The Future Makers (v1.0), page 6
“Why? Why bother?”
“You are not content here. Our whole social system, our entire philosophy, is based on the contentment of the individual. So we must do what we can…in addition, you have given us a tremendous amount of research material in psychology and in theoretical cosmogony. We are grateful. We want you to have what you want. Your fear is great. Your desire is greater. And to help you achieve your desire, we have put you on this course of abreaction.”
“Abreaction?”
He nodded. “The psychological re-enactment, or retracing, of everything you have done since you came here, in an effort to return you to the entrance-point in exactly the same frame of mind as that in which you came through it. We cannot find that point. It has something to do with your particular psychic matrix. But if the point is still here, and if, by hpynosis, we can cause you to do exactly what you did when you first came through—why, then, you’ll go back.”
“Will it be—dangerous?”
“Yes,” he said, unhesitatingly. “Even if the point of tangency is still here, where you emerged, it may not be at the same point on your earth. Don’t forget—you have been here for eleven of your years…And then there’s the agony—bad enough if you do go through, infinitely worse if you do not, for you may drift in—in somewhere forever, quite conscious, and with no possibility of release.
“You know all this, and yet you still want us to try…
He sighed. “We admire you deeply, and wonder too; for you are the bravest man we have ever known. We wonder most particularly at your culture, which can produce such an incredible regard for the ego…Shall we try again?”
I looked at the sun which was too orange, and at the hills, and at his broad, quiet, beautiful face. If I could have spoken my name then, I think I should have stayed. If I could have seen her just at that moment, I think I should have waited a little longer, at least.
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s try it again.”
I was so afraid that I couldn’t remember my name or the name of Gracias de Nada, or something, the fellow who drove the bottom-dump. I couldn’t remember how to run the machine; but my hands remembered, and my feet.
Now I sat and looked at the windrow; and then I pulled back the throttle and raised the blade. I swung into the windrow, and the gravel loaded clean on to the blade and cleanly ran off in two even rolls at the sides. When I sensed that the gravel was all off the blade. I stopped, shifted into high reverse, pulled the left steering clutch to me, let in the master clutch, stamped the left brake…
That was the thing, then. Back-blading that roll out—the long small windrow of gravel that had run off the ends of my blade. As I backed over it, the machine straddling it, I dropped the blade on it and floated it, so that it smoothed out the roll. Then it was that I looked back—force of habit, for a bulldozer that size can do real damage backing into power-poles or buildings—and I saw the muzzy bit of fill.
It was a patch of spread gravel that seemed whirling, blurred at the edges. Look into the sun and then suddenly at the floor. There will be a muzzy patch there whirling and swirling like that. I thought something funny had happened to my eyes. But I didn’t stop the machine, and then suddenly I was in it.
Again.
It built up slowly, the agony. It built up in a way that promised more and then carefully fulfilled the promise, and made of the peak of pain a further promise. There was no sense of strain, for everything was poised and counterbalanced and nothing would break. All of the inner force was as strong as all the outer forces, and all of me was the point of equilibrium.
Don’t try to think about it. Don’t try to imagine for a second. A second of that, unbalanced, would crush you to cosmic dust. There were years of it for me; years and years…I was in an unused stockpile of years, somewhere in a hyperspace, and the weight of them all was on me and in me, consecutively, concurrently.
I woke up very slowly. I hurt all over, and that was an excruciating pleasure, because the pain was only physical.
I began to forget right away.
A company doctor came in and peeped at me. I said, “Hi.”
“Well, well,” he said, beaming. “So the flying catskinner is with us again.”
“What flying catskinner? What happened? Where am I?”
“You’re in the dispensary. You, my boy, were working your bulldozer out on the fill and all of a sudden took it into your head to be a flying kay-det at the same time. That’s what they say, anyhow. I do know that there wasn’t a mark around the machine where it lay—not for sixty feet. You sure didn’t drive it over there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That, son, I wouldn’t know. But I went and looked myself. There lay the Cat, all broken up, and you beside it with your lungs all full of your own ribs. Deadest looking man I ever saw get better.”
