The Early Pohl (11 page)

We submitted perforce to having a tube wrapped around the wrist of each of us, various other gadgets clamped to other parts of our anatomy, and our eyes bandaged so we could see nothing. As soon as all the equipment was adjusted to their satisfaction, one of them commenced to question us.

But what questions! Nothing we could have expected—at least, not in our right minds. Apparently they had no desire to learn facts, to discover what we wanted to do here, or anything about our backgrounds. To the accompaniment of ominous buzzings and clickings from the machine, we were asked such questions as, "If you were to be imprisoned in a dark room for twenty-four hours, what would you do?" and, "Would you prefer to witness a pageant or take part in it?" and others even less rational. I could hear a stylus scratching the answers on a pad, and wondered what type of persons these might be.

Then I heard a cry of alarm from Braid and tensed my muscles to rip off my blindfold and see what was happening. I couldn't, of course; the hypnosis of that helmet forbade any resistance. But I felt a gentle pressure in my arm, and then a stinging jolt of mild electricity. I leaped, and I think I cried out too. A squeal from Clory and a grunt from Check showed that they had received the same treatment.

Our blindfolds were removed, but the tests continued. They detached all the gadgets from Clory and sent her away to sit in the comer, while Braid, Check and I were quizzed in a new fashion, A string of such words as "read," "learn," "sleep," "eat," and other verbs of varying meaning were spoken to us, and one of the men noted the readings of a leaping dial needle attached to the bands on our wrists.

But that was all. We were released from the apparatus and conducted out of the room by the same man who had brought us. As we left, the head man of the Council called to us, "You will return tomorrow, and everything will be clear. Have patience till then."

We were returned to our room, where we found ourselves unaccountably sleepy. Though we had been awakened not more than four hours before, we could not stay awake. We sought couches and lay down. Just as I was dropping off, I thought I saw the door open, and a man enter and fasten something to Glory's head. It appeared to be a helmet, but I could not force myself to awaken and make it out. As he approached me, I dropped off into deep slumber.

6
The Dream

My sleep was full of dreams—odd ones. I saw myself in a thousand impossible situations.

Quite naturally, I dreamed of the scene in the Council Chamber. But in the dream I was not the object of the Council's attention—I was a member of it. In fact, I was chief of the Council. Before me, in one fantasy of sleep after another, were brought dozens of persons to be asked the questions I had been asked that day; thousands of other persons with other problems to be settled. I could not understand the tenth part of those problems, but in my dream I knew all about them; I solved them all, to the complete satisfaction of everyone. I was not supreme among the Council, but I was its coordinator, the one finally to resolve each knotty problem according to the suggestions of the others.

As the dreams grew in clarity, an immense amount of background material began to fill it. I saw a teeming, populous world, many times the size of my own. Almost completely underground, it was, but it filled millions of square miles on a hundred different subterranean levels. In this new world—which I came to identify with the underground city my sleeping body was in—was a complete civilization, vaster by far than all the Tribes put together, of a culture and depth of understanding that bewildered me.

The surface of this world, I saw, was given over to relaxation. No one died, either on the surface or below, save by accident, but the swift pace of the underground life aged its inhabitants, made them old in mind while still young in body. They needed refreshment, refreshment which meant a complete relaxation, complete forgetting of all of the cares of the world below. Forgetting, even, that there was a world below . . .

At which point I awakened. It was morning again—according to the elusive sky on the window—and the others were awakening too.

They had had much the same sort of dream, with individual differences. Check had dreamed of himself, not as leader of the Council, but as a worker in a sort of "large room, with funny pieces of machinery spread all over," as he described it. He seemed to have been engaged in some sort of research, but he did not know any more about it. Clory had not seen herself in any of the dreams. Braid hesitated, looked fearfully disturbed about something, then finally said she couldn't remember, and stuck to it.

Eventually the guard came once more and took us out again to go to the Council.

