to see it, it was too late. We tried to fight them, but by then we were confined to this one planet, those of us that were left. To keep us here they used a force field that we ourselves had invented. They had all the power by then, and they used our own weapons against us.”

  Old Vandergrift paused and drummed his finger absently on the soft, warm, plastic table. “It is important that you get the idea of the patrols exactly,” he said. “They could, of course, put a podian beside every man, woman, and child on earth. Then they would be taking no chance that we would ever succeed in devising a weapon capable of defeating them.

  “But they would not get the results they want. After the first generation they would have merely an extension of the podian mind. A larger, more capable extension, but it would have no more imagination than they have. It wouldn’t be any better than their own mind. And they know that is not good enough.

  “That’s why they use what the layman calls the mind patrol,” he went on. “The mathematician knows it as the probability patrol. This at once controls us and yet leaves enough freedom that we may hope to overthrow them. Without that hope we could not be interested in scientific progress.

  “You don’t think,” he said bitterly, “that we can supply all of our own economic needs to keep our science advancing? Plastics are plentiful. We make them from the forests which are everywhere around us.

  “We’ve picked the ruins of our old cities for metal, and we have our own mines. But we still run short of certain metals, especially since there is only air transportation any more. Where do you think we get those metals? Exactly.”

  He fell silent and resumed eating. But Pawl wanted more information. After waiting for a sufficiently long period he asked quietly, “Now I know why they have the patrols. But I still don’t know how they work.”

  The old mathematician looked up testily. “Of course. If they sent their ships in a predetermined pattern over the earth they would get—nothing. The bulk of the people would remain in one place, and the research workers would move once or twice in ten years. To avoid this result, they have introduced a random element into the patrol.”

  “Then it was Hall’s idea that these patrols could sti
ll be evaded by the proper application of math,” Lura ventured timidly.

  “Wrong,” snapped Vandergrift. “That was Steinberg’s idea. Hall merely wanted to evade them in any way he could. The two men worked together, and Hall wrote about their work. It’s the old story. The man who popularizes a theory gets all the credit for it. Though don’t misunderstand me: Steinberg was in full agreement with what Hall was doing.”

  “That’s what I want to know,” persisted Pawl. “What was Hall working on?”

  “Who knows?” answered the mathematician sardonically. “He was a great one for telling us what we must do. He said that if we had a little enemy, in ten years we might devise something that could defeat them. A bigger enemy might require twenty years of uninterrupted work. But an enemy that controls much of the galaxy, an enemy that could destroy, not just the earth, but the whole solar system any time they thought it necessary, that enemy might require a thousand years of work.

  “But what he was doing, he didn’t say. All I know is that he was fond of quoting an old biologist whose name I believe was Holt: Heredity is the development of the fertilized ovum in the womb.” The white-haired patriarch paused and looked around.

  Pawl shook his head. “Let’s skip the biology. That’s not my field. What about the electronic devices he was supposed to have been working on?”

  Vandergrift grunted. “Nobody knows. Nothing was ever found.”

  “His children took them to the podians,” said Lura vindictively.

  “You have a fixation on his children,” answered her uncle. “I myself have talked to an old man who last saw the children of both Hall and Steinberg. Their parents had just died, and they were on the way to the place they ultimately settled. There were four of them. Two Steinbergs and two Halls. The oldest was eighteen, the youngest was twelve.

  “Aside from the. clothing they wore, they had only these things: one small hand weapon, a few dresses their mothers had worn, and the pallet!, they had slept on when they were younger.”

  “So that proves they didn’t take them. But they still might have destroyed them,” insisted Lura.

  Vandergrift smiled sadly. “Maybe they destroyed the devices, I don’t know. But, in any event, there is no use blaming them for it. I’ll tell you why.

  “Both Hall and Steinberg paid a lot of attention to their children. They worked with them constantly. And yet they were never able to achieve very much. The children had no conception of the podian role in human affairs; they were never even very bright.

  “An autopsy was performed on the two men after their death. One thing was revealed which is not widely known, because we don’t like our great men to have defects. Both men had structurally abnormal brains. Brilliant? Yes. But defective.

  “Their children, especially in view of their behavior, which was queer, and definitely abnormal, were undoubtedly structural—morons. This is the opinion of the best psychiatrists of their day.”

