I Speak for Earth Page 5

  Briaros frowned. “You reported that it was successful,” he began. Schneider cut him short.

  “Successful! Yes! Physically and technically it was a success. We achieved this transfer of the delicate physical counterpart of personality, and its restoration, and here I am and talk to you. But—there are diffiulties. I hardly know how to explain to you. You realize you are what you are?”

  “You mean that I—” Briaros bit his lip. “You mean I am the physical I? But obviously!”

  “No, no!” said Schneider impatiently. “I speak this badly. Realize that you are subject to your glands, your digestion, your tiredness, your muscle tone or lack of it, your eyes, everything. Your personality includes your subconscious—as though in the back of your mind there was always a hum, a carrier wave, all the nerve signals from the involuntary muscles and the organs of the body. Do you see? But we cannot carry that to another body! Personality, yes, memory, yes, learned skills, yes. Assume that you have lived till now in this body; to change to another is to shift the house of your life to another foundation, perhaps irregular. There will then be cracks in the walls through subsidence. There will be weakenings. You understand?”

  “You mean that there’s a risk of insanity in the candidates? During the test?”

  Schneider shook his head and spoke in a voice of forced optimism. He said, “I think not. Not in the others, that is to say. They are very stable. The short period of a month on the other foundation will not weaken them much. It is only I about whom I worry.”

  Briaros said slowly, “This sounds ominous.”

  “I do not try to make it so. Imagine, though: imagine that after more than fifty years of life in this body, feeling its muscles, knowing its ways, I look suddenly to the mirror and I—and I!—see the face of a woman. That face is more familiar than my own; it is my wife’s, so close to me. Yet I am inside it! And not the face alone. The body, you understand? The physical difference is incredibly minor; the mind makes substitutions automatically, and finds the counterparts of what it is used to. But that is a strain. I am not certain beyond doubt that I can stand the strain a second time.”

  He finished, and looked at Briaros with an air of dignity.

  “Why do you bring this to me?” said Briaros at last.

  “To whom else could I bring it?” said Schneider calmly.

  Briaros rose abruptly to his feet and began to pace the carpet. After two passes, he halted and swung to face the psychologist.

  “Do you wish to withdraw?” he snapped.

  “I have committed the blunder of making myself indispensable,” said Schneider in a voice little above a whisper.

  “That’s not a blunder. It’s a foregone conclusion.” Briaros’s forehead showed a little shiny with perspiration. “But do you want to withdraw?”

  No.”

  “Do you honestly think it would be better for the success of the project if you did?”

  Schneider spread his hands helplessly. “I cannot tell!” he said. “I know—you understand? I know—that it would take as long again for someone else to learn, to accept with his insides, the things I have learned in developing my miracle. I must stay. Yet I am afraid that I will break.”

  “Because of the strain you talked about?”

  “Because of age,” Schneider said. “We do not call men of fifty and sixty old, not today. But after fifty years, the personality has been so shaped and formed by its accustomed “carrier waves,” as I called them, in its own brain in its own body, that the change finds it too rigid to adjust. The other candidates are all young, none over thirty-six. They will flex, perhaps, yield enough to absorb the impact of the shock. But a second time might destroy me.”

  Briaros said at long last, “Don’t let it, Fritz. Whatever you can do to prevent it, do it! On you more than on anyone else hangs the future fate of this planet Earth!”

  VIII

  FROM BEING a focus, Joe Morea felt he had suddenly changed into smuggled goods. His belongings and himself were both handled in the same careful but impersonal way: hurried from the project building through the streets and on to the superway to the airport, in a humming car painted UN yellow. His driver was a silent, burly man who drove as though he were being followed. Almost certainly, the car was being followed.

  Joe was pretty sure he would discourage attempts to get a conversation going. That suited his mood perfectly. Leaning back in the rear of the car, he stared out at the evening, thinking about the past and the future.

  Darkness was falling. Lights everywhere fought against it. He looked down at himself, at the driver, at the drivers and passengers in other cars, thinking about alien intelligence.

  How would it feel to be Gyul Kodran, coming to Earth and looking at this same scene through unhuman eyes? What would one remark—on the curious artefacts: the buildings, possibly hinting at man’s simian descent, because they reared up skyward; cars, strangely shaped, propelled by unfamiliar devices; clothing, peculiar, uncomfortable, dictated by whim rather than reason.

  Joe found himself looking at a particular teen-age girl, standing at the edge of the road waiting for a crossing signal, and realized he wasn’t seeing her. He was seeing Maggie.

  He wondered if Schneider would keep his promise and make sure that letter reached her. Why not? Well, there were a dozen reasons why not. The moment it was announced or leaked out that he was a candidate or that anyone else was a candidate, there would be a storm of opposition from people who thought they knew better.

  And there was someone who thought he knew better. Joe shot forward in his seat. Scrawled in huge day-glo letters on the parapet of the superway half a mile ahead was the slogan:

  SEND JUKES TO THE STARS!

  He watched the slogan till it whizzed past and was gone. Then he said to the driver, “Who in hell is Jukes?”