In the elevator, I saw something that took me a moment to comprehend. The guide carried the force rod, and seemed as supercilious, as free from worry about our actions as ever—but he did not wear the mind-compelling hat! I stared again to make sure, then nudged Check to a position behind the man and pointed. Check saw, widened his eyes, then together we whirled on the man and bowled him over.

Our muscles obeyed us! The man cried out, then lashed at us with arms and legs, but our first leap had knocked the rod from his hands. It was two against one, and Check and I were strong. The man toppled to the floor, Check upon him; I secured the rod and turned it on him.

Just then the elevator door commenced to open quietly—we had arrived. And as it slid open, we all saw just outside a full dozen of armed men walking along the corridor!

I was staggered, but had presence of mind enough to level the weapon at the foremost of them. "I'll kill the first one to move," I yelled, and meant it—it simply never occurred to me that I didn't know how to operate the thing!

The men outside didn't know that. It was an impasse.

Braid caught Clory to her instinctively and said, "What shall we do, Keefe?" I didn't know, but I could not afford to have either her or the men know that.

I asked a question. "Do you think you can run that car?" I didn't take my eyes off the men, but I could see her shadow at the little bank of keys.

"Maybe—not very well," her voice came. "At least I think I can start it."

That was not so good. "Check—come here," I called after a space. He stirred suddenly, as though my command had jolted him out of some deep thought. He stepped slowly forward, still with puzzlement at something in his eyes, and looked a question at me.

"Take the rod from one of them," I ordered, stabbing my weapon at one of the men. He hesitated. "Go ahead," I cried with irritation. "There may be more along in a minute,"

He hesitated for only a second after that. Then, with a swift swoop, he snatched a rod, stepped back a pace—and snatched my rod!

Swinging it to cover all of us, Clory and Braid and me as well as the men, he wrinkled his brow. "Now, wait a minute, all of you," he muttered. "I want to think—" He stared at the men, and at us, then shrugged. "Get up!" he cried to the original owner of the rod. "I'm going to see this through. We're going to the Council Chamber!"

The man rose, smiling. "You are coming along very well," he observed cryptically, and led the way along the hall. Nor did he say anything more.

The man who, in my dream, I had replaced as leader of the Council, widened his eyes in surprise as the lot of us entered. "Weapons?" he murmured questioningly. "There should be no weapons in here."

But Check said, "I am not sure of that, yet—though I am beginning to believe it. But I shall keep this until you explain things to me."

The man smiled. "There is no need to explain," he said, seating himself. I saw with a start that he had not taken the seat of the day before, but was in a small, less conspicuous seat to one side of it and below. That was how I had dreamed it!

"No," repeated the old man, "there is no need to explain any more. We have explained already. Did you not have dreams last night? . . . Yes. Those dreams, then, were fact. We induced them, hypnotically, to tell you what words could not tell as well.

"If you had accepted them as fact, they would have told you that this city is your home. Your real home, more so than the Tribes from which you came. Even, it is Glory's home, though she was born in a Tribe. Her father and her mother lived here."

"This snake hole?" ejaculated Braid.

The man laughed gently. "This is not all of the world. This city here, which houses a paltry few thousand people, is only one of a hundred thousand such; the others all on other planets. This world is merely the sixth satellite of the fifth planet circling one sun. And each of the other planets is inhabited, and many planets of other suns. On the third planet of the sun is the home of our race, from which we all stem, but there are a thousand times as many people of our race now as the planet could hold—even were there still Death."

"But why—" I began, and then stopped, for the man had raised a hand.

"I shall tell you the 'whys' in a moment," he said. "And when I have told you a few of them, to prepare you for the shock, your minds shall be returned to you."

Check quickened his breath at those words. His rod dropped unnoticed to the floor; one of the men picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. Before we could ask another question, the old man went on.

"As I have said, there is no more Death, save by accident. You know that; you know that, though many disappear, few die. Those who disappear come here.