“I don’t get it. Did anybody see this happen? Are you trying to—”
“Only one claims to have seen it was a Puerto-Rican bottom-dump driver. Doesn’t speak any English, but he swears on every saint in the calendar that he looked back after dumping a load and saw you and twenty tons of bulldozer forty feet in the air, and then it was coming down!”
I stared. “Who was the man?”
“Heavyset fellow. About forty-five. Strong as a rhino and seemed sane.”
“I know him,” I said. “A good man.” Suddenly, then, happily: “Doc—you know what his name is?”
“No. Didn’t ask. Some flowery Spanish moniker, I guess.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “His name is Kirkpatrick. Alonzo Padin de Kirkpatrick.”
He laughed. “The Irish are a wonderful people. Go to sleep. You’ve been unconscious for nearly three weeks.”
“I’ve been unconscious for eleven years,” I said, and felt foolish as hell because I hadn’t meant to say anything like that and couldn’t imagine what put it into my head.
THE PIPER
By Ray Bradbury
To a great many people Modern Science Fiction begins and ends with Ray Bradbury. The remarkable creator of classics like “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Bradbury has a style which rings like poetry, expressing ordinary—and extraordinary—things in a way that is totally unique. His rise to the position of eminence which he now enjoys was not easy, however. His early writings often display his influences too openly and his desperate search for publication frequently made him compromise his own natural flare simply to see his work in print. But thanks to a shrewd agent and one or two adventurous editors, the young Bradbury was encouraged to let the torrent of words locked in him spill out onto the page. “The Piper” which appears here was the first story he wrote without a collaborator—he had co-authored a number of prior tales with an established S.F. writer, Henry Hasse—and it has stood the passage of time well. Enthusiasts of Bradbury’s work will see in it shades of what was to follow in “The Martian Chronicles”—to those who have not read this great work it will serve as a worthy introduction.
From space, Mars was like a copper-coloured lantern, burning feebly, growing old, and dying. It resembled a large blossom as the Jovian spaceship approached it.
Kerac, the Martian, stood in the heart of his ship, watching the lovely, faded flower unfold like the soft petals of memory—half afraid to look, but quite knowing what changes twenty years might have brought to his homeland. Mars, at first glance, was the same. Fingers of nostalgia touched him. Strange tears stung his eyes. But as the ship needled down through lean atmosphere, the physiognomy of the planet appeared scarred. Sprawling over the Martian meadowland lay a city, its pattern of black and white splotches merging into a bulging idiot eye. “Jovian riff-raff”, swore Kerac as he peered downward. “What a mess!”
His thin fingers tightened, his spidery hands clutching a silver musical Pipe upon which he had composed his symphonies and folk-tunes—his only link with his past, with his fame as a composer and musician.
Kerac began to shiver as if a quiet wind were blowing through him—a wind of resentment and fear and a strange deep anger. The city’s lines emerged in sharper detail. It was filthily unplanned, a proof of decay rather than progress. There was no questioning of fact that this city had been thrown together by the awkward, drunken hand of the Jovian colonizers. Squalor and the character of these pale-blue creatures from Jupiter were synonymous.
Highways shot out from the core of the city, throwing tentacles of metal southward to three other Jovian cities; each as disproportioned and irritating to the eye as the first.
Kerac raged, half to himself, half to the short, flabby, blue-skinned Jovian who stood with slitted dark eyes beside him.
“Look what they’ve done!” he cried. “For a million years that valley was green and fertile, soft with growing things. They’ve tom it up, hunting for minerals! Those mountains in the South—they were regular and beautiful. They’ve ripped the tops off them and shattered the sides! Is this your blueprint for the colonization of Mars? Is this what I must enjoy on my return from exile?”
