Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 37
“Right. Shoot,” said Raines.
“Our roving reporter—” began Cornman, and was interrupted by the deafening whipping and cracking of blue-white electric flashes darting up and down twisted paths through the air between the copper ring on the floor and its opposite number on the ceiling.
Cornman turned his eyes from the brilliance and glimpsed Stafford, his face tense with concentration, running his fingers like a high-speed typist over sliding resistances, buttons, switches, and the milled knobs of dials. Just for a second or so—then Stafford froze, the cracking ceased with a snap that banished the leaping shadows.
And Cornman became aware that his ears were ringing and that there was a smell of ozone. Because of this temporary deafness, Raines’s voice sounded faint to him. He didn’t get the import of it. It sounded like “Idlmstfgtnidtcmbk.”
He swung round and blinked to behold Raines standing on the little pedestal in a long robe of a yellow so vivid it almost stabbed the eye. Raines had grown a little pointed beard, he was smiling, his eyes were full of a serene amusement. He stepped down and gripped Stafford’s hand.
“It’s great!” he said enthusiastically. “You’ll have to come over there. I never dreamed before that such bliss was possible.”
Stafford’s tired eyes lighted up.
“Nothing to worry about?” he asked.
“Worry!” said Raines with a snort. “Nobody there knows the meaning of the word. Hello, Cornman, heard any good jokes lately?”
“Hello,” responded Cornman. “What was that word you used the moment you arrived? Something in your blissful friends’ language?”
“Their language is English,” smiled Raines. “Only through usage it has developed into a kind of verbal shorthand. The vowels have mostly been dropped, and more degrees of expression put into the consonants. Civilization speeds up thought processes.
“People here are already thinking faster than they can speak. It’s logical to expect speech to take short cuts. What I said was ‘I had almost forgotten I had to come back.’ Believe it or not, I’ve got so in the way of speaking like that these last few weeks that I feel I am speaking painfully slowly and deliberately now.”
“Let’s go and sit down in the other room and let you tell us the story,” said Stafford. “I take it this other world is higher up the scale of civilization than ours?” he flung over his shoulder as he led the way.
“Way up,” said Raines.
“Things swam about me for a moment,” said Raines, beginning his narrative. “I seemed to drop a few inches—the height of the pedestal, I expect—and then I found myself standing on that grassy plain shown in your photo, in bright sunlight. And there was the walled city, a couple of miles away.
“The road was but a hundred yards off. I gained it and started walking toward the city. Apart from the unusual design of the city, there was no sense of being on another planet. The gravitation, air, and natural scenery were the same as here in England. I judged that the planet which kept changing places with the earth was in general identical to it. It remained to be seen how the inhabitants compared.
“It didn’t remain long. I had barely covered a quarter of a mile before I saw a little car—like that in the photo—speeding toward me from the city. I stopped and waited for it.
“It overshot me by twenty yards. I glimpsed a couple of men in it arrayed in scarlet robes, like cardinals. It stopped. The men in it did something that caused their seats to swivel around, and this obviated the necessity of turning the car, for it came slowly back to me, and what had been its rear was now its front.”
He paused, then resumed his story.
“The men were just like any other men, except that they looked much better humored. None of the tense frowning you see all the time in the streets of our cities. The only lines on their faces were the lines of laughter.
“One of them leaned out and addressed me with a smile. ‘Hooru.’
“It sounded vaguely like, ‘Who are you?’, so I answered, ‘My name is Raines. I have come from another world. What do you call this place?’
“Obviously they didn’t comprehend a word of it. They smiled at one another and motioned me to a sort of high dicky seat which had sprung up at the back of the car. Then we set off at a swift pace for the city.
“The city gate was just like a great roller blind. It rolled up at our approach, and we shot underneath it and through the fairly populous streets without slackening speed. The buildings reared above us like skyscrapers. There were no sidewalks. People, all in differently colored but always vivid robes, seemed to be walking just where they pleased, paying no heed to the traffic, of which there was little enough.
“We were spinning round corners so fast that several times I nearly shot off my seat. I was scared, and yelled to the driver to slow down. Both men merely looked at me in puzzlement. One pedestrian, a tall chap in a yellow robe like mine, walked slap in front of our car. He saw us. He could have avoided us. I believe we could have avoided him. There was a slight jar, a bump, and looking back I saw him lying in the road. Only his robe was yellow and crimson.
“And the two men in my car were grinning at each other! I felt sick. What mad and murderous people were these, I wondered.
“We stopped at a tall white building. In a few minutes I was shown into a room somewhere near the top of it, with a view over the city and the surrounding plain. The two men retired, leaving me alone. Presently the door opened, and in came a portly gray-haired fellow in a robe of startling orange. He sat himself comfortably opposite me, and began what I presumed to be an interrogation.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your language. You don’t, by any chance, happen to have heard of English?’
