Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2 Read online

  He ached for one touch of reason, something as incontrovertible and unchanging as the buildings they were passing.

  He looked again. The buildings were incontrovertible, right enough, but they weren’t Stuyvesant Town. They were the similar structures of Peter Cooper Village. He shot forward and seized the cabby’s shoulder. “Hey, where do you think you’re taking me?”

  The cabby twitched his shoulder out of the way as politely as possible. “To see Mr. De La Meter, sir. I’m sorry, but it’s for your own good, you know.”

  Bergenholm shrank back into his seat, his face blank. He knew better than to argue or try to jump from a moving vehicle. He was trapped, he knew it, and he lapsed into hopelessness.

  * * * *

  He hadn’t tried to escape when the cab stopped. The driver had come around and opened his door, his eyes mildly watchful. Moreover, Dexter didn’t even care what happened any more. He rode the elevator to De La Meter’s apartment—or, rather to the floor the cabby indicated— and waited while the man went over to the incinerator.

  The cabby reached up and pushed the plastic plate which bore a legend prohibiting the tenents from throwing explosives down the shaft, and slid it upwards, despite the seemingly solid rivets in each corner. The door opened, and De La Meter looked out.

  “Ah, Mr. Bergenholm! Come in!” He turned to the cabby. “All right, Boskone, you can go now. I won’t need you any more today.”

  Dexter went into De La Meter’s apartment with approximately the same feelings he would have had if the door had really opened on the incinerator. He stared glumly while De La Meter mixed him a drink and handed it to him, and sat down as if the man’s hospitable gesture had been a physical shove.

  De La Meter frowned. “You look nervous,” he said. Then he smiled. “Oh, I understand.” He chuckled lightly. “Don’t worry, Mr. Bergenholm. We certainly won’t hold anything against you. What you experienced was merely a phenomenon we’ve come to call Remission of Sincerity. It’s quite common. That’s why Boskone was waiting for you.”

  Bergenholm remained unconvinced, but some of the tension began to leave him as the drink did its work.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing whether he was or not.

  De La Meter’s hands moved in their practiced deprecatory gesture. “A nothing. But you’re curious, and I should explain.

  “It’s really quite simple,” he went on. “You’ll grant me that most people live by looking at things as they ought to be, rather than by what they are. A tree is a tree, a house is a house, a fireplug is a fireplug.

  “They live even more firmly on the basis of gestalts— that is, by learning that a certain invariable group of definite components makes up any one thing, or any act. A car is a metal body with windows, on wheels. An emphasis on any one of these components produces variations; i.e., a larger body means a truck, or, more windows”— he chuckled— “a bus.

  “Similarly, a man walking up to a newsstand is going to buy a paper. What else would he be doing? Particularly when the other two physical components—a newspaper and a nickel—are combined with the other two action components. Two arms reach out. One is holding a paper, and the other a nickel. Obviously, a newspaper is being purchased.”

  Bergenholm nodded. “I figured that out.” But why was it being done—why were De La Meter and others like him taking advantage of this fact?

  “Precisely. You figured it out. On the day after you’d been given your first hint, you had learned enough to duplicate my actions in boarding the bus. Actually, of course, our conductors do not give the passengers money—but you had been led to believe they did, and you fell into a new gestalt which enabled you, so you thought, to live outside Stage One gestalts. For our purpose, it proved you were capable of assuming the protective mimicry which enables us to live as we do. You bore out our earlier decision to approach you.”

  “Why did you approach me?” Bergenholm asked. He was watching De La Meter closely, looking for the sign of a lie.

  “You’ve been—’suffering’ is the wrong word—from gestalt lapses,” De La Meter replied. “Do you remember the time you got off on the wrong floor of your building? Actually, you didn’t. You got off on the tenth floor, which is where you live. But, this time, you’d been counting floors as you went up, rather than simply waiting for the proper number to appear on the door. So, when the elevator accidentally stopped on the tenth floor—the true tenth floor—you got off.”

  “I remember that,” Dexter agreed. “I ducked right back into the elevator when I saw the number on the elevator door. It said ‘Nine.’“

  De La Meter smiled. “Precisely. There are two ninth floors in the building.”

  Bergenholm was past the stage of being impressed by such revelations. “Why?” he asked. “What are you people up to? Isn’t your own world better than ours?”

  “But, my dear fellow, this is our world. We’re completely and totally human. We simply take advantage of a human trait. We’ve established a serene and untroubled society beside the Stage One society, that’s all. After all, it’s a human privilege to live on one’s nerve ends and be pushed and shoved around, but it’s also a human privilege to try and do something about it. We did, quite a few generations ago. If the Stage Ones want to have their annoyances, let them. We don’t have to deal with them.”

  Bergenholm—who could be called Dexter Bergenholm, or Dexter, or simply “he” without once implying that each label signified a different person—had finished his drink, which wasn’t really his, but De La Meter’s, since De La Meter had paid for it. He thought of that and the myriad gestalts which make up the sum and substance of experience and life, and communication, and for that one instant life was not a smoothly progressive, largely invariable whole, but an accretion of fragments which usually—but not always—fell into the same patterns. Even the society within a society—De La Meter’s society, his society—was a gestalt composed of subsidiary gestalts.