Kerac fell silent. The blue-skinned Jovian, mute and small in comparison with the incredibly tall and thin musician said nothing.
The exile’s face was a fine network of lines. A dry, brown, birdlike face it was, aquiline and keen-eyed. There was about him an indefinable air of mystery and melancholy. And now he was looking down into the faces of ten million dead Martians. They cried out to him for only one thing. They asked revenge. That was all.
“There,” said Kerac, pointing. “See where the river flows down from the hills?”
The Jovian compressed his thick lips, said nothing. The exile continued.
“I was bom near the mouth of that stream, up that way, where the mountains are purple. Look at it now! Marred by twenty years of smoke, grime and filth, and now turned into a sewage canal!”
“The Klondike days on Earth were as bad,” snapped the Jovian, speaking for the first time in minutes. “This is the same rush on a larger scale. The end justifies the means!”
The small Jovian projectile nosed the soil, rocking to rest Ports slid open. Seconds later, Kerac walked on Martian soil for the first time in twenty years. It was the same spongy, moist-smelling ground that his childish feet had skipped on, but now it was littered with trash, scarred and slashed by the jets of spaceships, blotched with machine oil.
Kerac stood looking a moment. Audio pillars, situated at various points about the landing field spilled music, garish Jovian songs of dissonance and chaos. Then, with an oath, Kerac kicked.
A discarded utana bottle went ricochetting noisily.
They left the rocket-port, walked into the town, into narrow, alley-like streets, filled with the thick, fishy odour of Jovian food. Laughter echoed down crooked-spined thoroughfares. Glasses shattered. Now and then a gun snapped, propelling death, adding to the din of the alien city. The Jovian indicated a shabby dwelling.
“Sleep there.”
“Thank you, no.” Kerac spun on one heel, walked off toward the edge of town where the stream wound past on its way from the violet-tinged hills. “I’m going where I can breathe.”
The Jovian made no move to follow, but grunted, “The Council will jail you if you do not report once a day. I will expect you tomorrow, Martian!”
“If you want me, just follow the stream—” Kerac’s voice faded like a bird flying into the gathering twilight.
He walked quickly, his jaw tightened. Misery was in his soul. The harsh lights burnt his eyes. The music of Jupiter poured from towering audios all over the town, constant, grating. And, once, faintly, the sound of giggling women cut in his ears.
The sun was setting as he reached the quiet stream. He knelt there with the water lapping at his knees and prayed on the stars that some plan would help him end all this.
The stream was cold to his fingers, as cold as the blood of the Martian race which had committed suicide in order not to be engulfed and controlled by the tide of colonials swarming from Jupiter. Kerac thought of the pioneers, of his murdered family, the desecrated soil. He prayed even more fervently.
“Kam, give me strength,” he asked. “Kam, give me strength.”
When the city was left sprawled behind him, he walked with a new spring to his legs. Exhilaration poured through him, a song came to his lips. He lifted his silver Pipe and played his song to the hills. The hills repeated it, softly.
Stars came out, the stream at his side murmured melodies as it flowed over pebbles. Suddenly time was no obstacle. Time flew back. Twenty years fell away like a misted veil. Everything was peaceful again. There was no conquest, nothing but beauty and the night.
He turned to look at the Jovian city and its lights, a million-eyed monster defacing the plain. Other music interrupted the song on his lips. Music from the audios in the city, broadcast so loudly that the East wind plucked it, carried it to the hills.
Kerac restrained a curse, and plunged on. The mad music tagged at his heels. Was there no escaping them?
The wind changed. The music of Jove died into silence. He sighed with relief. It would not be long, he thought. He had come home to die. He was old. The Jovian scientists had finished dissecting him physically and psychologically, and now were sending him to his dead planet, knowing full well that alone he could not harm them. He was the last of the Golden Race.
But what of the Creatures in the Martian mountains, the vast unnamable hordes of amorphous, guttural-voiced entities that inhabited the caves of Mars? Had they been as ruthlessly wiped out as the great Golden Race?
