To Conquer Chaos Read online

  “Did I tell you that?”

  “No.” Yanderman chuckled. “I didn’t even have to ask you. Am I right?”

  Conrad shivered. “Y-yes. Absolutely right. Is that the way everyone manages it?”

  “Most people do. It’s autohypnosis. Instead of a crystal ball on a chain, I could use my fingertip to make you go into trance. The—No, I’m wandering from the point. I was going to say that when you return from self-induced trance you have difficulty capturing the memories of your visions because so many of the things in them don’t connect with ordinary life, right? If you tried to recount them afterwards, you probably had to leave out a great deal because you couldn’t make sense of it.”

  “That’s so,” Conrad confirmed.

  “Which probably suggested that you’d had a mere dream. In dreams, logic doesn’t operate, and they’re just as hard to explain afterwards. Now imagine me questioning you during trance. I can’t see or hear what you’re experiencing. I have to put broad general questions, and you describe what you can. But what you’re seeing may not refer to anything you or I ever saw in waking life. For all I know, indeed, you may have had a vision already in which you saw this Station when it was in full operation—Granny Jassy might have had one, or anybody! But because it connected with what I’ve always until now believed to be sheer superstition, the tale of walking to other worlds, I’d have avoided putting the right questions to you. Can you follow me, or am I so tired I’m muddling you?”

  “I think I’m following all right. But this reminds me of what I meant to say at the beginning. This girl Nestamay—”

  “Who is very interested in you, I notice.”

  “If she hadn’t anyone else to choose except the one who got himself killed it’s hardly surprising!” Conrad snapped. “Let me finish!”

  “I’m sorry,” Yanderman murmured.

  “I’ve seen her in a vision. I tried to tell you earlier, but you said it was a family resemblance. It isn’t! The more I think about it, the more I’m sure. And I tell you something else I’ve remembered.” Conrad half-sat up and turned on one elbow, staring fiercely into the darkness.

  “It must be ten years or more since I bothered with a vision of the barrenland for any length of time. Did I tell you I had visions of the barrenland as well as of the area before it was barren?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised. Go on.” Yanderman sounded interested.

  Conrad took a deep breath. “Well, I’d almost forgotten that I didn’t always prefer to concentrate on the visions of the distant past. I suppose it must have been after I got interested in girls that I settled for that. There are always lots of people in the—uh—the pre-barrenland visions.

  “But I did sometimes have visions of the barrenland just being the way it is, with a few people in it here and there. I think I might have got caught up with these after Nestamay’s father came to Lagwich and was taken for a devil. I’d had all the kid’s grandiose dreams of becoming a famous thing-killer like Waygan the hornman, the father of the present one. It was probably with the idea of killing devils instead of things that I thought about the barrenland at all. I kept at it on and off for a year or two, and then lost interest.

  “It wasn’t till I realised Nestamay reminded me of something that the memory came back. I didn’t recognise her at once for two reasons, I guess: first, I was trying to recall a person, and in fact it was my soap-carving I was thinking of, and second, she’s changed.”

  “Family resemblance is still more likely.”

  “No! She’s changed. As though—oh, like growing up. In fact, that’s precisely it! My soap-carving looked like Nestamay as she would have been when she was a little girl, in spite of my trying to make it look like Idris nowadays. What’s more—” He checked with a strangled sound, and then resumed in a near-shout of frantic excitement.

  “I’ve got it! That was why I stopped bothering about visions of the barrenland! It was because in them I saw ordinary people instead of the fearsome devils I was after, to kill! I didn’t care about little girls and folk who looked like just anybody!”

  He dropped his voice again to an awe-hushed whisper, and finished, “Yanderman, I feel I’m beginning to remember all sorts of crazy things!”

  “A sensation that you’ve been here before? That you’ve seen this place already?”

  “Exactly!” Conrad was almost bouncing with excitement.

