Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (21 page)

Lane spent a week in the padded cell. Once, Smith entered to talk to him. The conversation was brief.

“I can’t find any evidence to support your theory,” Smith said.

“Is that because even CACO can’t get access to certain classified documents and projects at Lackalas Astronautics?” Lane said.

“Yeah. I was asked what my need to know was, and I couldn’t tell them what I really was trying to find out. The next thing I’d know, I’d be in a padded cell with regular sessions with a shrink.”

“And so, because you’re afraid of asking questions that might arouse suspicions of your sanity, you’ll let the matter drop?”

“There’s no way of finding out if your crazy theory has any basis.”

“Love will find a way,” Lane said.

Smith snorted, spun around, and walked out.

That was at 11
A.M.
At 12:03, Lane looked at his wristwatch (since he was no longer compelled to go naked) and noted that lunch was late. A few minutes afterward, an Air Force jet fighter on a routine flight over Washington suddenly dived down and hit CACO HQ at close to one thousand miles an hour. It struck the massive stone building at the end opposite Lane’s cell. Even so, it tore through the fortress-like outer walls and five rooms before stopping.

Lane, in the second subfloor, would not have been hit if the wreck had traveled entirely through the building. However, flames began to sweep through, and guards unlocked his door and got him outside just in time. On orders transmitted via radio, his escorts put him into a car to take him across the city to another CACO base. Lane was stiff with shock, but he reacted quickly enough when the car started to go through a red light. He was down on the floor and braced when the car and the huge diesel met. The others were not killed. They were not, however, in any condition to stop him. Ten minutes later, he was in his apartment.

Dr. Sue Brackwell was waiting for him under the skylight. She had no clothes on; even her glasses were off. She looked very beautiful; it was not until much later that he remembered that she had never been beautiful or even passably pretty. He could not blame his shock for behaving the way he did, because the tingling and the warmth dissolved that. He became very alive, so much so that he loaned sufficient life to the thing that he pulled down to the floor. Somewhere in him existed the knowledge that “she” had prepared this for him and that no man might ever experience this certain event again. But the knowledge was so far off that it influenced him not at all.

Besides, as he had told Smith, love would find a way. He was not the one who had fallen in love. Not at first. Now, he felt as if he were in love, but many men, and women, feel that way during this time.

Smith and four others broke into the apartment just in time to rescue Lane. He was lying on the floor and was as naked and red as a newborn baby. Smith yelled at him, but he seemed to be deaf. It was evident that he was galloping with all possible speed in a race between a third-degree burn and an orgasm. He obviously had a partner, but Smith could neither see nor hear her.

The orgasm might have won if Smith had not thrown a big pan of cold water on Lane.

Two days afterward, Lane’s doctor permitted Smith to enter the hospital room to see his much-bandaged and somewhat-sedated patient. Smith handed him a newspaper turned to page two. Lane read the article, which was short and all about EVE. EVE—Ever Vigilant Eye—had been a stationary-orbit surveillance satellite which had been sent up over the East Coast two years ago. EVE had exploded for unknown reasons, and the accident was being investigated.

“That’s all the public was told,” Smith said. “I finally got through to Brackwell and the other bigwigs connected with EVE. But either they were under orders to tell me as little as possible or else they don’t have all the facts themselves. In any event, it’s more than just a coincidence that she—EVE, I mean—blew up just as we were taking you to the hospital.”

Lane said, “I’ll answer some of your questions before you ask them. One, you couldn’t see the holograph because she must’ve turned it off just before you got in. I don’t know whether it was because she heard you coming or because she knew, somehow, that any more contact would kill me. Or maybe her alarms told her that she had better stop for her own good. But it would seem that she didn’t stop or else did try to stop but was too late.

“I had a visitor who told me just enough about EVE so I wouldn’t let my curiosity carry me into dangerous areas after I got out of here. And it won’t. But I can tell you a few things and know it won’t get any further.