The Dark Race had not committed suicide, this much Kerac knew. And it would have taken time to clean them all out of the million caves. A faint spark of hope began to flicker within him.
Looking out over a dimly illuminated stretch of desert in one direction, the lifeless Martian city of Kam lay desolate.
Kam’s aged spires towered toward thin air, flinging out great symmetrically designed parkways and gardens like the unused pinions of a magnificent bird, for ever quiescent, no more to live, no more to fly.
Not long ago that city had breathed, given birth to millions of Martians, swaddled them, Raised them, given them riches, happiness from untold centuries of idyllic existence.
Kerac caressed his musical Pipe, the instrument that had given him solace during his long exile on Jupiter.
He gazed idly. A great swarm of creatures flew up from the dead city of Kam—a trail of soaring white birds crossing stars with a shrill song in their thousand throats. Repeating and repeating their song, again and again, fading, fading and fading still more, until only a vestige of an echo wandered back in a soft finale.
Away they flew over the synthetic Jovian streets and down oyer the horizon from which would come the rising sun many hours later.
Then a deep grumble reached Kerac’s ears. The grumble had started even as the great Kam birds flapped high with their waning song, had reached a peak as the birds subsided into the far lands. Now the grumble began to fade, but not before Kerac realized what it was.
When the birds came, singing, the grumbling followed close. But the dull grumble came from the ground, from the dim caverns of the mountains. And he knew what caused the grumble—The Dark Race! Deep in the caves they still survived. Elation flamed within him. Martians still existed, even if they were the dull-brained, misshaped Dark Race. Kerac had an ally!
Kerac had no plan as he approached the caverns of the Dark Race. He walked slowly between sheer walls that stretched five hundred feet skyward as through granite slabs of a tomb city. All was velvet silence, and only his feet beat a gentle scuff-scuff on the rock.
He stopped, touched with excitement yet a dash of fear. Something rustled just ahead. A dark shape manifested itself. Greenish eyes glared at Kerac. A low guttural snarl came through the gloom.
The shape moved sluggishly, like a ponderous, semi-human amoeba; a mass of ebon life on the verge of imitating Man. It reared up on thick black legs, groping out with fat dark arms and thick, hungry fingers. It opened a wide, lipless mouth and grunted.
Kerac fell back, fear tightening his chest like a vice. His fingers sought his silver musical Pipe. But he didn’t carry it to his lips. What good was music against this terror?
He attempted an appeal to the creature.
“My friend,” he appealed softly. “We are brothers. We have been blasphemed by the men from another star.”,
He paused, then repeated: “We are brothers.”
The unhuman thing swayed. The two legs slobbered on firm rock in a horrible imitation of walking. A semblance of an arm writhed out in Kerac’s direction.
“Will you help me?” pleaded Kerac. “The beasts of Jove are tearing at you. They take your riches, defile the veldt-lands. Soon they come here to wipe you out. But before they do, help me.”
The creature snarled and turned. From the caves a dozen voices shrieked reply. Kerac retreated six paces.
“We are brothers, don’t you understand? We have a duty, a task to perform. Help me to act now.”
A roaring wall of voices rushed from the deep caves. Overhead, a cloudlet of Kam birds wafted by, singing. And with their appearance, the Dark Race gave birth to a volcano of ear-shattering cries. Hundreds of them floundered, groped, stumbled, reeled out of the stuffy tunnels.
Kerac whipped about as a thousand green eyes stared at him. His heart churned defeat and anger and hopelessness. They started to close in. He fled.
He ran until he reached a place where the walls broadened out. Here he paused. The Dark Race came no further. They had never advanced beyond this boundary. Never. Only their voices, cold, pestilential, menacing, had transcended.
Even now they gave up the brief chase, returned to their caves. The night became as quiet as the distant pinpoint stars. Jupiter gloated in the heaven.