"For immortality brings age. The fine blade of the mind dulls from constant use.
The
body does not sicken nor age, but the mind grows old. It must be rested.

"And for that are these rest planets—one in every System—established. All knowledge, save of the simple art of language, walking, and the others, is taken from a man when he is discovered to need rest. He is given an artificial, hypnotic memory, and sent to join a Tribe. For a dozen years or more he lives with the Tribe, while his mind grows younger. Then he is brought back, as were Check and Braid, or finds his way back as you did. And he takes up his place again, refreshed."

He paused and looked sharply at the door. It was open; a man was entering, bearing a shimmering bright gem in his hand. "You have all been examined," he continued slowly, "and found to be completely rejuvenated. Then you were given the sleep-teaching treatment, to prepare you, and then this little speech. You are now ready to have returned to you your full minds, with all the memories of your long, long lives!"

The man with the crystal stepped forward, looking from one to the other of us. "Keefe will be first," said the older one. "Simply look into the jewel."

I looked—I heard the man who carried it commence to speak, a droning voice that compelled sleep. In seconds the voice faded away, and the lights dimmed and the entire world was dark. Then there was a sound like thunder, and I heard the word, "Awake!"

My eyes opened, and I felt a maddening, dizzying swirl of thoughts into my brain. I reeled and clutched at the man as my brain, stung into swift activity, sorted and filed the knowledge it had taken me a long lifetime to acquire.

I stood there, swaying. Then there was a sudden feeling of released tension, and I opened my eyes.

Everything suddenly was familiar. I knew my life, and what I had to do.

And with a sort of joyous gravity I had never known in the life of the Tribe, I stepped forward and, with the ease of long experience, slid quietly into the seat of pre-eminence among the Council.

There are two things I've been meaning to talk about, because they seem to me relevant, but I haven't found a place for them—so I'll arbitrarily put them in here.

One is Futurian games.

We were a competitive bunch, all arrogant individualists. When we played games we played for blood. We started with the usual games everyone knows—all the card games; all the board games; parlor games like Twenty Questions and Ghosts. Then we improved on them. Instead of Twenty Questions we played Impossible Questions, the point of which was to ask a question to which no one else knew the answer. It had to be fair. It had to be something that any highly intelligent Renaissance man could have been expected to have come across in the course of a lifetime's study. Ideally, it should also contain an item of information interesting in itself, because of its oddity or its significance. (Example—from the last time I played it, shortly after World War II: "What did Wernher von Braun say when the American rocket experts asked him what the aerodynamic reason was for having such small tail fins on the V-2?" Answer: "Wernher von Braun laughed and laughed and said, 'Aerodynamics,
nicht
. We had to make them small because we shipped them by rail, and the German train tunnels were so narrow.'") The end of the game was when anybody present could answer any question. Sometimes that never happened.

Ghosts palled after a while,* So we began playing Tsohg (Ghosts backward), then
Le Spectre,
which was Ghosts in French. (What made it hard was that none of us knew any French, except for the occasional word like
tiens!, alors, merde
and so on.) When that began to run out of steam we invented a whole new game, or way of life, called
Djugashvili
. Superficially this resembled Ghosts, but every player said whatever he felt was appropriate (Reverse! Foot fault!—whatever), and the loser was whoever the other players could brainwash into admitting he had lost a point. The rule was there were no rules.

Then there was the Piece of String. That was not a game we played with each other, we played it
on
people, in parks, on warm summer nights, when there were plenty of strollers and the light was not too good. Two of us would stand in the middle of a path, gazing expectantly at approaching strollers. Then, as they came close, we would back away into the underbrush on opposite sides, paying out nonexistent cord with our fingers; when it was all out we would lower it to shoetop level and wait to see what happened.

What happened was never, for some reason, that people killed us, or even chased us. Some people would feel with their feet. Others would stride right through, glaring at us, daring us to trip them. Now and then somebody would say something, either hostile or now and then amused; but usually they would just walk away.