  “It’s an illusion,” Yanderman said, the words almost stifled by a healthy yawn. “It’s very common. It generally passes off in an hour or two at longest.”

  “But—!”

  “Conrad, life begins here very early in the morning,” Yanderman interrupted. “I think we ought to go to sleep, or when they show us over the Station in the morning we won’t understand anything we see.”

  “It’s not an illusion,” muttered Conrad obstinately. But Yanderman didn’t answer, except by rolling over noisily on his make-shift bed and yawning again even louder.

  XXII

  Twelve hours later Conrad sat moodily in the hot sun, a piece of unsalvaged scrap of indeterminate purpose serving as a stool, and tossed pebbles from hand to hand.

  It wasn’t that he had meant to be rude to Nestamay, he explained furiously to himself. It was just—

  Well, over there, for example: Yanderman talking intently to Maxall, being fluent and knowledgeable about things of which he had no direct experience, making a tremendous impression on the old man as he had already done on Keefe, Egrin and all the others. It wasn’t fair. The clues and hints he was drawing on were taken from him, Conrad, the one with the gift of seeing into the past—and Conrad himself couldn’t make use of them.

  Yanderman’s explanation of why not was very convincing. It was perfectly true that his visions had always had a dreamlike quality which rendered them difficult to recapture. But being right on that score didn’t make him right on everything!

  With a rebellious expression Conrad flung his pebbles into a patch of dust.

  Why should his feeling of having seen all this before be a mere illusion? Yanderman was willing enough to accept that his visions of the barrenland before it was barren corresponded to a past reality; wasn’t there room in a span of four and a half centuries for a whole lot of true visions? The more he thought about it, the more Conrad came to the conclusion that he really had visualised parts of this area around the so-called Station in the brief period following the arrival of the “devil”—Nestamay’s father—at Lagwich. He hadn’t been interested in things like that for long. Other visions, those in which he dreamed of a prosperous and fertile landscape populated by marvellous people with astonishing powers, offered a more attractive contrast to the boredom and depression of reality.

  The haunting, disquieting sensation of almost remembering had come and gone during the whole of this morning. Every now and again it had become acute—when Maxall was showing them the device which maintained their clothing, for example, and again when he showed off the solar power accumulators and the heatbeams which had drained them yesterday.

  It was terrifying, Conrad reflected in passing, how narrow a margin these people had between survival and extinction. A single thing as big and dangerous as yesterday’s not only did extensive damage—a working party had been busy since dawn assessing the result of its blind passage to the outside from its point of emergence in the dome—but also wasted their stored power so that everything depending on it failed. Today was bright and sunny, so the recharging would proceed quickly. But on an overcast day it would be fearful, having to wait and watch the power supplies creep back to a useful level, knowing that at any moment the alarm might signal a vicious monster and the heatbeams were temporarily out of service—

  Wait a second.

  Conrad turned and stared towards the broken whaleback of the gigantic dome. He didn’t know much about the storage or use of this hard-to-conceive energy; in Lagwich, things like cornmills and looms were driven by inefficient single-cylinder steam-engines, but that
was about the most advanced machinery he had ever come in direct contact with. Nonetheless, out of the mist of half-memory which this place evoked in his mind a few vague concepts were beginning to emerge.

  It seemed logical that if everything else which still operated here at the Station, like the clothing machine, the ovens, and the heatbeams, required a supply of power, then the mysterious, capricious entity supposed to be screened by the dome and the impenetrable jungle of alien vegetation would require power also. Where was it coming from? Presumably, from the same source—the solar accumulators. The … the production … no, the transport of things from their own worlds (Conrad was struggling now) must involve effort of some sort. Was this a fact he had recalled from a scene in one of his visions, or a simple exercise in deduction? He couldn’t decide, but there was a feeling of rightness about the idea.

  He glanced round, half-intending to go at once to Yanderman and put the suggestion to him. But Yanderman and Maxall, lost in discussion, were strolling away from him and around the curve of the dome.

