Galactic Dreams Page 7

  “What a fool you are,” Mortimer sighed. “You are a social animal and do not hesitate to accept the benefits of your society. You accept medicine, so your children live now as they would have died in the past, and you accept a ration of food to feed them, food you do not even work for. This suits you, so you accept. But you do not accept planning for your family and you attempt to reject it. It is impossible. You must accept all or reject all. You must leave your society or abide by its rules. You eat the food, you must pay the price.

  “I don’t ask for more food. The baby has its mother’s milk; we will share our food ration … .

  “Don’t be fatuous. You and your irresponsible kind have filled this world to bursting with your get, and still you will not stop. You have been reasoned with, railed against, cajoled, bribed and threatened, all to no avail. Now you must be stopped. You have refused all aid to prevent your bringing one more mouth into this hungry world. Since you have done so anyway, you are to’ be held responsible for closing another mouth and removing it from this same world. The law is a humane one, rising out of our history of individualism and the frontier spirit, and gives you a chance to defend your ideals with a gun. And your life.

  “The law is not humane,” Benedict said. “How can you possibly suggest that? It is harsh, cruel, and pointless.

  “Quite the contrary, the system makes very good sense. Try to step outside yourself for a moment, forget your prejudices and look at the problem that faces our race. The universe is cruel but it’s not ruthless. The conservation of mass is one of the universe’s most firmly enforced laws. We have been insane to ignore it so long, and it is sanity that now forces us to limit the sheer mass of human flesh on this globe. Appeals to reason have never succeeded in slowing the population growth, so, with great reluctance, laws have been passed. Love, marriage, and the family are not affected up to a reasonable maximum of children. After that a man voluntarily forsakes the protection of society, and must take the consequences of his own acts. If he is insanely selfish, his death will benefit society by ridding it of his presence. If he is not insane and has determination and enough guts to win-well then he is the sort of man that society needs and he represents a noble contribution to the gene pool. Good and law-abiding citizens are not menaced by these laws.

  “How dare you! Benedict shouted. “Is a poor, helpless mother of an illegimate baby a criminal?

  “No, only if she refuses all aid. She is even allowed a single child without endangering herself. If she persists in her folly, she must pay for her acts. There are countless frustrated women willing to volunteer for battle to even the score. They, like myself, are on the side of the law and eager to enforce it. So close my mouth, if you can, Benedict, because I look forward with pleasure to closing your incredibly selfish one.

  “Madman! Benedict hissed and felt his teeth grate together with the intensity of his passion. “Scum of society. This obscene law brings forth the insane dregs of humanity and arms them and gives them license to kill.

  “It does that, and a useful device it is, too. The maladjusted expose themselves and can be watched. Better the insane killer coming publicly and boldly forth-instead of trapping and butchering your child in the park. Now he risks his life and whoever is killed serves humanity with his death.

  “You admit you are a madman, a licensed killer? Benedict started to stand but the hall began to spin dizzily and grow dark: he dropped back heavily.

  “Not I,” Mortimer said tonelessly. “I am a man who wishes to aid the law and wipe out your vile, proliferating kind.

  “You’re an invert then, hating the love of man and woman.

  The only answer was a cold laugh that infuriated Benedict.

  “Sick! he screamed. “Or mad. Or sterile, incapable of fathering children of your own and hating all those who can ….

  “That’s enough! I’ve talked to you far long enough, Benedict. Now I shall kill you.

  Benedict could hear anger for the first time in the other’s voice and knew that he had goaded the man with the prod of truth. He lay silent, sick and weak, the blood still seeping through his rough bandage and widening in a pool upon the floor. He had to save what little strength he had to aim and fire when the killer came through the doorway. Behind him he heard the almost silent opening of the bathroom door and the rustle of footsteps. He looked helplessly into Maria’s tearstained face.

  `Who’s there with you? Mortimer shouted, from where he crouched behind the armchair. “I hear you whispering. If your wife is there with you, Benedict, send her away. I won’t be responsible for the cow’s safety. You’ve brought this upon yourself, Benedict, and the time has now come to pay the price of your errors, and I shall be the instrumentality of that payment.

  Mortimer stood and emptied the remainder of the magazine bullets through the doorway, then pressed the button to release the magazine and hurled it after the bullets, clicking a new one instantly into place. With a quick pull he worked the slide to shove a live cartridge into the chamber and crouched, ready to attack.

  This was it. He wouldn’t need the knife. Walk a few feet forward. Fire through the doorway, then throw in the teargas pen. It would either blind the man or spoil his aim. Then walk through firing with the trigger jammed down and the bullets spraying like water and the enemy would be dead. Mortimer took a deep, shuddering breath - then stopped and gasped as Benedict’s hand snaked through the doorway and felt its way up the wall.

  It was so unexpected that for a moment he didn’t fire and when he did fire he missed. A hand is a difficult target for an automatic weapon. The hand jerked down over the light switch and vanished as the ceiling lights came on.

  Mortimer cursed and fired after the hand and fired into the wall and through the doorway, hitting nothing except insensate plaster and feeling terribly exposed beneath the glare of light.

