The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert Page 8

  Baldy stepped back from the bench, turned. “Why don’t you go over to Mom’s for the day?”

  “The whole day?”

  Baldy glanced at Eric, back at his wife. “The Doc’s paying me fourteen hundred bucks for the day’s work. That’s our baby money; now run along.”

  She made as though to speak, closed her mouth, walked over to her husband, kissed his cheek. “Okay, Hon. Bye.” She left.

  Eric and Baldy went on with their work, the pressure mounting with each clock tick. They plodded ahead, methodically checking each step.

  At 3:20 P.M., Baldy released test clips from half of the new resonance circuit, glanced at the wall clock. He stopped, looked back at the teleprobe, weighing the work yet to be done. Eric lay on his back under the machine, soldering a string of new connections.

  “Doc, we aren’t going to make it.” He put the test meter on the bench, leaned against the bench. “There just isn’t enough time.”

  An electronic soldering iron skidded out from under the teleprobe. Eric squirmed out behind it, looked up at the clock, back at the unconnected wires of the crystal circuits. He stood up, fished a credit book from his pocket, wrote out a fourteen hundred buck credit check to Baldwin Platte. He tore out the check, handed it to Baldy.

  “You’ve earned every cent of this, Baldy. Now beat it; go join your wife.”

  “But—”

  “We haven’t time to argue. Lock the door after you so you can’t get back in if—”

  Baldy raised his right hand, dropped it. “Doc, I can’t—”

  “It’s all right, Baldy.” Eric took a deep breath. “I kind of know how I’ll go if I’m too late.” He stared at Baldy. “I don’t know about you. You might, well—” He shrugged.

  Baldy nodded, swallowed. “I guess you’re right, Doc.” His lips worked. Abruptly, he turned, ran up the stairs. The outside door slammed.

  Eric turned back to the teleprobe, picked up an open lead to the crystal circuits, matched it to its receptor, ran a drop of solder across the connection. He moved to the next crystal unit, the next—

  At one minute to four he looked at the clock. More than an hour’s work remained on the teleprobe and then—He didn’t know. He leaned back against the bench, eyes filmed by fatigue. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, pressed the igniter, took a deep drag. He remembered Colleen’s question: “What’s it like to be insane?” He stared at the ember on his cigarette.

  Will I tear the teleprobe apart? Will I take a gun, go hunting for Colleen and Pete? Will I run out?—The clock behind him clicked. He tensed. What will it be like? He felt dizzy, nauseated. A wave of melancholia smothered his emotions. Tears of self-pity started in his eyes. He gritted his teeth. I’m not insane … I’m not insane—He dug his fingernails into his palms, drew in deep, shuddering breaths. Uncertain thoughts wandered through his mind.

  I shall faint … the incoherence of morosis … demoniacal possession … dithyrambic dizziness … an anima figure concretionized out of the libido … corybantic calenture … mad as a March hare—

  His head sagged forward.

  … Non compos mentis … aliéné … avoir le diable au corps—What has happened to Seattle? What has happened to Seattle? What has—His breathing steadied; he blinked his eyes. Everything appeared unchanged … unchanged … unchanged—I’m wandering. I must get hold of myself!

  The fingers of his right hand burned. He shook away the short ember of his cigarette.

  Was I wrong? What’s happening outside? He started for the stairs, made it halfway to the door when the lights went out. A tight band ringed his chest. Eric felt his way to the door, grasped the stair rail, climbed up to the dim, filtered light of the hall. He stared at the stained glass bricks beside the door, tensed at a burst of gunshots from outside. He sleepwalked to the kitchen, raised on tiptoes to look through the ventilator window over the sink.

  People! The street swarmed with people—some running, some walking purposefully, some wandering without aim, some clothed, some partly clothed, some nude. The bodies of a man and child sprawled in blood at the opposite curbing.

  He shook his head, turned, went into the living room. The lights suddenly flashed on, off, on, stayed. He punched video for a news program, got only wavy lines. He put the set on manual, dialed a Tacoma station. Again wavy lines.

