Collected Short Fiction, page 429
Using them as boosters, as amplifiers, she intended to hurl a psionic signal through the sea to the surface. She could not do it alone; in series, the four of them might do almost anything.
They lay, the four of them, sprawled on couches in Mary’s room. With cold fury she whipped them together into the unit she needed. Michael had objected; after all, the penalty for projecting one’s mind beyond the borders of New Baltimore was death. But Mary had quashed that objection, welded the Four into One, cajoled and commanded and pleaded and manipulated.
Now, tenuously, the threaded strand of four-ply thought wove toward the surface.
Mary had seen the tridims projected on the arching screens in General Hall. She had an idea of the surface—all blacks and browns and fused glass and gaunt frameworks that had been buildings. But she wanted to see it for herself.
She wanted direct visual experience of this surface world, this dead skin of the planet, cauterized by Man’s evil. Mary had a lively appreciation of evil.
UPWARD they traveled. Mary sensed Michael and Tom and Roger clinging to her mind, helping her force the impulse upward. Eyes closed, body coiled, she hurled herself to the task.
And the blackness of the water lightened to dark green as the sun-warmed zone approached. She had not got this far on her earlier, solo attempts. Now her mind rose with little effort into the upper regions of the sea, and without warning cleaved through the barrier of water into the open air.
Michael and Tom and Roger were still with her.
The sight of landside was dazzling.
The first perception was of the sun; smaller than she had expected, but still an awesome object, glowing high in the metal-blue sky. White clouds lay fleecily under the sun.
New Baltimore was some miles out at sea. Drifting lazily but yet with the near-instantaneous speed of thought, they moved landward, ready and eager to see the desolation and ruin.
The shock was overwhelming.
Together, the Four drifted in from the sea, searching for the radiation-blackened fields, the dead land. Instead they saw delicate greenness, carpets of untrodden grass, vaulting thick trees heavy with fruit. Animals grazed peacefully in the lush fields. In the distance, glimmering in the sun, low sloping mountains decked in green rose slowly from the horizon.
BIRDS SANG. Wind whistled gently through the swaying trees. It was as if the hand of man had never approached this land.
Can the scars have healed so soon? Mary wondered. Hardly a century since the bombings destroyed the surface; could the wounds have been covered so rapidly? In wonder she guided the multiple mind down through the warm sky to the ground.
They came alight in a grassy field, sweet with the odors of springtime. Mary felt the tingle of awe. Beings were approaching, floating over the grass without crushing it—not the misshapen mutants some thought might have survived on the surface, but tall godlike beings, smiling their welcome.
A surge of joy rippled through Mary and through her into her three comrades. It would not be hard to teleport their bodies up from the depths. They could live here, in this pleasant land, quitting the confines of New Baltimore. She extended the range of her perception. In every direction lay beauty and peace, and never a sign of the destruction that had been.
Perhaps there was no war, she thought. The landside people sent our ancestors down into the depths and then hoaxed them.
And for a hundred years we thought the surface was deadly, radiation-seared, unlivable!
FOR THE first time in her life Mary felt no rancor. Bitterness was impossible in this green world of landside. The sun warmed the fertile land, and all was well.
All . . .
Sudden constricting impulses tugged at the thread of thought by which the four dreamers held contact with landside.
“Mary, wake up! Come out of it!”
She struggled, but not even the combined strength of the Four could resist. Inexorably she found herself being dragged away, back down into the depths, into New Baltimore, into wakefulness.
She opened her eyes and sat up. On the other couches, Michael and Tom and Roger were groggily returning to awareness.
The room was crowded. Six members of the New Baltimore Control Force stood by the door, glaring grimly at her. Mary tried to lash out, but she was outnumbered; they were six of the strongest Sensitives in New Baltimore, and the fierce grip they held on her mind was unbreakable.
“By what right do you come in here?” she asked, using her voice.
It was Norman My rick of the Control Force who gave the reply: “Mary, we’ve been watching you for years. Now we finally caught you and your three accomplices. You’re under arrest on a charge of projecting beyond the boundaries of New Baltimore.”
THE TRIAL was a farce.
Henry Marked sat in judgement upon them, in the General Hall of the City of New Baltimore. Procedure was simple. Marked, a Sensitive, opened his mind to the accusing members of the Control Force long enough to receive the evidence against the Four.
Then he offered Mary and her three satellites the chance to assert their innocence by opening their minds to him. Sullenly, Mary refused on behalf of the Four. She knew the case was hopeless; if she allowed Marked to peer, their guilt was proven. If she refused, it was an equally tacit admission of guilt. Either way, the penalty loomed; but Mary hoped to retain the integrity of her mind. She had a plan, and a mind-probe would ruin it.
Decision was reached almost immediately after the trial had begun.
Marked said, “I have examined the evidence presented by the Control Force. They have shown that you, Mary, have repeatedly violated our security by making contact with other Domes, and now have inveigled three other Sensitives into joining you for a still bolder attempt. You have made no attempt to defend yourself against this charge. Will you speak now, Mary?”
