Dreaming Jewels (5 page)

He got over the drunkenness; alcoholism is not a disease, but a symptom. There are two ways of disposing of alcoholism. One is to cure the disorder which causes it. The other is to substitute some other symptom for it. That was Pierre Monetre’s way.

He chose to despise the men who had shut him out, and let himself despise the rest of humanity because it was kin to those men.

He enjoyed his disgust. He built himself a pinnacle of hatred and stood on it to sneer at the world. This gave him all the altitude he needed at the time. He starved while he did it; but since riches were of value to the world at which he sneered, he enjoyed his poverty too. For a while.

But a man with such an attitude is like a child with a whip—or a nation with battleships. For a while it is sufficient to stand in the sun, with one’s power in plain sight for all to see. Soon, however, the whip must whistle and crack, the rifles must thunder, the man must take more than a stand; he must take action.

Pierre Monetre worked for a while with subversive groups. It was of no importance to him which group, or what it stood for, as long as its aim was to tear down the current structure of the majority. He did not confine this to politics, but also did what he could to introduce modern non-objective art into traditional galleries, agitated for atonal music in string quartets, poured beef-extract on the serving tables of a vegetarian restaurant, and made a score of other stupid, petty rebellions—rebellions for their own sake always, having nothing to do with the worth of any art or music or food-taboos.

His disgust, meanwhile, fed on itself, until it was neither stupid nor petty. Again he found himself at a loss for a means of expressing it. He grew increasingly bitter as his clothes wore out, as he was forced out of one sordid garret after another. He never blamed himself, but felt victimized by humanity—a humanity that was, part and parcel, inferior to him. And suddenly he was given what he wanted.

He had to eat. All his corrosive hatreds focused there. There was no escaping it, and for a while there was no means of eating except doing work which would be of some value to some part of humanity. This galled him, but there was no other way of inducing humanity to pay him for his work. So he turned to a phase of his medical training and got a job in a biological laboratory doing cellular analyses. His hatred of mankind could not change the characteristics of his interested, inquiring, brilliant mind; he loved the work, hating only the fact that it benefited people-employers and their clients, who were mostly doctors and their patients.

He lived in a house—an ex-stable—near the edge of a small town, where he could take long walks by himself in the woods and think his strange thoughts. Only a man who had consciously turned away, for years, from everything human would have noticed what he had noticed one fall afternoon, or would have had the curiosity to examine it. Only a man with his unusual combination of training and ability would have had the equipment to explain it. And certainly, only such a social monster could have used it as he did.

He saw two trees.

Each was a tree like any other tree—an oak sapling, twisted from some early accident, young and alive. Never in a thousand years would he have noticed either of them, particularly, had he seen it alone. But he saw them together; his eye swept over them, he raised his eyebrows in slight surprise and walked on. Then he stopped and went back and stood staring at them. And suddenly he grunted as if he had been kicked, and went between the trees—they were twenty feet apart—and gaped from one to the other.

The trees were the same size. Each had a knotted primary limb snaking off to the north. Each had a curling scar on the first shoot from it. The first cluster on the primary on each tree had five leaves on it.

Monetre went and stood closer, running his gaze from tree to tree, up and down, one, then the other.

What he saw was impossible. The law of averages permits of such a thing as two absolutely identical trees, but at astronomical odds. Impossible was the working word for such a statistic.

Monetre reached and pulled down a leaf from one tree, and from the other took down its opposite number.

They were identical—veining, shape, size, texture.

That was enough for Monetre. He grunted again, looked searchingly around to fix the location in his mind, and headed back to his shack at a dead run.

Far into the night he labored over the oak leaves. He stared through a magnifying glass until his eyes ached. He made solutions of what he had in the house—vinegar, sugar, salt, a little phenol—and marinated parts of the leaves. He dyed corresponding parts of them with diluted ink.

What he found out about them checked and double-checked when he took them to the laboratory in the morning. Qualitative and quantitative analysis, volumetric and kindling temperature and specific gravity tests, spectrographics and pH ratings—all said the same thing; these two leaves were incredibly and absolutely identical.

Feverishly, in the months that followed, Monetre worked on parts of the trees. His working microscopes told the same story; he talked his employer into letting him use the 300-power mike which the lab kept in a bell-jar, and it said the same thing. The trees were identical, not leaf for leaf, but cell for cell. Bark and cambium and heartwood, they were the same.

It was his own incessant sampling which gave him his next lead. He took his specimens from the trees after the most meticulous measurements. A core-drill “take” from Tree A was duplicated on Tree B, to the fractional millimeter. And one day Monetre positioned his drill on both trees, got his sample from Tree A, and, in removing it, broke the drill before he could obtain his specimen from the second tree.

He blamed it, of course, on the drill, and therefore on the men who made it, and therefore on all men; and he fumed home, happily in his own ground.

But when he came back the next day he found a hole in Tree B, exactly on the corresponding spot to his tap on Tree A.

He stood with his fingers on the inexplicable hole, and for a long moment his active mind was at a complete stop. Then, carefully, he took out his knife and cut a cross in Tree A, and, in the same place on Tree B, a triangle. He cut them deep and clear, and went home again to read more esoteric books on cell structure.