  “Jukes?” he said thoughtfully. “Jukes is a megalomaniac preacher. Runs the Pure Belief and Pure Behavior Church of New York.”

  There, was silence again. Joe turned the name over in his mind. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me,” he said at last.

  “His congregation think that’s wrong,” said the driver.

  “I see. What are they doing, then? Running a write-in campaign for him to represent Earth?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Are there a lot of write-in candidates?”

  “I guess you could say there were a lot of them. A sort of flood broke loose, these past few days.”

  “Such as?”

  “Man in Berlin who announced he was going on a hunger strike till he was chosen. They had to put him in an asylum in the end. ’Nother in Sicily, claiming that Gyul Kodran was sent by the devil and only the Pope could handle things up there in the Federation. Don’t know what exactly he wants the Pope to do. Exorcise them, maybe.” He gave a harsh chuckle. “And in Japan they say they want the Emperor to do the trip—say only someone who’s descended from the gods can cope with the problem. And then there’s these spiritualists—I heard about it from my wife, she got sort of tied up with mediums and people when our boy died a few years back. Seems they’re trying to persuade some Tibetan mystic or other to project himself on a beam of light out that way and prove that human beings are all pure and sweet and disembodied.”

  “What do you think about it?”

  The driver gave Joe a sidelong glance. He said, “Well, I tried to explain to my wife that a beam of light would be considerably too slow, but she wasn’t having it.”

  Joe almost missed the glint of humor in the driver’s eyes as he spoke; he caught it, though, and gave an appreciative chuckle. He said, “No, that’s not quite what I meant. I wanted to get your feelings about the job. Who do you think ought to go?”

  “Anyone but me,” said the driver. He slowed for the turn off the superway and into the airport precincts. “Yes, pal, anyone, but anyone, bar me!”

  A pretty good answer, reflected Joe. He was very tempted to go along with it all the way, and write it on
his own personal banner. “Anyone but me!” A quick way out. A good solution.

  Only—

  He asked himself, as the car pulled up, not in front of the passenger reception hall, but over to one side near a big van bearing the UN insignia and in sight of a yellow UN VTO Mach 5 express liner, why he wasn’t prepared to accept it.

  It wasn’t as though he himself was confident that they’d been right to choose him. He only had the word of Schneider and his team of experts, and presumably behind them the authority of the computers and every other source of knowledge that had been brought to bear on the problem.

  Well, all right. That was impressive. To be told with that kind of authority behind the information that you were right for the job implied its own confidence. But that in itself wouldn’t be enough to make him put up with what he’d already gone through, let alone begin to assume the appalling responsibility of representing Earth out there—

  For the first time, he really began to feel in his bones the load he would be carrying if he was the final selection of the six candidates. He felt a sort of icy blow strike him in the guts. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield not seeing anything, for fully half a minute after the driver opened the passenger door for him to get out.

  He came to himself abruptly, scrambled to the ground, and looked about him, still not seeing clearly. All he could think of was the idea that maybe he was ridiculously going through with all this for Maggie’s sake, like a knight-errant on a quest, to win his lady’s favor.

  He said suddenly, under his breath, “Damnation, there are worse reasons for doing something!”

  “Worse than what?” Schneider’s voice cut across his preoccupied mind, and he turned and saw the psychologist standing a yard from him, unnoticed.

  “Ah—nothing,” said Joe, felling unnecessarily embarrassed. “As a matter of fact, I just caught up with the realization of what it will mean if I’m the final selection. Doc, how in hell do you expect an intelligent man to accept that kind of responsibility?”

  Schneider gave him a level look. “Yesss,” he said softly. “It would be so far easier if we could only select a blockhead without imagination to trouble him. But what purpose would that serve? Do not fear, though. There will be—aids.”

  Aids? Joe turned the word around in his mind. He said, “You mean drugs or something? Tranquillizing drugs?”

  “Perhaps. That is something we have not yet finally established. Will you come across to the plane? I believe we are waiting to take off.”

  Joe fell into step beside Schneider and they began to walk unhurriedly toward the plane.

  “I think,” said Joe meditatively, “you’ve probably been dosing my food during my stay at the project. I certainly do have an imagination, and I’m beginning to wonder why I haven’t imagined all kinds of …”

  Schneider interrupted. “Yes! Yes, of course we have. A two-grain dose per day of meprobamate and assorted catalyzers. You should not object; it had enabled you to concentrate far better.”

  “I would object,” said Joe. “But for one thing. I mean, it’s pretty unkind to let me in for this by doping me.”

  “So what is the one thing which prevents you?”

  Joe shrugged. “That I’ve got to believe you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, who in hell does? We might as well quit cold, and tell the Federationers they can keep their damn galaxy.”

  “You wouldn’t like that,” said Schneider. It was a statement, not a question.

  “No—I guess I feel we deserve a chance to get out there with the rest of them. I feel we’ve worked hard enough at straightening ourselves out to deserve that much reward.”

  They were at the foot of the gangway up to the plane. Joe halted and glanced at the open door ahead. He said, “Are the others traveling with us?”

  Schneider shook his head. “You will meet them tomorrow. They are coming from different places.”

  “Where?”