“We have no defense.”
MARKELL sighed. “You certainly must be aware that our position under the Dome is a vulnerable one. We can never know when the madness that destroyed landside”—Mary smiled knowingly, saying nothing—“will return. We must therefore discourage unofficial contact between Domes by the most severe measures possible. We must retain our position of isolation.
“You, Mary, and your three confederates, have broken this law. The penalty is inevitable. Our borders are rigid here, our population fixed by inexorable boundaries. We cannot tolerate criminals here. The air and food you have consumed up to now is forfeit; four new individuals can be brought into being to replace you. I sentence you to death, you four. This evening you shall be conveyed to the West Aperture and cast through it into the sea.”
Mary glared in icy hatred as she heard the death sentence pronounced. Around her, members of the Control Force maintained constant check on her powers, keeping her from loosing a possibly fatal bolt of mental force at the judge or at anyone else. She was strait-jacketed; she had no alternative but to submit.
But she had a plan.
THEY WERE taken to the West Aperture—a circular, sphinctered opening in the framework of the Dome, used only for the purpose of execution. An airlock the size of a man served as the barrier between the pressing tons of the sea and the safety of New Baltimore.
The Four were placed in the airlock, one at a time.
Mary did not dare let an inkling of her plan leak out; if the Control Force knew, they would see to it that the Four met a different death. Mary could be patient. Thought communication is virtually instantaneous; there was more than enough time to explain her plan to them in the first microsecond beyond the airlock, beyond the reach of the Control Force, before the killing pressure squeezed them to paste.
The airlock opened—once, twice, thrice, a fourth time. Mary felt the coolness first, Michael next, then Roger, then Tom, Instantly her mind sought theirs. “Listen to me! We can save ourselves yet!”
“How? The pressure . . .”
“Listen! We can link again; teleport ourselves to the surface. You’ve seen what it’s like up there. We can live there. I wanted them to throw us out all along! Hurry, join with me!”
“The surface,” Roger said. “We can’t . . .”
“We can live there. Hurry!”
MICHAEL objected, “Teleportation takes enormous energy. The backwash will smash the Dome. A whole section of the city will be flooded!”
New Baltimore was built in twenty watertight sections. Five hundred people would die if the water broke through this point.
“What do we care?” Mary demanded. “They condemned us to death, didn’t they? Well, I condemn them!”
There was no more time for arguing. Already the microsecond had nearly drawn to its close. They were beginning to drift; in moments, the pressure would kill.
Mary made use of her superior Powers to gather the other three to her. Debating was impossible now. Ruthlessly she drew their minds into hers. She heard Roger’s faint protest, but swept it away. For the second time, the Four became one. Mary gathered strength for the giant leap, not even knowing if she could make it but not bothering to consider the possibility of failure now.
Upward.
The passage was instantaneous, as the four minds, linked in an exponential series, ripped upward through the boiling sea toward the surface. Toward the green, warm, fertile surface.
Toward the blackened, seared, radiation-roasted surface.
MARY HAD only an instant for surprise. The surface was not at all as her mind had viewed it; rather, it was even more desolate than the tridims in General Hall had shown it. Congealed rivers of rock wound through the dark fields of ash. The sky hummed with radioactive particles. No life was visible.
Mary dropped to her knees in the blistering ash, still warm from the fires of a century before. The heavy particles lanced burningly through her body. How can this be? She wondered. We saw green lands.
An impulse reached her from Roger, dying of radiation to her left:
. . . fooled you, Mary. Superior to you in one power, anyway. Imaginative projection. I blanked out real image, substituted phony one. You couldn’t tell the difference, could you? Happy dying, Mary . . .
She hissed her hatred and tried to reach him, to rip out his eyes with her nails, but strength failed her. She toppled face-forward, down against the terrible deadly soil of Mother Earth, and waited for the radiation death to overtake her.
Hoaxed, she thought bitterly. By him!
While five thousand feet below, the angry sea, swollen and enraged by the passage of four humans upward through it, crashed against the West Aperture of the New Baltimore dome, crashed again, finally broke through and came raging in, an equal and opposite reaction. Above, Mary Boyle writhed in death-throes under a leaden sky.
Recalled to Life
The grave itself no longer held terror for humanity. The idea of reanimating the dead did, however!
Part 2
Synopsis of Part One:
JAMES HARKER, once Mayor of New York City and once Governor of New York State, is a political has-been at 43. His own party, the National-Liberals, has cast him aside, refusing to nominate him for re-election in the 2032 voting, because of his stubborn and independent tactics.
He has returned to the semiobscurity of private law practice. Occupied in settling the estate of Richard Bryant, a dying old hero of early space travel, Harker is approached one day by a gangling, awkward man who introduces himself as Dr. Benedict Lurie of the Beller Research Laboratories. Lurie puts a strange and surprising proposition to him.
