The Early Pohl (16 page)

I woke up in a strange room. . . . Well, I am no traitor, though I may be about to become one, here in this room with a city burning about me and an empire dying. They shall not make me one, whatever devilish—or human—torture they bring to bear on me. Even though Collard has turned renegade to the Four and the Four, even though I have added to his disgrace and mine by not killing him when I might have, I shall not betray what I have sworn to revere.

What I learned in those one hundred days I am bound by oaths on the linked triangles of the Other People not to reveal. I will not tell, though Collard may.

I learned much. I am no longer quite human, even in appearance. Great strength is mine now, and I, like the Others, need never sleep. Solid, tormented days we spent in the ray chambers, I and the other three young men who were chosen with me. Had you seen us before the one hundred days, seen the four of us together, you might have thought we were brothers. The rigid tests of the masters insured that, with their emphasis on great height, strength and vitality.

But when the hundred days were through—we were identical; stamped of the same mold, forged in the same fires of growth, milled on the same sharp edge of learning.

The animal pinkness of human flesh left us, and our skin took on a greenish cast, as chlorophyll cells were absorbed into us. We can swallow up pure light energy and convert it, like a plant, to heat and force. Our flesh was transmuted in other ways, to great tensile strength. Oh, we have to eat still. But the food is only for the replacement of cells which die and wear off, not for energy.

The one hundred days passed quickly. Collard and I, and two others who do not matter, being dead, were the four youths. The Four and the Four are not all trained together. The four maidens are taught and rebuilt to be simple recorders, animate libraries for the use of the Others.

They also are placed in ray chambers, but the rays that flood their bodies, tear them down and rebuild them, are of a different order. The retentive capacity of their brains is increased, and the other functions become lesser. Physically they are not changed, for they need not be. The wise Others do not tamper with what need not be changed.

This is what is done with the four maidens. I may tell it, for it is no secret. Collard will be on his way back to Earth soon, arrowing through the void at mind speed, the first human to make the trip in that direction.

I pray that the Others will be prepared for him. But whether they are or not this secret is out.

The Others on Earth are constantly studying, always learning. All men know what they study—the Earth, and its unexplored potentialities. What they learn is telepathically transcribed on to the ray-sensitized brains of the four maidens. The maidens learn to be telepathic in their one hundred days. They receive a burden of knowledge, four of them each year.

And when they have absorbed al1 that has been learned by the Others in their year, they are sent back to the green world from which the Others came.

The four youths bring them there; that is our destiny.

I shall not tell you how, for if Collard dies that must remain a secret. But the crowns we wear have much to do with it. They are, as Gibbs said, a perfect weapon and a perfect shield. They are also a perfect vehicle. With their aid we can spurn gravity, cast the Earth aside, cleave the thin air at light speed. Nor need we breathe, and so we can travel the space between the planets.

Enough of that. I can still see the machine in my mind's eye, and the flames still dance above the stricken city. My hour, too, is running short.

The one hundred days ended, and we were not men any more. We were gathered together, the four of us, plus the two Others who had supervised our training. One of the Others spoke, bid us take off the human garments we wore and dress in purple-red coveralls, ornamented with the linked triangles of the Others. Self-healing, perfectly insulated, these would prevent our absorbing too much energy from the naked rays of the sun while still in Earth's vicinity, yet would keep us warm when we attained outer space, en route to the far star around which spun the planet of the Others.

While he was talking, a zip-ship sighed into the air overhead and slowly settled down beside us, the wide purple fans of its underjets lighting up the darkness all around. Overhead the calm stars twinkled. There was no moon.

A couple of humans—special police, clad in tunics and emblems like ours, but without the crowns—were running the ship. One opened the port and stepped out. His companions inside handed limp white figures out to him—the four maidens. He deposited them gently on the ground. Then, without a word to any of us, he got back in the ship. The port closed and it lay quiescent, waiting for the girls to be removed so that its jets could flare without cremating them on the spot.

There were no last-minute instructions. We knew what we were to do. Collard and I and the other two walked over to the unconscious, unbreathing maidens, whose life-processes had been suspended by the science of the Others to fit them for the journey through airlessness.

We picked them up, clasped them under our arms. They were light burdens, for they were only girls. Attractive girls, surpassingly beautiful, even, for only superior physical and mental specimens get into the Four and the Four.

The Others stood and watched us, without words. There was nothing they needed to tell us. Collard was the leader, he with his strange streak of humanity in him, human strength that did not have the chill rigidity of the strength of the masters, but could bend and give way where their strength broke, and then return; Collard looked around at the remainder of us and saw that we were ready; Collard seized the leadership, and it was he who said the word of command.

And all of us, four youths and maidens, set out on an incredible journey. Each man of us raised up his arm. Each of us willed the pull of gravity to relinquish its hold, denied the existence of weight and Earth-pull. We rose into the air with gathering speed.

A moment, and we were shrieking through the dense air of the lower strata, not looking down or back, but conscious that the Earth was dwindling underneath. A moment after that and the air was a thin, weak thing that no longer held us back. Coldness began to seep in. Our lungs worked hard, until the soothing, tingling power of the crowns and the heat suits took hold, and warmth and air were luxuries we did not need.

And then, not abruptly, there was no air.

The trip may have been long; I have no way of knowing, for the time was not like the passage of hours or days on a planet. Onward we fled, faster until even the stars were crawling about in space, and we could see them slide slowly behind us. Their colors changed and disappeared. Behind us the stars were red; ahead, deep, smoky violet. And then, quickly, all the stars were ahead of us, with different colors being the only thing that showed where they really were, as we caught up with and passed the light rays that came from behind. Faster than light—infinitely faster—we went, while the stars crept slowly around and winked from violet to red as we fled past them.

