Big Book of Science Fiction (22 page)

A
bell was ringing, and it took him a while after he’d opened his eyes to tell
where he was and what it was. He was strapped into the seat of his scouter, and
the visiplate before him showed only empty space. No Outsider ship and no
impossible planet.

The bell was the communications
plate signal; someone wanted him to switch power into the receiver. Purely
reflex action enabled him to reach forward and throw the lever.

The face of Brander, captain of
the
Magellan,
mother-ship of his group of scouters, flashed into the
screen. His face was pale and his black eyes glowed with excitement.

“Magellan
to Carson,” he snapped. “Come on
in. The fight’s over. We’ve won!”

The screen went blank; Brander
would be signaling the other scouters of his command.

Slowly, Carson set the controls
for the return. Slowly, unbelievingly, he unstrapped himself from the seat and
went back to get a drink at the cold-water tank. For some reason, he was unbelievably
thirsty. He drank six glasses.

He leaned there against the wall,
trying to think.

Had
it happened? He was in good
health, sound, uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his
throat hadn’t been dry. His leg—

He pulled up his trouser leg and
looked at the calf. There was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed
scar. It hadn’t been there before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and
saw that his chest and abdomen were criss-crossed with tiny, almost
unnoticeable, perfectly healed scars.

It
had
happened.

The scouter, under automatic
control, was already entering the hatch of the mother-ship. The grapples pulled
it into its individual lock, and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the
lock was air-filled. Carson opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through
the double door of the lock.

He went right to Brander’s
office, went in, and saluted.

Brander still looked dizzily
dazed. “Hi, Carson,” he said. “What you missed! What a show!”

“What happened, sir?”

“Don’t know, exactly. We fired
one salvo, and their whole fleet went up in dust! Whatever it was jumped from
ship to ship in a flash, even the ones we hadn’t aimed at and that were out of
range! The whole fleet disintegrated before our eyes, and we didn’t get the
paint of a single ship scratched!

“We can’t even claim credit for
it. Must have been some unstable component in the metal they used, and our
sighting shot just set it off. Man, oh man, too bad you missed all the
excitement.”

Carson managed to grin. It was a
sickly ghost of a grin, for it would be days before he’d be over the mental
impact of his experience, but the captain wasn’t watching, and didn’t notice.

“Yes, sir,” he said. Common
sense, more than modesty, told him he’d be branded forever as the worst liar in
space if he ever said any more than that. “Yes, sir, too bad I missed all the
excitement.”

<>

~ * ~

THE ROGER BACON FORMULA

by Fletcher Pratt

I
MET the old man as the result of three beers and an argument. I never even knew
his name. He may be one of the greatest scientists alive; he may even not have
been human; and in either of these cases, I would hold through him the key to
an almost infinite enrichment of the human spirit. On the other hand, he may
merely have been one of those people of whom the law takes a justifiably dim
view, and in that case, it wouldn’t even do for me to be inquiring after him. I
work in a bank, and it would be as much as my job is worth.

So all I have is a rather
incredible story. All right, I admit I wouldn’t believe it myself if somebody
else told it. But just listen, will you? You can check if you want to.

It starts in one of those
restaurant-bars in Greenwich Village, where they have booths opposite the bar,
a radio that goes all the time, and as little light as possible. The gang used
to meet there because it was less depressing than getting together in anyone’s
furnished room and just about as cheap as long as you stuck to beer. It was a
good gang, even if most of them were a bunch of lousy Reds—or thought they were
in those days. I noticed that with most of them, the closer they got to fifty
bucks a week, the farther they got from the party line. That was the dividing
line, fifty per; once they hit it, they were all through as Commies.

At the time I’m telling about, it
was different, and I was practically the only one who blew a fuse whenever the
name of Karl Marx was mentioned. They used to gang up on me, with a lot of
scientific terms, and they knew most of the arguments I used, so I was always
having to think up new ones. On this night I’m talking about, I’d been doing a
little reading, so I let them have it with something about Roger Bacon, the
medieval friar, you know, who did so much monkeying around both with philosophy
and the physical sciences. “Go on, look him up some time,” I told them. “You’ll
find that every real argument of the Marxian dialectic has been anticipated and
answered before it was ever written down. Marx was just ignoramus enough not to
know that he was digging up dead rats.”

That let things loose, especially
as none of them really knew any more about Roger Bacon than I did, and for that
matter, they hadn’t read Marx at first hand, either. We all talked loud enough
to keep down the noise of the radio and to try to keep down each other, so that
after about the third beer, the bartender came around and told us to pipe down a
little. I had had my fun by that time, so I tried to change the subject to
something safe, like baseball, and when the rest wouldn’t, I got up and went
home.

Or started for home. I was just
going around the corner when this old man sidled up to me. “Pardon me, sir,” he
said apologetically.

The Village is full of
panhandlers. I glanced at him for long enough to see that he was very short,
had white hair and no hat, and a tear in his coat. I said, “Sorry, chum, I
haven’t got any money.”

“I don’t want money,” he said. “It’s
about—that is, I heard you mention Roger Bacon.”

I looked at him again then. He
had a kind of pear-shaped head with a little fluffy crown of hair on the top of
it, and a rim of more hair around over the ears, and the longest and thinnest
hands I ever saw on a human being. The tendons stood out on the backs of those
hands and made it look as though there were no flesh between them at all. I
said, “I’m afraid I’m really not much of a Bacon student.”