“‘English?’ he echoed, and rattled off again. He stopped when he saw that I wasn’t getting any of it. ‘Why do you speak archaic English?’ he asked, suddenly and surprisingly.
“ ‘This is the only English I know,’ I said.
“He smiled. ‘Then it’s lucky I have made it my hobby. I was asking who you were and where you came from.’
“ ‘It’s a story you’ll hardly credit,’ I said, and told him how and why I was visiting his world. I was amazed that he accepted it all without expressing any doubt. He asked more about earth, its inhabitants and their behavior. Then he settled himself to give me a long account of his world.
“In brief, it amounted to this—their world is nearly a twin of our own. Although the two worlds had developed side by side in time, as it were, theirs had gained about a thousand years on us. There must be some small difference in the intervals for some reason or other, possibly only a single second. But the aggregate over thousands of millions of years amounted to a thousand years.
“In effect, their world is what this one will be in a thousand years’ time if it continues to follow a parallel course—which, mark you, it has done so far undeviatingly.
“I was in a town called London—or ‘Lndn’ in their speedier English —round about 2947 a.d. There had been a Third World War—quite as nice a mess as we visualized, except that the planet managed to remain in one piece. But no nation did.
“All that was left afterwards were a few globally scattered strong points—vast, thick-walled fortresses, having no contact with one another, and harboring displaced persons thrown together by chance in the total world upheaval.
“From these grew up a system of walled cities, widely separated, each sufficient unto itself, each in deadly fear of attack from other cities and in a perpetual state of alert defense. Most cities had a radar system that detected the presence of any unknown persons or objects approaching the city by any means. I myself had been detected at once on the radar screens, surveyed through telescopes, and a car dispatched to bring me in for interrogation.
“ ‘Though that was merely through force of habit and curiosity,’ said the man in the orange robe—his name was Tmsn. ‘We did not fear you. We don’t fear anybody or anything any longer. Fear has been abolished and war has gone with it.’”
Raines paused again, briefly.
“Tmsn elucidated this statement. In the walled, fear-haunted city of Lndn after the Third World War a body of wise men set themselves to answer the question: ‘Why, if all men hate war and only wish to work and pursue happiness in peace, do they keep starting wars?’
“The answer, they decided, was because man was still saddled with the brain of an animal, a beast of prey, with the impulse to turn and rend everything that threatened it. While man was still a beast, that blind sense of self-preserving was natural and fitting. But man had one fundamental and growing difference from the beasts—an imagination.
“Unfortunately this imagination was tethered to his impulse to attack threatening things. He began to see threats that weren’t there at all—they were only in his leaping, anticipating imagination. He began to fear the attack phantasms in his own mind, and gave them the flesh of other people, other tribes, other nations.
“The wise men decided that this unholy union of fear and imagination had to be broken. One or the other had to be cut out if man was to have any future at all. To cut out imagination meant to return to the beast. They decided to cut out fear.
“Upon analysis, they found fear, worry, hatred, and rage were all disguises of just one thing—doubt. Doubt of one’s own ability to be equal to any threatening thing brought a surge of adrenalin from the glands into the blood stream to supply fighting energy to tackle the threat, imagined or otherwise. And when men were charged with this fighting energy, wars began of themselves.
“This doubt center of the mind, they found, was located in the frontal lobes of the brain. Hunting in the records, they found reports of a brain operation current in war neurosis cases during and after the Second World War. It consisted merely of severing the white nerves joining the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain.
“There was a Scottish surgeon who had specialized in the operation —the newspapers and journals of the end of the war period gave much space to it. The shell-shocked people, the war neurosis cases, were simply men distracted by doubt. Most of these people worried themselves ill fighting the enemies of their own imagination. A threat is just as real as you imagine it to be.
“The operation cut out that doubting. It brought unity, which meant peace of mind, to the patients. They became happy, good-humored, self-confident, unmalicious people. Some of them had their speech and hearing centers slightly affected. That was because of the clumsy surgical tools employed—a gimlet and a knife.
“ ‘Nowadays,’ said Tmsn, ‘we use heat and burn away the nerves painlessly, with no boring or cutting. We don’t even break the skin. It’s merely a matter of getting a fix on the part to be removed, by crossing two narrow electronic beams there. Also, the early, crude operations often brought on symptoms of fatness and lethargy. Obviously because fear no longer stimulated the glands to function. So now we make a little adjustment to the thyroid gland.’
“He went on, ‘The practice of this operation spread and has now become compulsory all over the world. We are a happy, confident people. We know war is finished now. As for the ordinary bothers of life as your people live it, we care no more than the lilies of the field.