  Olympia was on the air, a newcaster reading a weather report: “Partly cloudy with showers by tomorrow afternoon. Temperatures—”

  A hand carrying a sheet of paper reached into the speaker’s field of vision. The newsman stopped, scanned the paper. His hand shook. “Attention! Our mobile unit at the Clyde Field jet races reports that the Scramble Syndrome has struck the twin cities of Seattle-Tacoma. More than three million people are reported infected. Emergency measures already are being taken. Road blocks are being set up. There are known to have been fatalities, but—”

  A new sheet of paper was handed to the announcer. His jaw muscles twitched as he read. “A jet racer has crashed into the crowd at Clyde Field. The death toll is estimated at three hundred. There are no available medical facilities. All doctors listening to this broadcast—all doctors—report at once to State disaster headquarters. Emergency medical—” The lights again blinked out, the screen faded.

  Eric hesitated. I’m a doctor. Shall I go outside and do what I can, medically, or shall I go down and finish the teleprobe—now that I’ve been proved right? Would it do any good if I did get it working? He found himself breathing in a deep rhythm. Or am I crazed like all the others? Am I really doing what I think I’m doing? Am I mad and dreaming a reality? He thought of pinching himself, knew that would be no proof. I have to go ahead as though I’m sane. Anything else really is madness.

  He chose the teleprobe, located a handlight in his bedroom, returned to the basement lab. He found the long unused emergency generator under the crates in the corner. He wheeled it to the center of the lab, examined it. The powerful alcohol turbine appeared in working order. The pressure cap on the fuel reservoir popped as he released it. The reservoir was more than half full. He found two carboys of alcohol fuel in the corner where the generator had been stored. He filled the fuel tank, replaced the cap, pumped pressure into the tank.

  The generator’s power lead he plugged into the lab fuse box. The hand igniter caught on the first spin. The turbine whirred to life, keened up through the sonic range. Lab lights sprang to life, dimmed, steadied as the relays adjusted.

  It was 7:22 P.M. by the wall clock when he soldered the final connection. Eric estimated a half hour delay before the little generator had taken over, put the time actually at near eight o’clock. He found himself hesitant, strangely unwilling to test the completed machine. His one-time encephalorecorder was a weird maze of crossed wiring, emergency shielding, crowded tubes, crystals. The only familiar thing remaining in the tubular framework was the half-dome of the head-contact hanging above the test chair.

  Eric plugged in a power line, linked it to a portable switchbox which he placed in the machine beside the chair. He eased aside a sheaf of wires, wormed his way through, sat down in the chair. He hesitated, hand on the switch.

  Am I really sitting here? he wondered. Or is this some trick of the unconscious mind? Perhaps I’m in a corner somewhere with a thumb in my mouth. Maybe I’ve torn the teleprobe apart. Maybe I’ve put the teleprobe together so it will kill me the instant I close the switch.

  He looked down at the switch, withdrew his hand. He thought, I can’t just sit here; that’s madness, too.

  He reached up to the helmetlike dome, brought it down over his head. He felt the pinpricks of the contacts as they probed through his hair to his scalp. The narco-needles took hold, deadening skin sensation.

  This feels like reality, he thought. But maybe I’m building this out of memory. It’s hardly likely I’m the only sane person in the city. He lowered his hand to the switch. But I have to act as though I am.

  Almost of its own volition, his thumb moved, depress
ed the switch. Instantly, a soft ululation hung in the laboratory air. It shifted to dissonance, to harmony, wailing, half-forgotten music, wavered up the scale, down the scale.

  In Eric’s mind, mottled pictures of insanity threatened to overwhelm his consciousness. He sank into a maelstrom. A brilliant spectograph coruscated before his eyes. In a tiny corner of his awareness, a discrete pattern of sensation remained, a reality to hold onto, to save him—the feeling of the teleprobe’s chair beneath him and against his back.