  The first shot from the pistol went unheard in the roar of his gun and he did not realize that he was under fire until the second bullet ripped into the floor close to his foot. He stopped shooting, spun around, and gaped.

  On the fire escape outside the broken window stood a woman. Slight and wide-eyed and swaying as though a strong wind tore at her, she pointed the gun at him with both hands and jerked the trigger spasmodically. The bullets came close but did not hit him. In panic he pulled the machine pistol up, spraying bullets towards the window.

  “Don’t! I don’t want to hurt you!

  he shouted as he fired.

  The last of his bullets hit the wall and his gun clicked and locked out of battery as the magazine emptied. He hurled the barren metal magazine away and tried to jam a full one in. The pistol banged again and the bullet hit him in the side and spun him about. When he fell the weapon fell from his hand. Benedict, who had been crawling slowly and painfully across the floor, reached him at the same moment and clutched his throat with hungry fingers.

  “Don’t … Mortimer croaked and thrashed about. He had never learned to fight and did not know what else to do.

  “Please Benedict, don’t,” Maria said, climbing through the window and running to them. “You’re killing him.

  “No - I’m not,” Benedict gasped. “No strength. My fingers are too weak.

  Looking up, he saw the pistol near his head and he reached and tore it from her.

  “One less mouth now! he shouted and pressed the hot muzzle against Mortimer’s chest. The muffled shot tore into the man, who kicked violently once and died.

  “Darling, you’re all right? Maria wailed, kneeling and clutching him to her.

  “Yes … all right. Weak, but that’s from losing the blood, I imagine. But the bleeding has stopped now. It’s all over. We’ve won. We’ll have the food ration, and they won’t bother us anymore and everyone will be satisfied.

  “I’m so glad,” she said, and actually managed to smile through her tears. “I really didn’t want to tell you before, not bother you with all this other trouble going on. But there’s going to be … She dropped her eye
s.

  “What? he asked incredulously. “You can’t possibly mean … .

  “But I do.

  She patted the rounded mound of her midriff. “Aren’t we lucky?

  All he could do was look up at her, his mouth wide and gaping like some helpless fish cast up upon the shore.

  5:

  FAMOUS FIRST WORDS

  Millions of words of hatred, vitriol, and polemic have been written denigrating, berating, and castigating the late Professor Ephraim Hakachinik. I feel that the time has come when the record must be put straight. I realize that I too am risking the wrath of the so-called authorities by speaking out like this, but I have been silent too long. I must explain the truth just as my mentor explained it to me, because only the truth, lunatic as it may sound, can correct the false impressions that have become the accepted coin in reference to the professor.

  Let me be frank: early in our relationship I, too, felt that the professor was, how shall we describe it, eccentric even beyond the accepted norm for the faculties of backwater universities. In appearance he was a singularly untidy man, almost hidden behind a vast mattress of tangled beard that he affected for the dual purpose of saving the trouble and the expense of shaving and of dispensing with the necessity of wearing a necktie. This duality of purpose was common to almost everything that he did. I am sure that simultaneous professorships in both the arts and the sciences is so rare as to be almost unique-yet he occupied two chairs at Miskatonic University; those of quantum physics and conversational Indo-European. This juxtaposition of abilities undoubtedly led to the perfection of his invention and to the discovery of the techniques needed to develop its possibilities.

  As a graduate student I was very close to Professor Hakachinik and was present at the very moment when the germ of an idea was planted that was to flower eventually into the tremendous growth of invention that was to be his contribution to the sum of knowledge of mankind. It was a sunny June afternoon, and I am forced to admit that I was dozing over a repetitious (begat, begat, begat) fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls when a hoarse shout echoed from the paneled walls of the library and shocked me awake.

  “Neobican! the professor exclaimed again-he has a tendency to break into Serbo-Croatian when excited-and a third time, “Neobican!

  “What is wonderful, Professor? I asked.

  “Listen to this quotation, it is inspirational indeed, from Edward Gibbon; he was visiting Rome, and this is what he wrote: `As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter … the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. ”

  “Isn’t that incredible, my boy, simply breathtaking. A singularly important and historical beginning if I ever heard one. It all started there until, twelve years and five hundred thousand words later, racked by writer’s cramp, Gibbon scribbled `The End’ and dropped his pen. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was finished. Inspiring!

  “Inspiring? I asked dimly, my head still rattling with begats.

  “Dolt! he snarled, and added a few imprecations in Babylonian that will not bear translation in a modern journal. “Have you no sense of perspective? Do you not see that every great event in this universe must have had some tiny beginning?

  “That’s rather an obvious observation,” I remarked.

  “Imbecile! he muttered through clenched teeth. “Do you not understand the grandeur of the concept! Think! The mighty redwood, reaching for the sky, so wide in the trunk that it is pierced with a tunnel for motor vehicles to be driven through; this goliath of the forest was once a struggling single-leafed shrub incapable of exercising a tree’s peculiar attractions for even the most minuscule of dogs. Do you find this concept a fascinating one?

  I mumbled something incoherent to cover up the fact that I did not, and as soon as Professor Hakachinik had turned away I resumed my nap and forgot the matter completely for a number of days, until I received a message summoning me to the professor’s chambers.