  Conrad hesitated. Then he made up his mind. Until last night’s conversation with Yanderman he had been half-afraid of the offhand manner in which the older man could put him in touch, as it were, with his incomprehensible visions. He had assumed there was something almost magical about the crystal ball Yanderman employed. But if it was true that the tip of a finger would have served equally well, and if it was also true that sitting relaxed and staring fixedly at a mere pebble on the ground was a path into trance, why should he not attempt it himself? Not this time as a simple escape from boredom and misery, but with a deliberate purpose: to recapture the elusive visions now plaguing him with the sensation of having been here before.

  Conrad took a deep breath. He shifted his position on his uncomfortable perch and looked along the vast curve of the dome, trying to get straight in his mind what aspects seemed most familiar. He had only one incontestable point of recollection so far: the resemblance between Nestamay and his little carving. Was there anything else which struck him?

  The dome itself? He couldn’t be sure. And its most remarkable single feature—the tangle of unhealthy-looking vegetation spreading over the nearby ground and swarming up through gashes in the roof—had been so imprinted on his mind yesterday when the pitiable Jasper had emerged from it as a condemned victim that there was little point in trying to separate direct experience from apparent memory.

  Beyond that screen of leaves and stems, though, there was this half-godlike, half-demonic master of the Station’s fate: the organochemic cortex. What must it be like? Something which thought, presumably, after a fashion of its own. In his commonest visions he had encountered machines endowed not only with mobility but even with the ability to make decisions, designed to save their masters the trouble of attending to repetitive tasks varying only in minor detail. Conrad had no idea how such a machine could be arranged, yet it was comparatively easy to accept the concept if one had already agreed that it was possible to walk to other worlds. And even the knowledgeable Yanderman had been forced to give in on that score.

  So—the heart of the problem. Conrad stared with aching eyes at the masking foliage, hardly seeing that members of the daily working party were approaching from the southern side, spotting the deadly blackish forms of the plants’ seed-masses and either reaching up with long poles to smash them or trying to burn them with the feeble power available to the heatbeams.

  The thinking machine hidden in there … what must it be like? Anything like an ordinary human brain? Why not? Consider the long poles with which that working party was destroying the seed-masses. You want to reach something further away than you can grasp it, so you pick up a stick; your arm is a little like a stick, long and straight, so what you’re doing is making your arm longer. You want to go somewhere faster than you can walk; you get on a horse, which has four legs to your two and is stronger into the bargain. You start by looking for something which already does the same job, but more efficiently. If it comes to the job of thinking, why not start with the human brain as a pattern? Nothing else would be handy which was better at the job …

  Conrad gasped. For one ultimately shocking instant he had had the impression that he was no longer here, sitting on a chunk of scrap and staring at the dome, but in the dome and aware of looking at Conrad, and at Yanderman, and at Maxall, and at Nestamay and Keefe and Egrin and everybody and at the same time aware of what he was seeing and what Yanderman was seeing and Maxall and Nestamay and Keefe and Egrin and not only that but aware of things in the dome and beyond the dome not in any ordinary direction but as though the interior of the dome had become the mouth of an infinity of tunnels—help me!—reaching to an infinity of hells—help me!—through which a lost soul wandered—HELP ME!

  HELP ME!

  HELP ME!

  HELP ME!

  The moment wasn’t over. The moment was as infinite as that countless cluster of tunnels-through-nowhere, stretching forward and dominating his thinking as though a mould had been placed on his mind and squeezed tight for an infinitesimal quantum of time, leaving him helplessly altered. Subjectively it was like being tossed leafwise on a torrential river, battered by waves of concepts and impressions and deafened by a shriek saying HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME!

  Conrad moaned and clutched his temples, crazily fearing the blasting of the mental imagery now overwhelming him might smash physically out through the thin bones of his skull, smearing him black to his shoulders as Jasper had been smeared, condemning him to death in torment or death in the next second. The moan welled up and took the form of the inaudible scream echoing around his head. He was on his feet, swaying, and his throat was raw as he gave words to the mental message.