“I’d figured out that Brackwell was the master designer of the bioelectronics circuit of a spy satellite. I didn’t know that the satellite was called EVE or that she had the capability to beam in on ninety thousand individuals simultaneously. Or that the beams enabled her to follow each visually and tap in on their speech vibrations. Or that she could activate phone circuits with a highly variable electromagnetic field projected via the beam.

“My visitor said that I was not, for an instant, to suppose that EVE had somehow attained self-consciousness. That would be impossible. But I wonder.

“I also wonder if a female designer-engineer-scientist could, unconsciously, of course, design female circuits? Is there some psychic influence that goes along with the physical construction of computers and associated circuits? Can the whole be greater than the parts? Is there such a thing as a female gestalt in a machine?”

“I don’t go for that metaphysical crap,” Smith said.

“What does Brackwell say?”

“She says that EVE was simply malfunctioning.”

“Perhaps man is a malfunctioning ape,” Lane said. “But could Sue have built her passion for me into EVE? Or given EVE circuits which could evolve emotion? EVE had selfrepairing capabilities, you know, and was part protein. I know it sounds crazy. But who, looking at the first apeman, would have extrapolated Helen of Troy?

“And why did she get hung up on me, one out of the ninety thousand she was watching? I had a dermal supersensitivity to the spy beam. Did this reaction somehow convey to EVE a feeling, or a sense, that we were in rapport? And did she then become jealous? It’s obvious that she modulated the beams she’d locked on Leona and Rhoda so that they saw green where the light was really red and did not see oncoming cars at all.

“And she worked her modulated tricks on Daniels and that poor jet pilot, too.”

“What about that holograph of Dr. Brackwell?”

“EVE must’ve been spying on Sue, also, on her own creator, you might say. Or—and I don’t want you to look into this, because it won’t do any good now—Sue may have set all this up in the machinery, unknown to her colleagues. I don’t mean that she put in extra circuits. She couldn’t get away with that; they’d be detected immediately, and she’d have to explain them. But she could have put in circuits which had two purposes, the second of which was unknown to her colleagues. I don’t know.

“But I do know that it was actually Sue Brackwell who called me that last time and not EVE. And I think that it was this call that put into EVE’s mind, if a machine can have a mind in the human sense, to project the much-glamorized holograph of Sue. Unless, of course, my other theory is correct, and Sue herself was responsible for that.”

Smith groaned and then said, “They’ll never believe me if I put all this in a report. For one thing, will they believe that it was only free association that enabled you to get
eye in the sky
from ‘The egg and I’ and ‘Sky-blue waters’? I doubt it. They’ll think you had knowledge you shouldn’t have had and you’re concealing it with that incredible story. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. But then, I don’t want to be in my shoes.

“But why did EVE blow up? Lackalas says that she could be exploded if a destruct button at control center was pressed. The button, however, was not pressed.”

“You dragged me away just in time to save my life. But EVE must have melted some circuits. She died of frustration—in a way, that is.”

“What?”

“She was putting out an enormous amount of energy for such a tight beam. She must have overloaded.”

Smith guffawed and said, “She was getting a charge out of it, too? Come on!”

Lane said, “Do you have any other explanation?”

Philip José Farmer, in his preface to “The Freshman,” refers to the possibility of more in the “degrees” series coming to him in dreams. It’s unknown whether additional tales manifested to Farmer in this manner, but at least we have this amusing story, in which he cannot resist connecting the Miskatonic University freshman in question to Lord Greystoke’s Africa—Greystoke being, of course, a prominent member of the Wold Newton Family, as demonstrated in Farmer’s biography
Tarzan Alive.
The Miskatonic student is Bukawai, who comes from a long line of witch doctors. The ancestor of the Bukawai seen here was a witch doctor of the same name, and was featured in Edgar Rice Burroughs’
Jungle Tales of Tarzan.

I began reading H. P. Lovecraft’s stories about the Cthulhu mythos when I was a young boy. His grim peeps into the
Necronomicon
and into the shuddery horrors of the extremely ancient elder ones fascinated me. When I got older I still liked to read them, though I wasn’t gung-ho about them. But I’d never had any desire to write a story which would be part of the Cthulhu cycle.