  “So, why be tied down to a pretty nerve-wracking and thankless existence?” De La Meter said. “We have our own technology, now, our own traditions and habits. You’ll find our life serene, and infinitely less troubled.” He smiled again. “We don’t need your answer right away. Think it over for a few days. And now, I imagine your wife is getting anxious to have you home.”

  So De La Meter didn’t have anything to do with his wife’s not being home. Then she was probably out shopping or something.

  Bergenholm felt the load of anxiety fall off his shoulders, and realized that most of what had been the matter with him had been simple worry about her. After all, she was his wife.

  “All right, I will,” he said. “And thanks—thanks very much. I’ll come around the day after tomorrow. I imagine we can work out an arrangement about my wife?”

  “Oh, certainly. It’s a simple matter. Many families have only one Stage Two member.”

  Ah. The ideal answer. He shook De La Meter’s hand warmly, and bid him a friendly goodbye.

  All the way downstairs, he whistled happily. For amusement, he counted the floors. There was an extra one, all right—and a button set off to one side of the regular board which, because of its red color, no Stage One would ever push.

  Surprisingly, Boskone was waiting downstairs with his cab. Dexter climbed in, still whistling lightheartedly. He settled back on the cushions and crossed his legs, giving his home address.

  “I thought you were trying to camouflage something when you dawdled over breakfast this morning,” Boskone said in a peppery voice. “Your socks are dirty. Oh, I swear to goodness, I don’t know what you’d do if I wasn’t always busy looking out for you!”

  Dexter bounced forward and stared at Boskone’s face in the rearview mirror. “Miriam!” he gasped.

  “Yes, Miriam,” she mimicked. “Who did you think it was—some flibbertygibberty Stage Two? Oh, you make me sick sometimes.”

  “B—But!”

  “Oh, shut up and read the paper!” She reached into the mete
r and pulled out the Late City Edition of The Newer York Times.

  <>

  * * * *

  HAL CLEMENT

  Air Force bomber pilot, science teacher and scoutmaster, Hal Clement possesses a tremendous competitive advantage over the majority of his colleagues in the ranks of top-notch science-fiction writers: He understands what the scientists are talking about. This is tough on his competitors but works beautifully for the rest of us; for by ruthlessly capitalizing on his advantage he is enabled to write such horrifyingly plausible fantasies of science as-

  Critical Factor

  Pentong, excited for the first time in his life, raced northward. There was no need to grope or feel his way; this close to the great earthquake zone there were always minor tremors, and their echoes from the dense basalt below and the emptiness above reached him almost constantly. The treacherous sandstone strata, which beguiled the lazy traveler with the ease of penetration they offered and then led him up to the zones of death, were easy to spot; Pentong actually used them now, for seeing was so good that he could leave them with plenty of time to seek the safer levels below whenever they started to slope.

  The worst of his journey was behind. The narrow bridge of livable rock which led to the strange land he had found had been recrossed in safety, in spite of the terrifying and deceptive manner in which temblors from the earthquake zone far to the north were trapped, magnified, and echoed from its sides. Now he could see for many days’ travel all about him, and as far as he could see the land was good.

  Not as good as that he had visited, of course. This was the land he had known all his life, where food was just hard enough to find to make life interesting; where for ages past counting other, less fortunate, races from the far, far north had sought to break in and kill that they might inherit its plenty; where pools of magma shifted just rapidly enough to trap the unwary between impenetrable basalt and glowing death; where, if Pentong was right in what he believed of his discovery, regions now too close to the zones of death might be made accessible and provide food and living space for unguessable generations to come.

  He dreamt of this possibility constantly as he moved. No trace of his passage marked the rock behind him, for none of it was edible; but he hardly thought of food for himself. Speed was his prime concern, and to achieve it he traveled as close as he dared to the upper zones.

  The nearest settlement was more than five thousand miles north, he knew; his memory held a sharp picture of the tortuous path he had followed from it, and he retraced that path now. It led him far to the east, where the earth tremors were faint and travel slowed by the poor vision; then back, at a much lower level, to the northwest, where the principal delay was the denser rock. Five hundred miles short of his goal he had to stop, to examine carefully the region of magma pools through which he had passed on his way south. The precise path he had followed could not now be used; it was blocked in several places by molten rock which had forced its way between strata and heated the otherwise habitable stone above and below to an unbearable degree. But other paths existed; and slowly and carefully Pentong wormed his way between the pools, sometimes retreating the way he had come, sometimes going almost straight away from his goal, but gradually working north and downward until the last of the dangerous pockets of fluid lay behind him. Then he could hasten once more; and at last he reached the bed of carbonate rock, a mile thick and more than thirty thousand square miles in area, which had been deposited on the floor of an ancient sea some hundreds of millions of years before and was now safely surrounded and capped by harder layers which shielded its inhabitants from filtering oxygen. This was the city—not the one where Pentong had been born, but the farthest south of all the dwelling centers of his people, and the one to which the more adventurous spirits of the race tended to gravitate. The cities to the northwest and northeast, under the Bering and Icelandic bridges, held danger, of course; they bore the brunt of the endless defense against the savage tribes from beyond the bridges. Still, that danger was known and almost routine; it was the unknown parts of the world that spelled adventure. Pentong, he was sure, had proved himself the most adventurous so far; and he was also sure that he had done more.

