Deathworld (23 page)

"True—but not true," Ihjel said. "There are key men in every
conflict of forces, men who act like catalysts applied at the right
instant to start a chemical reaction. You might be one of these men,
but I must be honest and say that I can't prove it yet. So in order
to save time and endless discussion, I think I will have to spark
your personal sense of obligation."

"Obligation to whom?"

"To mankind, of course, to the countless billions of dead who kept
the whole machine rolling along that allows you the full, long and
happy life you enjoy today. What they gave to you, you must pass on
to others. This is the keystone of humanistic morals."

"Agreed. And a very good argument in the long run. But not one that
is going to tempt me out of this bed within the next three hours."

"A point of success," Ihjel said. "You agree with the general
argument. Now I apply it specifically to you. Here is the statement
I intend to prove. There exists a planet with a population of seven
million people. Unless I can prevent it, this planet will be
completely destroyed. It is my job to stop that destruction, so that
is where I am going now. I won't be able to do the job alone. In
addition to others, I need you. Not anyone like you—but you, and
you alone."

"You have precious little time left to convince me of all that,"
Brion told him, "so let me make the job easier for you. The work you
do, this planet, the imminent danger of the people there—these are
all facts that you can undoubtedly supply. I'll take a chance that
this whole thing is not a colossal bluff, and admit that given time,
you could verify them all. This brings the argument back to me
again. How can you possibly prove that I am the only person in the
galaxy who can help you?"

"I can prove it by your singular ability, the thing I came here to
find."

"Ability? I am different in no way from the other men on my planet."

"You're wrong," Ihjel said. "You are the embodied proof of
evolution. Rare individuals with specific talents occur constantly
in any species, man included. It has been two generations since an
empathetic was last born on Anvhar, and I have been watching
carefully most of that time."

"What in blazes is an empathetic—and how do you recognize it when
you have found it?" Brion chuckled, this talk was getting
preposterous.

"I can recognize one because I'm one myself—there is no other way.
As to how projective empathy works, you had a demonstration of that
a little earlier, when you felt those strange thoughts about Anvhar.
It will be a long time before you can master that, but receptive
empathy is your natural trait. This is mentally entering into the
feeling, or what could be called the spirit of another person.
Empathy is not thought perception; it might better be described
as the sensing of someone else's emotional makeup, feelings and
attitudes. You can't lie to a trained empathetic, because he can
sense the real attitude behind the verbal lies. Even your
undeveloped talent has proved immensely useful in the Twenties.
You can outguess your opponent because you know his movements
even as his body tenses to make them. You accept this without
ever questioning it."

"How do you know?" This was Brion's understood, but never voiced secret.

Ihjel smiled. "Just guessing. But I won the Twenties too, remember,
also without knowing a thing about empathy at the time. On top of
our normal training, it's a wonderful trait to have. Which brings me
to the proof we mentioned a minute ago. When you said you would be
convinced if I could prove you were the only person who could help
me. I
believe
you are—and that is one thing I cannot lie about.
It's possible to lie about a belief verbally, to have a falsely
based belief, or to change a belief. But you can't lie about it to
yourself.

"Equally important—you can't lie about a belief to an empathetic.
Would you like to see how I feel about this? 'See' is a bad
word—there is no vocabulary yet for this kind of thing. Better,
would you join me in my feelings? Sense my attitudes, memories and
emotions just as I do?"

Brion tried to protest, but he was too late. The doors of his senses
were pushed wide and he was overwhelmed.

"Dis ..." Ihjel said aloud. "Seven million people ... hydrogen bombs
... Brion Brandd." These were just key words, landmarks of
association. With each one Brion felt the rushing wave of the other
man's emotions.

There could be no lies here—Ihjel was right in that. This was the
raw stuff that feelings are made of, the basic reactions to the
things and symbols of memory.