“ ‘You will not find here people worrying because they’ve got to get to a certain place by a certain time or do anything by a certain time. No one worries about time in the least. Nobody worries about his health, so everyone is healthy. Most illnesses are products of worry.
“ ‘Nobody worries if there isn’t enough food—they just help themselves to other people’s. The other people don’t care. If they starve they don’t care—you only die once.
“ ‘You won’t find people caring what others think of them or their work. There is no fear of criticism. In your world most people love bright colors but they’re afraid to wear them. As you may have noticed, we are not afraid. We are free people.’
“I asked him the meaning of the incident of our car callously running down a harmless pedestrian. He laughed.
“ ‘Such things are fairly common,’ he said. ‘Only somebody from your sick world would think comment necessary. The fellow didn’t doubt that he could get across the road before the car got to him. The fact that he didn’t doesn’t mean a thing. He just didn’t, that’s all. I’m certain it didn’t worry him in the least. No more than it would have worried me. Or you, after we have cured you.’
“ ‘What!’ I exclaimed.
‘“As I’ve said, this lobular operation is compulsory for all in this world. You’re in it now. Ergo—’
“ ‘But I don’t want to be operated on.’
“ ‘Of course not. You fear it. That’s a symptom of your illness. After the operation you’ll wonder how you could have objected.’
“ ‘How dare you presume to operate on me against my will! This is dictatorship. I won’t have it,’ I cried.
“ ‘In your world,’ said Tmsn, ‘school doctors remove septic tonsils against the children’s wishes. They realize they are doing it for the children’s own good, and the children’s objections literally are—childish.’
“ ‘I’m not childish.’
“ ‘You are. Your whole world is. That’s what’s wrong with it. For your own good, we are going to give you treatment.’
“Well, they operated. And then I saw what a fool I had been to fear it. There was nothing to fear any more. What a great part of my life had been wasted in futile worrying! Everything became easy to me now that there was no crippling doubt. Here, look at my sketch book.”
He dragged it out of a capacious inner pocket and tossed it to Stafford, who glanced through it with a deepening frown.
“I filled that in a day,” said Raines. “I drew with swift, confident lines. Before, I used to think genius meant taking infinite pains. I spent half of my time erasing. I never had to erase a line of that. I was sure and unerring in every stroke.
“I studied the abbreviated English, too, and mastered it in a few days. Study is easy if the mind is cleared of doubt. The memory is infallible. You only forget if you fear you will forget.”
“And what do you propose doing now?” asked Cornman.
Raines stood up. “I’m going to see all the influential people here I can. Newspaper editors and proprietors, politicians, doctors, surgeons. I’ll soon persuade them that everyone should have this brain operation. It’ll end war for good and all and bring man perfect peace at last. Here begins the millennium!”
He marched toward the door and paused to call to Stafford, who was now staring gloomily out of the window, “I’ll be back in three weeks. Have no doubt of it. We’ll take the next trip together.”
He was gone.
Stafford had a pantomimic glimpse of him striding down the road in his flying yellow robe, singing joyously.
“H’m,” grunted Cornman, turning the leaves of the sketch book. “I don’t think our friend has much future as an artist. This stuff looks like the work of a five-year-old. In fact, I take a poor view of his future altogether in this world. He won’t last long if he continues to have no doubt that he has the right of way over six-wheeler buses.”
He gave a laugh that seemed to come from his chest.
“Well, there you are, Stafford,” he rumbled on. “The choice is between living in a fool’s paradise or a sane man’s hell.”
Stafford started to say something, stifled it, then turned on his heel and walked out.
It was early evening, and still Stafford had not returned.
Cornman went alone to a cafe to have the meal he usually shared with Stafford. As he sat at the table smoking his after-dinner cigar and reading the evening paper, his eyes lighted upon a paragraph.
MAN DROWNS IN RESCUE ATTEMPT
Shortly after noon today an unknown man, aged about 35, was drowned in a spectacular attempt to rescue Mr. R. H. Strongarm, well-known director of United Armaments, Ltd., who had accidentally fallen from his motor launch as it passed under Waterloo Bridge.
According to witnesses, the unknown man, who wore a full-length robe of bright yellow and who is suspected of having been a member of some strange religious sect, without a moment’s hesitation dived headlong from the bridge in an attempt to rescue Mr. Strongarm. After a few moments it became obvious that the would-be rescuer had no idea how to swim, and soon sank and was not seen again.
Mr. Strongarm, who was rescued by a patrol boat of the River Police, said, “I have never seen such courage. It is a great pity the man did not live to realize that he had attempted to save a life—I say this with all modesty—of such importance to our national security.”
Cornman’s guffaw made other diners turn to stare at him. He got up and left, hoping to find Stafford at home so that he could amuse him with this delicious piece of irony.