Then we knew by the signs we had been taught to watch for that we had arrived. And our wills, greater than human and multiplied by the crowns we wore, changed their impulse and concentrated on slowing us, stopping us.

Picture us there in space, the Four and the Four. Four men whose only life was in the mind for that time, whose bodies might as well not have been. And the girls we carried across the void, unmoving and rigid as ourselves. . . .

But we slowed and slowed more, and a green planet detached itself from the twinkling cosmos of stars that again were beating at us with white rays and blue, and red and yellow and all of the normal colors. The green planet grew larger.

It might have been a dozen seconds, and it might have been a thousand years since our journey had begun. But there we were, standing on a strange blue-green earth, moving our arms and legs again, breathing once more. And unhurriedly there walked toward us one of the Others, moving without strain on this light world, looking at us as he came. He had been waiting. He had known when we would come. . . .

2
Green Planet of Madness

Collard looked in at me. I cannot have much time left, by the expression on his face. There was pity there, and a curious friendliness that frightens me. He must believe that his mind machine will warp my brain, make me betray the Others. Absurd! Why, his machine is compounded of the science of the Others and their superhuman artisanry. He stole it from them, as he stole the strength and intellect they gave him in his training for the Four and the Four. He—

It does not matter. I must be brief.

There were bad things even on the planet of the Others. I was prepared for that, for I knew that nothing was perfect, not even in the wisdom of the masters. Collard was not prepared for it, with his curious human optimism that could not be wiped out of him; with his impossible ideals.

The one who had been waiting for us when we landed asked no questions, made no remarks. He beckoned us to follow him, and we carried the girls into a strangely un-ornate building, that looked as though it had been poured in magenta glass around the thing it was built to house. It had odd shapes and angles, curious wavy buttresses cascading away from the main structure, but they were not for decoration. You could see that they were needful to the purpose of the building.

Inside—there were rows upon rows of slabs, many empty and waiting. But most were in use. At the head of each of them there was a mind machine, like the mind machine the Others used to read and mold thoughts in the tests for the Four and the Four, like the machine that Collard cannot wait to use on me. At the foot was a cylinder of crystal, and a box under each cylinder that droned and pulsed. And in the space between, on each slab, there lay the figure of a girl of the Four and the Four.

A hundred of them at least there were, in this one room. There are four each year, and the pick of Earth's young girls for a quarter of a century lay somnolent on plastic, molded slabs there before us.

Many of them were no longer beautiful. Some were no longer human.

Each cylinder of crystal at the slab-foot was filled with a bluish red fluid that was blood, and each cylinder had two flexible crystal tubes running out from it, sinking themselves at the ends into the flesh of the girls. That was what gave life to the girls who had been of the Four and the Four. That and nothing else, for they were unmoving, rigid. The eyes of each girl were closed, and only slowly did their bosoms rise and fall; only slowly did the pale veins pulsate in their throats.

The Other gestured, and we carried the girls in, put them on empty slabs at the end of the long row. We left them there, and another of the masters came in and opened a case that held sharp steel knives. He took one out, slowly, carefully, and walked over to the slabs with their new occupants. At the door Collard paused, turned, looked back. The little muscles under his cheeks were quivering and his jaw was rigid.

I touched his arm. He looked at me uncomprehendingly, then turned and walked out with the rest of us.

Two more of the Others passed us going in.

I did not look back to see what they did. But they wore mind-reading crowns, and I believe they were going already to tap the reservoir of knowledge we had brought them.

That first thing sowed a seed of doubt in Collard, It did not in me, for I was and still am aware that humans, even those of the Four and the Four, live only by the tolerance of the Others and at their disposal. Still, it was—not pleasant.

What hurt even me, and what turned Collard into the wretched creature of rebellion that he is now, was something that happened only slowly and took a long time to penetrate. It came to us gradually that we had done our job. We were no longer necessary. That for which we had been chosen and trained had been accomplished, and we were through.

Oh, the Others gave us work to occupy us. I tended a machine in a great hall where a thousand wheels revolved and shifted direction. It was work that was pleasant, and it was necessary for someone to do it, for even the best machine must have a brain to back it up.

Collard had work, too. With delicate, tiny spectroscopes and other miraculous tools he had to sort and analyze specimens of minerals from the deep subsurface regions of their own planet that the Others were still exploring. A machine could have done Collard's job, but there was no machine. And there were too few samples to warrant constructing one, while a human could do the work.

Those two who had come with us had work also. And we met more than a score of other men in that city to which we were taken, a short distance from the crypt where the dead-alive girls lay on their plastic slabs, their minds open to the probing of the Others. Only a little more than a score of men were there, though, and they could not tell us what had happened to the men who were missing.

Our jobs kept us busy. But they were—unsatisfactory. What we did could have been done by anyone on the human Earth.

Those who had been on the green planet for the longest time showed clearly that they had realized their unimportance, and were hurt by it. There were lines in their faces, bleakness in their eyes.

They would not talk much, those who had been longest on the green planet. Not to me. But Collard was with them whenever he and they were not working. Always they were talking in low tones that became silent when I came near.

A dozen weeks, in the green world's time, that went on. Collard spoke to me hardly at all, though often I saw him watching me as though he were about to say something. He never did.

Then he disappeared.

Five of the older men went with him. They walked out of our living quarters to work—and never returned.

The Others came around several times then to look us over, murmuring and clicking to themselves in their incomprehensible tongue. And I saw that other men were beginning to show lines curving around the corners of their eyes, to keep silent and look watchfully at everything that went on. For days it was clear that the Others were giving us unwonted attention. Wherever I went there were always one or two of them somewhere about, working at something but looking at me from time to time, almost speculatively, almost with apprehension. From the men I quartered with, I learned that they had the same experience. I could not understand—