  “Help me! Help me! He-e-elp me!”

  But before the startled members of the nearby working party could reach him, he had fallen headlong—not into unconsciousness, but into a kind of hall of mirrors of delusion, in which the mirrors were whole human personalities, myriad in number, between which the blinding images reflected, reflected, reflected, and at eternally long last began to seem familiar, recognisable, interpretable into words.

  His eyes snapped open. He was lying on the rough bed where he had spent last night. Above him a curiously misshapen and discoloured form with pinkish bars crossing it—a hand holding a cloth. Nestamay’s hand holding a wet cloth with which she had been wiping his fever-hot face. She saw him come to himself and bit her lower lip in a seeming frenzy of worry.

  “He’s awake,” she said after a pause.

  The room swirled. Conrad found himself sitting up, not having formulated the intention, and was looking past the girl at her grandfather and Yanderman, who had been studying more of the old man’s treasured documents and now turned like two sections of a single unit to look and frame questions. There was no time for questions. There was only urgent actions.

  “Conrad! Are you—?” Yanderman began.

  “Listen!” Conrad exclaimed. “I have it now, but we’ve got to be quick.” He was scrambling up from the bed, twisting into a kneeling position facing them. “Do you hear me? I know what’s wrong and I know what has to be done! Maxall, you have to cut the power off—I mean … Well, stop it getting to the cortex but not completely, just hold it down to a sort of trickle and—”

  He stopped, aware that he wasn’t making sense to his listeners. A bead of sweat ran down his face like an insect.

  “Get a grip on yourself, Conrad,” Yanderman advised, moving close in an effort at reassurance. “You’ve had some kind of a shock, and—”

  “I know, I know!” Conrad clutched at his arm. “it’s because I’ve seen what’s got to be done! You were wrong about the visions people like me get—they’re not memories, they’re messages, and I’ve had a message that tells me what to do! We’ve got to cut back the power to the cortex.”

  “But this is impossible!” Maxall snapped. “We depend on it—it runs everything. If we cut off its power we starve, we freeze, we’re done f
or.”

  “But We’ve got to cut back the power. Not shut it off, just keep it low. Ohhh!” Conrad’s frantic words dissolved in a moan of desperation. “Look, is a madman crazy when he’s asleep?”

  “What?” Yanderman jerked his head.

  “Is a madman crazy when he’s asleep? I don’t think so. And he’s not dead, either, so it’s not killing him to make him sleep.” Conrad stared up at the low ceiling. “I almost have it all, you see, but I’m still—still arranging it. I think there’s a way of ensuring that only a trickle of power gets to the cortex, enough to keep the automatic things going like the heating and foodmaking, but not enough to—Oh, no wonder you don’t understand.” He slapped his thigh. “The most important thing is what I haven’t said.

  “Look, this—this thinking machine inside the dome. It’s laid out like a human brain. There’s a level which attends to routine matters, comparable to breathing, and this never stops or goes wrong and uses only a little power. But there’s another level, responsible for big decisions, which uses all the power it can get and when the power is low is—is unconscious.

  “And on this level the cortex has been hopelessly insane, with brief lucid intervals, for four hundred and sixty years, ever since it was infected with the disease against which the barrenland was created …”

  XXIII

  There was a stunned silence. Maxall broke it, shifting his weight with a scuffling sound as he spoke.

  “How do you know? I mean—how do you think you know?”

  Conrad felt an overwhelming wave of relief. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall of the hovel.

  “I’ll try and tell you, but it’s got to be quick, because there isn’t much time. It’s sunny today and the stored power is building up rapidly. My head’s full of pictures which I scarcely understand, all jammed in together in a single instant …” He pressed his fingers hard against his forehead. In a slow, effortful voice, with many hesitations, repetitions and gropings for words, he pieced out the explanation which had come to him.