  “Very well. From Shanghai. From Lagos. From Travancore. From Kiev.”

  “I hope we get on together,” said Joe, jokingly. He went up the gangway.

  Schneider did not accept the remark as a joke. He said very soberly, “It will be well if we do.”

  They and four men from the project, who sat by themselves at the rear of the passenger cabin, were the only people in the plane. They took seats together at the front. When the plane had climbed away from the airport and switched to its forward jets, Schneider inquired casually, “Have you ever been to the Pacific Islands before, Joe?”

  Joe shook his head. “I’ve just looked down at them, from Old Stormalong’s orbit.”

  “Some people say,” Schneider mused, “that we’re silly to be so eager to visit the stars when most of us never get the chance to see even half our own planet.”

  “Shortsighted of them, isn’t it?” said Joe.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, leave aside the people who are content to stay where they are. Maybe they’re scared; maybe they’re just lacking in imagination. One day, though, we’ll lick the old age problem. Then it will be possible for one man in a lifetime to get to know the whole of our little planet. And if we don’t grab our chance to widen our horizons now, we’re promised we won’t be allowed another.”

  Schneider took out a cigar and pierced the end judiciously. He said, “That’s a good point.”

  “I’ve got another,” said Joe after a pause.

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “Well, wherever you go on Earth, although you do find different ways of life and different languages and religions, all you get is people. Human beings. And human beings are all essentially the same. Sooner or later, we’re going to run out of differences—and in spite of everything that Gyul Kodran and his Federationers tell us, it’s the differences which have got us where we are. We need their stimulus to jolt us one step further along the path. One day we’re going to run out of them. We’re going to rub each other smooth and uniform, like pebbles on a beach. And if and when that happens, we’re going to rot.”

  Schneider nodded, his cigar between his teeth but still unlit.

  “And you think this is our chance to insure against it?”

  “I do indeed,” said Joe. His voice was fervent. “I was looking out at New York on the way here this evening—looking out the car window and trying to think how the city would look to an alien. You can’t do it. You can’t know how an alien would regard you unless you know the alien first, and know how you regard him. We need this chance to get into the Federation, doc. We need it maybe more than anything else we’ve ever known.”

  IX

  THE PLANE circled the island once; banking so that bright sunlight reflected off calm sea came sparkling in at the windows of the passenger cabin. Schneider nudged Joe and pointed.

  “Your new home, Joe. For about four months.”

  “Home,” Joe said absently, staring at the island.

  It was two miles long, shaped like an egg with a bite out of one side, rather flat, thatched lightly in the center with dark-leaved greenery. At one end there was an airfield, hastily razed flat, around which sectioned prefabricated buildings clustered. You had to look twice before you saw it was not just a made-over atoll run by an expense-account holiday organization, like a dozen others dotted around the vacant ocean. The clues came in snatches: Half hidden on the island were missile radar and submarines. There were also telltale double lines in the dusty sand that had sifted across the edge of the airfield.

  Speaking hesitantly, Joe said, “Doc, what would you need Tiger’s Claws for on an island like this?”

  Schneider gave a blank-seeming shake of the head. “Tiger’s Claws?” he echoed.

  “Please, doc. You’re not fooling anyone. I’ve been around rockets, missiles and space work for long enough to know better. Tiger’s Claws are a cluster of short-range search-and-destroy missiles riding on an antigrav unit driven to ultimate power output; the unit burns up in about fifteen s
econds from launching. The range is about a hundred and ten miles straight up at Mach Fourteen, and the search globe of the parasite missiles is about thirty miles in radius. Down there you can see the tracks in the sand leading to their emplacements; at a guess, they were only installed yesterday and haven’t yet been camouflaged. Satisfied that you’re not imparting any classified information to me?”

  There was the strange sensation of floating as the plane aligned itself over the airfield and began to drop straight down on its jets. Schneider said after a pause, “Joe, I don’t imagine you followed Earthside news very closely, did you, while you were up at Old Stormalong?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by “closely,” I used to hear what came up on the beams.”

  “What I talk about now mostly did not get on the beams. It was small columns in newspapers until lately. It seems that our people have waited impatiently for us to produce the godlike superman who will pass the Federationers’ examination. Now that eight months have gone by, and we have not yet shown him to them, people become impatient.”

  Joe frowned. “That’s right. I saw a slogan painted up on the wall of the superway yesterday evening, advertising for some preacher or other to go. Also, the driver who brought me down to the airport said his wife and some spiritualist group were trying to get a Tibetan yogi selected for the job—”

  He broke off. “You mean someone is liable to try and sabotage the selection project?”

  Schneider spread his hands. “We keep a finger on the public pulse,” he murmured, as though quoting from someone else. “I did not know about these Tiger’s Claws. But it would not surprise me to find that someone does very much want to be chosen. Someone with enough power and money behind him to need missiles to keep him down.”

  The plane hit with a gentle bounce and was on firm ground. At once the cabin door was flung open, and men in coveralls were running up with a gangway trolley and driving small lift trucks up to fetch cargo.

  “But—who?” demanded Joe, getting up from his seat to follow Schneider to the exit.