  “So it was impossible for them to carry on the work of their parents,” Lura said contritely. “And all my life I’ve hated them—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said her uncle. He arose and looked at the spool of calculations. “And now I’m going to quote something else to you. A woman named Emily wrote this long ago:

  ‘I dwell in possibility

  A fairer house than prose.

  More numerous of windows,

  Superior of doors.’

  “Substitute one word, probability, and that describes mathematicians in this age.”

  “It doesn’t quite rhyme,” protested Lura.

  Vandergrift smiled quizzically at flier, and went to the projector. Soon he was deeply immersed in the theory.

  The following morning Pawl awakened early, but the mathematician was already working. It was easy to see that he was greatly concerned. “It makes a small but important addition to one factor,” he explained. “And that can mean the difference between capture and freedom. I wish I had a faster machine to calculate this position.”

  He was overjoyed to find that Pawl had such a machine with him. “Their pattern isn’t as random as, say, the air molecules in a given quantity of gas. They have limited forces to use and a large territory to cover. So they have introduced modifications; they don’t give the same coverage to the oceans as they do the land. No need to.”

  “What kind of a patrol do they have on the ocean?” asked Pawl.

  “They have divided it into zones. On the open ocean, with no islands in it, they have a straight radar patrol, automatic, and very high speed. Many of the small islands they have—eliminated. Where there are clusters of islands they use a combination radar-mind patrol.” He chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t work. Nothing has ever escaped their radar patrols. They can probe down to the bottom of the ocean. By the way, that’s why caves won’t work either.”

  He turned back to his calculations.

  Pawl looked at the one old man working at the tiny machine. “The podians have a machine a thousand feet square to use,” he said hopelessly.

  “I know,” said the old man, his eyes shining, “but I have two advantages. I am looking for one spot where they won’t come: they have to account for the entire earth. They have a better machine to work out their equations on, but I have a more complex formulator.” He tapped his head and went back to work.

  In eight hours he looked up cheerfully. “Good thing you brought this to me.”

  “Then we’re not safe here,” said Lura.

  “Sure we are,” said the old man. “For about twenty hours. Plus or minus.”

  Pawl jumped to his feet. “Then let’s get out of here. We’ll take what we can. The rest we’ll have to leave.”

  Vandergrift smiled. “Where shall we go?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I will in about eight hours. No, make it seven. I’ve got the hang of your machine by now,” he said blandly. “I know that this area is going to be isolated and investigated, but I don’t know how much of this area. Before we can move, I must find out what areas are not going to be involved in the near future.”

  He bent over the calculator and began feeding equations to it. “I could use large quantities of black synthoffee. And you two can be loading the skycars with my possessions.

  It didn’t take long to load his belongings: the microlibrary, the plasto digester and foam sprayer, the large paralield generator, an assortment of hand weapons, the small and primitive synthetic food converter, and the personal odds and ends that accumulate in the course of sixty years.

  The hours passed slowly for Pawl and Lura, who could only stand and wait. But in six hours the mathematician was finished, beating his estimated schedule. With a sigh he raised his red-rimmed eyes from his work. “I think I’ve found a place where we will be safe for some time to come. It’s far away, near the Atlantic seaboard.” He lifted the calculator into his skycar, “Follow me in your machine.”

  It took them four hours to get out of the area that Vandergrift considered immediately dangerous. Thereafter they flew more slowly for a long time until they came to a wooded valley near, but not too near, a village. Once they landed the old man stretched out under a tree and almost instantly was asleep.

  The house was built by the time he awakened. A few trees were felled with the vibra saw, cut into lengths and fed into the plastic digester, and then sprayed rapidly into the desired form which hardened on contact with air. The basic raw material was all around them.

  The old man looked at it appreciatively. “Much fancier than I build myself.” He leaned against the wall and turned to Pawl. “I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to ask you. When are you going to the cave?”

  “In a few days,” answered Pawl. “First I want to rewire your Synthetic food converter. You might as well have more variety in your food.” There was this task before him, of course.

  This, and the extensive alterations to the skycar.

  He was both pleased and sorry to leave Lura and her uncle. It was clear to him that he was more than merely fond of the beautiful, indomitable girl. Yet it was obvious that, without a basic solution to the problem which confronted all mankind, any relation he might have with her would come to a sudden and catastrophic end. He was a realist, a product of his age. He questioned the value of a relationship that existed under terror, threatened constantly with involuntary dissolution.