Then, one night, some years ago, I had a dream in which I, a sixty-year-old man, was a freshman at a strange college and was attending a rush party given by a more-than-strange fraternity. There was something sinister about the whole affair, a sense of mounting danger. Just as the face of one of the frat brothers began to melt and he broke into a cackling laughter and I knew that something horrible was going to happen to me, I awoke.

I remember most of my dreams, and that was one I’d never forget. But it led to this story, “The Freshman,” and may lead to others, “The Sophomore,” “The Junior,” “The Senior,” “The M.A. Candidate,” “The Ph.D.” and who knows what else in the course of degrees.

The long-haired youth in front of Desmond wore sandals, ragged blue jeans, and a grimy T-shirt. A paperback,
The Collected Works of Robert Blake,
was half stuck into his rear pocket. When he turned around, he displayed in large letters on the T-shirt, M.U. His scrawny Fu Manchu mustache held some bread crumbs.

His yellow eyes—surely he suffered from jaundice—widened when he saw Desmond. He said, “This ain’t the place to apply for the nursing home, pops.” He grinned, showing unusually long canines; and then turned to face the admissions desk.

Desmond felt his face turning red. Ever since he’d gotten into the line before a table marked
Toaahd Freshmen A-D,
he’d been aware of the sidelong glances, the snickers, the low-voiced comments. He stood out among these youths like a billboard in a flower garden, a corpse on a banquet table.

The line moved ahead by one person. The would-be students were talking, but their voices were subdued. For such young people, they were very restrained, excepting the smart aleck just ahead of him.

Perhaps it was the surroundings that repressed them. This gymnasium, built in the late nineteenth century, had not been repainted for years. The once-green paint was peeling. There were broken windows high on the walls; a shattered skylight had been covered with boards. The wooden floor bent and creaked, and the basketball goal rings (?) were rusty. Yet M.U. had been league champions in all fields of sports for many years. Though its enrollment was much less than that of its competitors, its teams somehow managed to win, often by large scores.

Desmond buttoned his jacket. Though it was a warm fall day, the air in the building was cold. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that the wall of an iceberg was just behind him. Above him the great lights struggled to overcome the darkness that lowered like the underside of a dead whale sinking into sea depths.

He turned around. The girl just back of him smiled. She wore a flowing dashiki covered with astrological symbols. Her black hair was cut short; her features were petite and well-arranged but too pointed to be pretty.

Among all these youths there should have been a number of pretty girls and handsome men. He’d walked enough campuses to get an idea of the index of beauty of college students. But here... There was a girl, in the line to the right, whose face should have made her eligible to be a fashion model. Yet, there was something missing.

No, there was something added. A quality undefinable but... Repugnant? No, now it was gone. No, it was back again. It flitted on and off, like a bat swooping from darkness into a grayness and then up and out.

The kid in front of him had turned again. He was grinning like a fox who’d just seen a chicken.

“Some dish, heh, pops? She likes older men. Maybe you two could get your shit together and make beautiful music.”

The odor of unwashed body and clothes swirled around him like flies around a dead rat.

“I’m not interested in girls with Oedipus complexes,” Desmond said coldly.

“At your age you can’t be particular,” the youth said, and turned away.

Desmond flushed, and he briefly fantasized knocking the kid down. It didn’t help much.

The line moved ahead again. He looked at his wristwatch. In half an hour he was scheduled to phone his mother. He should have come here sooner. However, he had overslept while the alarm clock had run down, resuming its ticking as if it didn’t care. Which it didn’t, of course, though he felt that his possessions should, somehow, take an interest in him. This was irrational, but if he was a believer in the superiority of the rational, would he be here? Would any of these students?

The line moved jerkily ahead like a centipede halting now and then to make sure no one had stolen any of its legs. When he was ten minutes late for the phone call, he was at the head of the line. Behind the admissions table was a man far older than he. His face was a mass of wrinkles, gray dough that had been incised with fingernails and then pressed into somewhat human shape. The nose was a cuttlefish’s beak stuck into the dough. But the eyes beneath the white chaotic eyebrows were as alive as blood flowing from holes in the flesh.