DIS ... DIS ... DIS ... it was a word it was a planet and the word
thundered like a drum a drum the sound of its thunder surrounded
and was a wasteland a planet
of death a planet where
living was dying and
dying was very
better than
living

crude barbaric DIS hot burning scorching
backward miserable wasteland of sands
dirty beneath and sands and sands and
consideration sands that burned had
planet burned will burn forever
the people of this planet so
crude dirty miserable barbaric
sub-human in-human
less-than-human
but
they
were
going
to
be
DEAD

and DEAD they would be seven million blackened corpses
that would blacken your dreams all dreams dreams
forever because those
H Y D R O G E N B O M B S
were waiting
to kill
them unless .. unless .. unless ..
you Ihjel stopped it you Ihjel (DEATH) you (DEATH)
you (DEATH) alone couldn't do it you (DEATH)
must have
BRION BRANDD wet-behind-the-ears-raw-untrained-
Brion-Brandd-to-help-you he was the only one in the
galaxy who could finish the job..................................

As the flow of sensation died away, Brion realized he was sprawled
back weakly on his pillows, soaked with sweat, washed with the
memory of the raw emotion. Across from him Ihjel sat with his face
bowed in his hands. When he lifted his head Brion saw within his
eyes a shadow of the blackness he had just experienced.

"Death," Brion said. "That terrible feeling of death. It wasn't just
the people of Dis who would die. It was something more personal."

"Myself," Ihjel said, and behind this simple word were the repeated
echoes of night that Brion had been made aware of with his newly
recognized ability. "My own death, not too far away. This is the
wonderfully terrible price you must pay for your talent.
Angst
is
an inescapable part of empathy. It is a part of the whole unknown
field of psi phenomena that seems to be independent of time. Death
is so traumatic and final that it reverberates back along the time
line. The closer I get, the more aware of it I am. There is no exact
feeling of date, just a rough location in time. That is the horror
of it. I
know
I will die soon after I get to Dis—and long before
the work there is finished. I know the job to be done there, and I
know the men who have already failed at it. I also know you are the
only person who can possibly complete the work I have started. Do
you agree now? Will you come with me?"

"Yes, of course," Brion said. "I'll go with you."

"I've never seen anyone quite as angry as that doctor," Brion said.

"Can't blame him." Ihjel shifted his immense weight and grunted from
the console, where he was having a coded conversation with the
ship's brain. He hit the keys quickly, and read the answer from the
screen. "You took away his medical moment of glory. How many times
in his life will he have a chance to nurse back to rugged smiling
health the triumphantly exhausted Winner of the Twenties?"

"Not many, I imagine. The wonder of it is how you managed to
convince him that you and the ship here could take care of me
as well as his hospital could."

"I could never convince him of that," Ihjel said. "But I and the
Cultural Relationships Foundation have some powerful friends on
Anvhar. I'm forced to admit I brought a little pressure to bear."
He leaned back and read the course tape as it streamed out of the
printer. "We have a little time to spare, but I would rather spend
it waiting at the other end. We'll blast as soon as I have you tied
down in a stasis field."

The completeness of the stasis field leaves no impressions on the
body or mind. In it there is no weight, no pressure, no pain—no
sensation of any kind. Except for a stasis of very long duration,
there is no sensation of time. To Brion's consciousness, Ihjel
flipped the switch off with a continuation of the same motion that
had turned it on. The ship was unchanged, only outside of the port
was the red-shot blankness of jump-space.

"How do you feel?" Ihjel asked.

Apparently the ship was wondering the same thing. Its detector unit,
hovering impatiently just outside of Brion's stasis field, darted
down and settled on his bare forearm. The doctor back on Anvhar had
given the medical section of the ship's brain a complete briefing.
A quick check of a dozen factors of Brion's metabolism was compared
to the expected norm. Apparently everything was going well, because
the only reaction was the expected injection of vitamins and glucose.

"I can't say I'm feeling wonderful yet," Brion answered, levering
himself higher on the pillows. "But every day it's a bit
better—steady progress."

"I hope so, because we have about two weeks before we get to Dis.
Do you think you'll be back in shape by that time?"