  “Halt!” The challenge came through the rock as Pentong’s great, liquid body began to filter into the limestone. No city, even this far from the zones of war, dared be without sentries. “Name yourself!”

  “I am Pentong, returning from the south, a trip that was commanded. My word is this.” He emitted the coded series of temblors which the City Leaders had given him for identification, when and if he returned.

  “Wait.” The explorer knew that the sentry’s body extended far back into the city, and that at his other end he was in communication with the Leaders. The wait was not long. “Enter. You may eat, if you hunger, but go to the Leaders as soon thereafter as may be.”

  “I am hungry, but I must go to them at once. I have found something of importance, and they must know.” The sentry was plainly curious, but forebore to question further; obviously if this stranger felt his news too important to wait for food. he would hardly pause for conversation.

  “Take the Stratum of Manganese; it will be cleared for you,” was all the watcher said. Pentong acknowledged the courtesy—traffic was sometimes a problem in a city of sixty billion inhabitants, each of whom averaged ten cubic yards in volume and was apt to have that bulk spread through a most irregular outline. The Stratum of Manganese was a foot-thick layer stained with the oxide of that metal, and thereby marked plainly to Pentong’s senses. It was cut off sharply by a fault which extended across the center of the city in a northeast-southwest direction; and at one point along that fault was a large volume where numerous boulders of quartz, probably washed to this spot by some ancient river, were imbedded in the limestone. Here the Leaders, or enough of them to transact business, could always be found. Pentong greeted them, received the acknowledgment, and began his report without preamble.

  “About five thousand miles to the south,” he said, “the continental mass in which this city is located narrows apparently to a point. The earthquake zone extends to this point, and seeing is good; but echoes tend to be confusing in some regions, and I explored many of these by touch. In one such area I found a long tongue of sandstone extending yet farther south; and after debating whether I should return to report its existence before venturing out along it, I decided it would be better to have something more complete to report. It was almost like traveling through a stratum which has been cut off on opposite sides by parallel dikes; but the sides this time were simply emptiness. There was no zone of death, however, apparently the tongue of rock is surrounded by what Derrell the Thinker called ocean, which seems to protect the upper regions of portions of the continents. Below, of course, was basalt.

  “The neck of rock went on, seemingly without end. Sometimes it widened, sometimes narrowed so that I thought it had come to an end; but it always went on. Those who claim the continents are drifting will have to explain how that narrow ridge of stone has stayed intact.

  “At last, however, it really widened; and to make short a report whose data was long in compiling, there is a continent at the other end—and I could find no trace of other than lower animals in that continent. That, however, is not its most important feature; what is really striking is the fact that it appears to have no Zone of Death whatever. It is covered with a solid material, which seems to be crystalline from the way it carries sound, but which is impenetrable to living bodies. The continent is inhabitable from top to bottom.”

  “How about edible rock?”

  “As good or better than our own land.” The Leaders reacted audibly to this, and it was some time before speech was again directed at the explorer. Then, as he had expected, it was complimentary.

  “Pentong, you deserve the thanks of every inhabitant of this continent. If your report is as accurate as it seems to be objective, our food problem is solved for generations to come. We will transmit this
news to the other cities, and plans for colonizing the new continent will be worked out as rapidly as may be. Your name will be known from here to the Northern Frontier.”

  For a moment the explorer basked in the praise that was the deepest need of his kind; then he spoke again, with a delicious thrill of anticipation.

  “Leaders, there is yet more, if I may speak.” Cracklings of surprise spread from the boulder-shot area, and the nearer citizens paused in their activities to learn what went on.

  “Speak.”

  “I was curious as to the nature of this solid which seemed as impenetrable as basalt, and strove to learn more about it. For a long time I made no progress; but at last I came to an earthquake zone, in which magma had risen very near the upper levels. About this point the strange substance was thinner; and while investigating the neighborhood, a pocket of magma broke through the Outer Void. This I could tell, partly because of the good seeing, and partly because I could feel the heat working down from the thin layers above.” He paused.

  “This has occurred before,” commented one of the Leaders. “What did it teach you?”

  “Where the magma spread, the solid disappeared—and became like the ocean!” Pentong stopped again, for purely rhetorical reasons—he knew there would be no interruption this time.

  “As you all remember, Derrell the Thinker showed that ocean was a substance, apparently liquid like magma; he studied its sound-transmitting properties, and described them well. I heard his lecture, and examined the substance myself on several occasions. This crystalline sheath of the Southern Continent is simply solid ocean; it melted just as rock does when the magma reached it.” Again the pause, and this time the Leaders conferred briefly.

  “Your point is of extreme scientific interest,” their spokesman finally said, “but we admit we do not see practical importance for it as yet. We gather from your manner that you do; if you would go on—” he left the sentence unfinished.