He looked so disappointed that I
thought he was going to burst into tears. I tried to comfort him with, “But I
do think the Bacon manuscripts are remarkable productions, whether they are
forged or not.”

“Forged?” he said, his voice
going up thinly. “I don’t . . . Oh, you mean the Parma manuscripts, the ones
Newbold tried to translate when he achieved such curiously correct results by
the wrong method. But those only describe annular eclipses and plant
reproduction. They are the least part of the work. If the world had listened to
the full doctrine of Roger Bacon, it would be six centuries further along the
path of civilization.”

“Do you think so?” I said. This
sounded like the beginning of one of the arguments of the gang.

“I know it! Can you spare a few
moments to come up to my place? I have something that will interest any student
of Roger Bacon. There are so few.”

If there is one thing the Village
has more of than panhandlers, it is nuts, but the night was young and the old
bird sounded so wistful that it was hard to turn him down. Besides, even a nut
can be interesting. I let him lead me around a couple of corners to Bank Street
and up interminable flights of stairs in a rickety building to where he flung
open a door on an attic room of surprising size.

Its layout resembled the tower of
a medieval alchemist more than anything it could have been designed for. There
was a long library table in black wood, stained and scarred, on which stood a
genuine alembic, which had been abandoned to distill some pungent liquid over a
low flame. All around about the alembic was a furious litter of papers,
chemical apparatus and bottled reagents. A cabinet opposite held rolls of
something that appeared to be sheepskin; there was a sextant on the cot, and a
telescope stood by the window. To complete the picture, a huge armillary sphere
occupied the corner of the room between the cot and the telescope.

I realized the old duffer was
talking in his piping voice: “—the unity of all the sciences, Roger Bacon’s
greatest contribution to human knowledge. Your modern specialists are only
beginning to realize that every experimenter must understand other sciences
before he can begin to deal with his own. What would the zoologist do without a
knowledge of some chemistry, the chemist without geology, and the geologist without
physics? Science is all one. I will show—”

He was at the cabinet, producing
one of the sheepskin rolls. It was covered with the crabbed and illegible
writing of the Middle Ages, made more illegible still by the wear and tear of
centuries.

“A genuine Roger Bacon. You know
there are some years following his stay in Paris that have never been accounted
for publicly? Ha! Certainly you do not know that he spent them at Citeaux, the
headquarters of the order to which he belonged. I have been to Citeaux. I found
them restoring the place after the damage caused by the war. Fortunate
circumstance that you—that we have wars. The vaults had been damaged by
shellfire; it was easy to search among them and gather—these!” He waved one of
his skeleton-like hands toward the sheepskin rolls. “The greatest of Roger
Bacon’s works.”

“But didn’t the French
government—?” I asked.

“French government! What does any
government that represents only a tiny portion of the world know about
something that affects the whole? The French government never heard of
the
manuscripts. I saw to that.” He chuckled.

“What did you find in them?” I
asked.

“Everything. What would you say
to an absolutely flat statement of the nebular hypothesis? An exposition of
nuclear theory?”

“It must be wonderful. Is that
all in there?” I was not quite sure what he was talking about, but I knew
enough to know I should be startled.

“All that and more. Didn’t I tell
you that Bacon made discoveries that the rest of the world has not yet grasped?
Here, look at this—” He shoved one of the sheepskins into my hand. “Wait, you
do not know how to read the script. I have the same thing written out and
translated.” He fumbled among the papers on the laboratory table and handed me
one. His own writing was almost as bad as the medieval script, but I managed to
make out something like this:

“De Transpositio mentis:
He that would let hys spirit
vade within the launds of fay and fell shall drinke of the drogge mandragoreum
till he bee sight out of eye, sowne out of ear, speache out of lips and time
out of minde. Lapped in lighte shall he then fare toe many a straunge and
horrid earthe beyond the bounds of ocean and what he seeth there shall astounde
him much; yet shall he return withouten any hurt.”

“What do you make of it?” said
the old man.

“That he was probably a drug
addict,” I said, frankly. “Mandragora is fairly well known—was well known even
in the Middle Ages, I presume.”

“You are as bad as the rest,”
said the old man. “1 had hoped that a Bacon scholar—look, you’re missing all
the essentials. You people here never believe in anything but yourselves. Now, look
again. He doesn’t say ‘mandragora’ but ‘mandragoreum’ and it’s not a copyist’s
error, because it’s written in Bacon’s own hand. Note also that he titles it ‘the
transposition of the mind.’ He never imagined, as drug addicts do, that his
body was performing strange things. What Roger Bacon is telling us there is
that there is a drug which will bring about the dissociation of the mind from
the body which seems to occur under hypnotism, but ‘withouten any hurt.’ Also
he says ‘lapped in lighte,’ which is more than a hint of employing the force
and speed of light. Modern science has not attained anything like that yet. I
told you Bacon was ahead not only of his time, but of ours. Moreover—” here he
gave me a quick glance “—in another place, I found the formula for compounding
his drug mandragoreum, and I can assure you that it is nothing like mandragora.
I have even used it myself; it produces a certain ionization among the cells of
the inner brain by action on the pineal—but you probably don’t understand; you
are willing to remain earthbound.”