  He sank farther into the maelstrom, saw it change to gray, become suddenly a tiny picture seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He saw a small boy holding the hand of a woman in a black dress. The two went into a hall-like room. Abruptly Eric no longer saw them from a distance but was again himself at age nine walking toward a casket. He sensed again the horrified fascination, heard his mother’s sobs, the murmurous, meaningless voice sounds of a tall, thin undertaker. Then, there was the casket and in it a pale, waxed creature who looked somewhat like his father. As Eric watched, the face melted and became the face of his uncle Mark; and then another mask, his high-school geometry teacher. Eric thought, We missed that one in my psychoanalysis. He watched the mobile face in the coffin as it again shifted and became the professor who had taught him abnormal psychology, and then his own analyst, Dr. Lincoln Ordway, and then—he fought against this one—Dr. Carlos Amanti.

  So that’s the father image I’ve held all these years, he thought. That means— That means I’ve never really given up searching for my father. A fine thing for an analyst to uncover about himself! He hesitated. Why did I have to recognize that? I wonder if Pete went through this in his musikron? Another part of his mind said, Of course not. A person has to want to see inside himself or he never will, even if he has the opportunity.

  The other part of his mind abruptly seemed to reach up, seize control of his consciousness. His awareness of self lurched aside, became transformed into a mote whipping through his memories so rapidly he could barely distinguish between events.

  Am I dying? he wondered. Is it my life passing in review?

  The kaleidoscopic progression jerked to a stop before a vision of Colleen—the way he had seen her in his dream. The memory screen lurched to Pete. He saw the two people in a relationship to himself that he had never quite understood. They represented a catalyst, not good or evil, merely a reagent which set events in motion.

  Suddenly, Eric sensed his awareness growing, permeating his body. He knew the condition and action of each gland, each muscle fiber, each nerve ending. He focused his inner eyes on the grayness through which he had passed. Into the gray came a tendril of red—shifting, twisting, weaving past him. He followed the red line. A picture formed in his mind, growing there like the awakening from anaesthetic. He looked down a long street—dim in the spring dusk—at the lights of a jet car thundering toward him. The car grew larger, larger, the lights two hypnotic eyes. With the vision came a thought: My, that’s pretty!

  Involuntary reactions took over. He sensed muscles tensing, jumping aside, the hot blast of the jet car as it passed. A plaintive thought twisted into his mind: Where am I? Where’s Mama? Where’s Bea?

  Tightness gripped Eric’s stomach as he realized he sat in another’s consciousness, saw through another’s eyes, sensed through another’s nerves. He jumped away from the experience, pulling out of the other mind as though he had touched a hot stove.

  So that’s how Pete knew so much, he thought. Pete sat in his musikron and looked through our eyes. Another thought: What am I doing here? He sensed the teleprobe chair beneath him, heard the new self within him say, “I’m going to need more trained, expert help.”

  He followed another red tendril, searching, discarded it; sought another. The orientation was peculiar—no precise up or down or compass points until he looked out of the other eyes. He came to rest finally behind two eyes that looked down from an open window in the fortieth story of an office building, sensed the suicidal thoughts building up pressure within this person. Gently, Eric touched the center of consciousness, seeking the name—Dr. Lincoln Ordway, psychoanalyst.

  Eric thought, Even now I turn back to my own analyst.

  Tensely, Eric retreated to a lower level of the other’s consciousness, knowing that the slightest misstep would precipitate this man’s death wish, a jump through that window. The lower levels suddenly erupted a pinwheel of coruscating purple light. The pinwheel slowed, became a mandala figure—at the four points of the figure an open window, a coffin, a transitus-tree and a human face which Eric suddenly recognized as a distorted picture of himself. The face was boyish, slightly vacant.

  Eric thought, The analyst, too, is tied to what he believes is his patient. With the thought, he willed himself to move gently, unobtrusively into the image of himself, began to expand his area of dominion over the other’s unconscious. He pushed a tentative thought against the almost palpable wall which represented Dr. Ordway’s focus of consciousness: Line (a whisper), don’t jump. Do you hear me, Line? Don’t jump. The city needs your help.