  “Look at that,” he said, pointing to what appeared to be a normal radio, housed in a crackle-gray cabinet and faced with a splendid display of knobs and dials.

  “Bully,” I said, with enthusiasm. “We will listen to the final game of the World Series together.

  “Stumpfsinnig Schwein,” he growled. “That is no ordinary radio, but is an invention of mine embodying a new concept, my Temporal Audio Psychogenetic detector, TAP for short - and `tap’ is what it does. By utilizing a theory and technique that are so far beyond your rudimentary powers of comprehension that I will make no attempt to explain them, I have constructed my TAP to detect and amplify the voices of the past so that they can be recorded. Listen and be amazed!

  The professor switched on the device and, after a few minutes of fiddling with the dials, exacted from the loudspeaker what might be described as a human voice mouthing harsh animal sounds.

  “What was that? I asked.

  “Proto-mandarin of the later part of the thirteenth century B.C., obviously,” he mumbled, hard at work again on the dials, “but just idle chatter about the rice crop, the barbarians from the south, and such. That is the difficulty; I have to listen to volumes of that sort of thing before I chance on an authentic beginning and record it. But I have been doing just that - and succeeding!

  He slapped his hand on a loose pile of scrawled pages that stood upon the desk. “Here are my first successes, fragmentary as yet, but I’m on the way. I have traced a number of important events back to their sources and recorded the very words of their originators at the precise moment of inception. Of course the translations are rough and quite colloquial-but that can be corrected later. My study of beginnings has begun.

  I’m afraid I left the professor’s company at that time. I did want to hear the ball game and I regret to say that it was the last time that I or anyone else ever saw him alive. The sheets of paper he so valued were taken to be the ravings of an unwell mind, their true worth misunderstood, and they were discarded. I have salvaged some of them and now present them to the public, who can truly judge their real worth. For fragmentary as they are, they still cast the strong light of knowledge into many a darkened corner of history that has been obscured in the past.

  “… even though it is a palace it is still my home, and it is too small by far with my new stepmother, who is a bitz. I had hoped to continue in my philosophy studies, but it is impossible here. Guess I better run the army down to the border; there may be trouble there.

  Alexander, Macedonia, 336 B.C

  “… hot is not Ye word for it, and all of VIRGINIA is like an Oven this summer. When Opportunity arose to earn a little l. s. d. running a Survey line through the hills I grabbed it before M.F. could change his Minde. That is how I met today (forgot his name, must ask him tomorrow) in the Taverne. We did have an Ale together and did both complain mightily upon the Heat. With one thing leading to Another as they are wont to do, we had more Ales and he did Confide in me. He is a member of a secret club named, I think since Memory is hazy here, The Sons of Liberty, or some such … .

  George Washington, 1765

  “France has lost its greatness when an honest inventor gains no profit from his onerous toil. I have neglected my practice for months now, perfecting my handy Hacker Supreme Salami Slicer. I should have earned a fortune selling the small models to every butcher in France. But no!, the Convention uses the large model without paying a sou to me, and the butchers are naturally reluctant now to purchase.

  J. I. Guillotine, M.D., 1791

  “My head doth ache as though I suffereth an ague, and if I ever chance on the slippery-fingered soddish son of an illtempered whore who dropped that night-vessel in Fetter Lane, I will roundly thrash him to within an inch of his life, and perhaps a bit beyond. Since arrival in London I have learned the neatness of step and dexterity of motion needed to avoid the contents of the many vessels emptied into the street, but this is the first time there was need
to dodge the container itself. Had I moved a trifle quicker this body, of crockery in motion would have continued in motion. But my head doth ache. As soon as it is better I must think on this; there is the shade of an idea here.

  Sir Isaac Newton, 1682

  “I. is afraid that F. knows! If he does I have had it. If I. was not so seductively attractive I would find someone else’s bed-but she does lead me on so. She says she can sell some of her jewelry and buy those three ships she was looking at. The last place I want to go is to the damn Spice Islands, right now at the height of the Madrid season. But F. is king, and if he finds out … !

  (Attributed to Cristoforo Colombo of Genoa, 1492, but derivation is obscure.)

  “Am I glad I got little Pierre the Erector Set. As soon as he is asleep I’ll grab the funny tower he just made. I know the Exposition Committee won’t use anything like this, but it will keep them quiet for a while.

  Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, 1888

  “Woe unto China! Crop failures continue this year and the depression is getting worse. Millions unemployed. The only plan that seems at all workable is this construction project that Wah-Ping-Ah is so hot about. He says it will give a shot in the arm to the economy and get the cash circulating again. But what a screwball idea! Build a wall fifteen hundred miles long! He wants to use his own initials and call it the WPA project, but I’m going to call it something different and tell the people it’s to keep the barbarians out, as you can always sell them on defense appropriations if you scare them enough.

  Emperor Shih Hwang-ti, 252 B.C.

  “There will be a full moon tonight so I’ll have enough light to find that balcony. I hate to take a chance going near that crazy family, but Maria is the hottest piece of baggage in town! She made her kid sister Julie, the buck-toothed wonder!, promise to have the window unlocked.