"No promises," Brion said, giving a tentative squeeze to one bicep.
"It should be enough time, though. Tomorrow I start mild exercise
and that will tighten me up again. Now—tell me more about Dis and
what you have to do there."

"I'm not going to do it twice, so just save your curiosity awhile.
We're heading for a rendezvous point now to pick up another
operator. This is going to be a three-man team, you, me and an
exobiologist. As soon as he is aboard I'll do a complete briefing
for you both at the same time. What you can do now is get your head
into the language box and start working on your Disan. You'll want
to speak it perfectly by the time we touchdown."

With an autohypno for complete recall, Brion had no difficulty in
mastering the grammar and vocabulary of Disan. Pronunciation was
a different matter altogether. Almost all the word endings were
swallowed, muffled or gargled. The language was rich in glottal
stops, clicks and guttural strangling sounds. Ihjel stayed in a
different part of the ship when Brion used the voice mirror and
analysis scope, claiming that the awful noises interfered with
his digestion.

Their ship angled through jump-space along its calculated course. It
kept its fragile human cargo warm, fed them and supplied breathable
air. It had orders to worry about Brion's health, so it did,
checking constantly against its recorded instructions and noting
his steady progress. Another part of the ship's brain counted
microseconds with moronic fixation, finally closing a relay when
a predetermined number had expired in its heart. A light flashed
and a buzzer hummed gently but insistently.

Ihjel yawned, put away the report he had been reading, and started
for the control room. He shuddered when he passed the room where
Brion was listening to a playback of his Disan efforts.

"Turn off that dying brontosaurus and get strapped in," he called
through the thin door. "We're coming to the point of optimum
possibility and we'll be dropping back into normal space soon."

The human mind can ponder the incredible distances between the
stars, but cannot possibly contain within itself a real
understanding of them. Marked out on a man's hand an inch is a large
unit of measure. In interstellar space a cubical area with sides
a hundred thousand miles long is a microscopically fine division.
Light crosses this distance in a fraction of a second. To a ship
moving with a relative speed far greater than that of light, this
measuring unit is even smaller. Theoretically, it appears impossible
to find a particular area of this size. Technologically, it was a
repeatable miracle that occurred too often to even be interesting.

Brion and Ihjel were strapped in when the jump-drive cut off
abruptly, lurching them back into normal space and time. They didn't
unstrap, but just sat and looked at the dimly distant pattern of
stars. A single sun, apparently of fifth magnitude, was their only
neighbor in this lost corner of the universe. They waited while the
computer took enough star sights to triangulate a position in three
dimensions, muttering to itself electronically while it did the
countless calculations to find their position. A warning bell chimed
and the drive cut on and off so quickly that the two acts seemed
simultaneous. This happened again, twice, before the brain was
satisfied it had made as good a fix as possible and flashed a
NAVIGATION POWER OFF light. Ihjel unstrapped, stretched, and made
them a meal.

Ihjel had computed their passage time with precise allowances. Less
than ten hours after they arrived a powerful signal blasted into
their waiting receiver. They strapped in again as the NAVIGATION
POWER ON signal blinked insistently.

A ship had paused in flight somewhere relatively near in the vast
volume of space. It had entered normal space just long enough to
emit a signal of radio query on an assigned wave length. Ihjel's
ship had detected this and instantly responded with a verifying
signal. The passenger spacer had accepted this assurance and
gracefully laid a ten-foot metal egg in space. As soon as this had
cleared its jump field the parent ship vanished towards its
destination, light years away.

Ihjel's ship climbed up the signal it had received. This signal had
been recorded and examined minutely. Angle, strength and Doppler
movement were computed to find course and distance. A few minutes of
flight were enough to get within range of the far weaker transmitter
in the drop-capsule. Homing on this signal was so simple, a human
pilot could have done it himself. The shining sphere loomed up, then
vanished out of sight of the viewports as the ship rotated to bring
the spacelock into line. Magnetic clamps cut in when they made
contact.