It seems that the Belief Labs, working secretly on a private grant the past eight years, have developed a process which can restore to life human beings who have been dead less than twenty-four hours. They wish to engage Harker as their legal consultant. Despite his wife’s uneasiness and his own inner doubts, he allows himself to be taken to the Beller Laboratories headquarters in Litchfield, New Jersey, and is given a demonstration of the process in action which convinces him that their process is genuine. He accepts the job.
But he is not pleased with the present Beller staff. The lab director, Dr. Martin Raymond, is a sincere and competent man—but Harker takes an immediate dislike to the group’s publicity agent, the brash and impatient Cal Mitchison, and to a researcher named David Klaus who seems to be angling for Raymond’s job.
Still, he agrees to devote himself full-time to serving as legal advisor, and withdraws himself from other business commitments despite the strenuous warning of his friend and partner, Bill Kelly. He visits a Roman Catholic priest, Father Carteret, and learns from him that the Church will probably oppose reanimation on theological grounds; swearing Carteret to secrecy, Harker leaves, realizing he will have potent forces to contend with in securing the legalization of the Beller process.
He attempts to have Mitchison, the publicity agent, discharged, but in this he is blocked by Simeon Barchet, an ultra-conservative opponent of his who administers the Beller Fund and thus controls the purse of the organization. Temporarily abandoning the idea, Harker journeys to Albany to see his successor as Governor, Leo Winstead, in hopes of getting Winstead’s support in the coming political struggle over reanimation. Winstead, though, tells him that the thing is too hot to handle, and refuses to commit himself until higher-ranking members of their party have decided on National-Liberal policy.
Harker then makes plans to go to Washington and appeal to Clyde Thurman, senior Senator from New York and patriarch of the National-Liberal party. The night before his departure, Harker learns that his aged client Richard Bryant has died, and that his children, led by his oldest son Jonathan, are striving to break the will Harker had written for him. The following morning Harker is at the airport when he receives an emergency call from Mart Raymond, who tells him to come to the lab in Litchfield immediately. Mitchison and Klaus have issued an unauthorized statement prematurely informing the world of the existence of the Beller Process for reanimation. The laboratory is swarming with reporters.
Hastening there, Harker finds the place in confusion. Mitchison and Klaus have disappeared. And when Harker suggests a public demonstration, Raymond confesses for tire first time that the process does not always work—and when it does work, one time out of six the brain is not revived with the body.
This, of course, eliminates the possibility of a public demonstration, which would, Harker now realizes, be like a game of Russian Roulette, with one chance in six that the whole show would blow up in their faces. As he considers the situation, Barchet enters and informs him that the reporters are growing restless. He composes a hasty statement disowning Mitchison, crediting Raymond as head of the project, and declaring that full details of the technique will be released as soon as they are ready. Then he locates the nearest vidset, to see how the news is being treated.
The original announcement has already pushed all other news into the background. Thurman and others are calling for an immediate Senate investigation with a view to placing the reanimation technique under federal regulation. The President and Vice-President are treating the news calmly. But there one large and vitally important question still to be answered. That question is; how will the man in the street react? Harker wishes he knew.
Now Read Port Two:
CHAPTER IX
HARKER held his first news-conference at three-thirty that afternoon, in the hastily-rigged room that was now his Litchfield office.
By that time, it had occurred to him that he had become not only the legal adviser of the Laboratories, but the public spokesman, publicity director, and chairman of the board as well. Everyone, Raymond included, seemed perfectly willing to delegate responsibility to him.
He made a list of eight selected media representatives—three newspapers, both press services, two video networks and one radio network, and invited them to send men to his conference. No others were allowed in.
He told them very concisely what the Beller technique was, how it had been developed, and what it could do. He used a Few technical terms that he had picked up from his weekend reading. He did not mention the fact that the technique was not without flaws.
When lie had finished his explanation, he called for questions. Surprisingly few were forthcoming. The news seemed to have stilled the tongues of even these veteran reporters.
At the close of the conference he said, “Headquarters for further Belief news will be right here. I’ll try to make myself available for comment about the same time every afternoon.”
He watched them go. He wondered how much of what he had said would reach the public undistorted, and how much would emerge in garbled and sensationalized form.
Toward evening, he started finding out.
Harker reached his home in Larchmont about seven that evening, utterly exhausted. Lois was at the door, anxious-faced, tense.
“Jim! I’ve been listening to the news all day. So have the boys. Your name’s been mentioned every time.
“That’s nice, Harker said wearily. He unsnapped his shoes and nodded hello to his sons, who stared at him strangely as if he had undergone some strange transformation during the day.
“I’ll be spending most of my time at Litchfield until things get calmer,” he said. “I may even have to sleep out there for a while.”
The phone rang suddenly. Harker started to go for it, then changed his mind and said, “Find out who it is, first. If it’s anybody official tell them I’m not home yet. Except Raymond.
Lois nodded and glided off toward the phone alcove. When she returned, she looked even more pale, more tense.
“Who was it?”
“Some—some crank. There’ve been a lot of those calls today, Jim.”
He tightened his lips. “I’ll have the number changed tomorrow. Nuisances.”