  With part of his mind, Eric realized that if the analyst sensed his mental privacy being invaded that realization could tip the balance, send the man plunging out the window. Another part of Eric’s mind took that moment to render up a solution to why he needed this man and others like him: The patterns of insanity broadcast by Pete Serantis could only be counterbalanced by a rebroadcast of calmness and sanity.

  Eric tensed, withdrew slightly as he felt the analyst move closer to the window. In the other’s mind, he whispered, “Come away from the window. Come away—” Resistance! A white light expanded in Eric’ thoughts, rejected him. He felt himself swimming out into the gray maelstrom, receding. A red tendril approached and with it a question, not of his own origin, lifted into his mind:

  Eric? What is this thing?

  Eric allowed the pattern of teleprobe development to siphon through his mind. He ended the pattern with an explanation of what was needed.

  Thought: Eric, how did the Syndrome miss you?

  Conditioning by long exposure to my own teleprobe; high resistance to unconscious distortion built up by that work.

  Funny thing; I was about to dive out the window when I sensed your interference. It was something—the red tendril moved closer—like this.

  They meshed completely.

  “What now?” asked Dr. Ordway.

  “We’ll need as much trained help as we can find in the city. Others would censor out this experience below the threshold of consciousness.”

  “The influence of your teleprobe may quiet everybody.”

  “Yes, but if the machine is ever turned off, or if people go beyond its area of influence, they’d be back in the soup.”

  “We’ll have to go in the back door of every unconscious in the city and put things in order!”

  “Not just this city; every city where the musikron has been and every city where Serantis takes it until we can stop him.”

  “How did the musikron do this thing?”

  Eric projected a mixed pattern of concepts and pictures: “The musikron pushed us deep down into the collective unconscious, dangled us there as long as we remained within its area of influence. (Picture of rope hanging down into swirls of fog.) Then the musikron was turned off. (Picture of knife cutting the rope, the end falling, falling into a swirling gray maelstrom.) Do you see it?”

  “If we have to go down into that maelstrom after all these people, hadn’t we better get started?”

  * * *

  He was a short man digging with his fingers in the soft loam of his flowerbed, staring vacantly at shredded leaves—name, Dr. Harold Marsh, psychologist. Unobtrusively, softly, they absorbed him into the network of the teleprobe.

  She was a woman, dressed in a thin housecoat, preparing to leap from the end of a pier—name, Lois Voorhies, lay analyst. Swiftly, they drew her back to sanity.

  Eric paused to follow a thin red tendril to the mind of a neighbor,
saw through the other’s eyes sanity returning around him.

  Like ripples spreading in a pond, a semblance of sanity washed out across the city. Electric power returned; emergency services were restored.

  The eyes of a clinical psychologist east of the city transmitted a view of a jet plane arrowing toward Clyde Field. Through the psychologist’s mind the network picked up the radiating thought patterns of a woman—guilt, remorse, despair.

  Colleen!

  Hesitantly, the network extended a pseudopod of thought, reached into Colleen’s consciousness and found terror. What is happening to me!

  Eric took over. Colleen, don’t be afraid. This is Eric. We are getting things back in order thanks to you and the musikron plans. He projected the pattern of their accomplishments.

  I don’t understand. You’re—

  You don’t have to understand now. Hesitantly: I’m glad you came.

  Eric, I came as soon as I heard—when I realized you were right about Pete and the musikron. She paused. We’re coming down to land.

  Colleen’s chartered plane settled onto the runway, rolled up to a hangar and was surrounded by National Guardsmen.

  She sent out a thought: We have to do something about London. Pete threatened to smash the musikron, to commit suicide. He tried to keep me there by force.

  When?

  Six hours ago.

  Has it been that long since the Syndrome hit?

  The network moved in: What is the nature of this man Serantis?

  Colleen and Eric merged thoughts to project Pete’s personality.

  The network: He’ll not commit suicide, or smash his machine. Too self-centered. He’ll go into hiding. We’ll find him soon enough when we need him—unless he’s lynched first.

  Colleen interrupted: This National Guard major won’t let me leave the airport.