When he returned to the forest, he found both trees bearing a cross.

He made many more tests. He cut odd shapes in each tree. He painted swatches of color on them.

He found that overlays, like paint and nailed-on pieces of board, remained as he applied them. But anything effecting the structure of the tree—a cut or scrape or laceration or puncture—was repeated, from Tree A to Tree B.

Tree A was the original. Tree B was some sort of a… copy.

Pierre Monetre worked on Tree B for two years before he found out, with the aid of an electron microscope, that aside from the function of exact duplication, Tree B was different. In the nucleus of each cell of Tree B was a single giant molecule, akin to the hydrocarbon enzymes, which could transmute elements. Three cells removed from a piece of bark or leaf-tissue meant three cells replaced within an hour. The freak enzyme, depleted, would then rest for an hour or two, and slowly begin to restore itself, atom by captured atom, from the surrounding tissue.

The control of restoration in damaged tissue is a subtle business at its simplest. Any biologist can give a lucid description of what happens when cells begin to rebuild—what metabolistic factors are present, what oxygen exchange occurs, how fast and how large and for what purpose new cells are developed. But they cannot tell you
why.
They cannot say what gives the signal, “Start!” to a half-ruined cell, and what says “stop.” They know that cancer is a malfunction of this control mechanism, but what the mechanism is they do not say. This is true of normal tissue.

But what of Pierre Monetre’s Tree B? It never restored itself normally. It restored itself only to duplicate Tree A. Notch a twig of Tree A. Break off the corresponding twig of Tree B and take it home. For twelve to fourteen hours, that twig would work on the laborious process of reforming itself to be notched. After that it would stop, and be an ordinary piece of wood. Return then to Tree B, and you would find another restored twig, and this one with its notch perfectly duplicated.

Here even Pierre Monetre’s skill bogged down. Cell regeneration is a mystery. Cell duplication is a step beyond an unfathomable enigma. But somewhere, somehow, this fantastic duplication was controlled, and Monetre doggedly set about finding what did it.

He was a savage, hearing a radio and searching for the signal source. He was a dog, hearing his master cry out in pain because a girl wrote that she did not love him. He saw the result, and he tried, without adequate tools, without the capacity to understand it if it were thrust under his nose, to determine the cause.

A fire did it for him.

The few people who knew him by sight—none knew him any other way—were astonished that he joined the volunteer fire-fighters that autumn, when the smoke blasted through the hills driven by a flame-whipped wind. And for years there was a legend about the skinny feller who fought the fire like a soul promised release from hell. They told about cutting the new fire-trail, and how the skinny feller threatened to kill the forest ranger if he did not move his fire line a hundred yards north of where it had been planned. The skinny feller made history with his battle of the back-blaze, watering it with his very sweat to keep it out of a certain patch of wood. And when the fire advanced to the edge of the back-blaze, and the men broke and fled before it, the skinny feller was not with them, but stayed, crouched in the smoking moss between two oak saplings, with a spade and an axe in his bleeding hands and a fire in his eyes hotter than any that ever touched a tree. They saw all of that—

They did not see Tree B begin to tremble. Their eyes were not with Monetre’s, to peer through heat and smoke and the agonized cloud of exhaustion which hovered around him, and see the scientist’s mind reaching out to seize on the fact that the shuddering of Tree B was timed exactly with the rolling flames over a clearing fifty feet away.

He watched it, red-eyed. Flame touched the rocky clearing, and the tree shivered. Flame tugged the earth like hair in a hurricane pulling a scalp, and when the fire wavered and streamed upward, Tree B stood firm. But when a tortured gust of cold air rushed in to fill the heat-born vacuum, and was pursued along the ground by fingers of fire, the tree shook and tensed, wavered and trembled.

Monetre dragged his half-flayed body to the clearing and watched the flames. A spear of red-orange there; the tree stood firm. A lick of a fiery tongue here, and the tree moved.

So he found it, in the middle of a basalt outcropping. He turned over a rock with fingers which sizzled when they touched it, and under it he found a muddy crystal. He thrust it under his armpit and staggered, tottered, back to his trees, which were now in a small island built of earth and sweat and fire by his own demonaic energy, and he collapsed between the oak saplings while the fire roared past him.

Just before dawn he staggered through a nightmare, a spitting, dying inferno, to his house, and hid the crystal. He dragged himself a quarter of a mile further toward the town before he collapsed. He regained consciousness in the hospital and immediately began demanding to be released. First they refused, next they tied him to his bed, and finally he left, at night, through the window, to be with his jewel.

Perhaps it was because he was at the ragged edge of insanity, or because the fusion between his conscious and unconscious minds was almost complete. More likely it was because he was peculiarly equipped, with that driving, searching mind of his. Certainly few, if any, men had ever done it before, but he did it. He established a contact with the jewel.

He did it with the bludgeon of his hatred. The jewel winked passively at him through all his tests—all that he dared give it. He had to be careful, once he found out that it was alive. His microscope told him that; it was not a crystal, but a supercooled liquid. It was a single cell, with a faceted wall. The solidified fluid inside was a colloid, with an index of refraction like that of polystyrene, and there was a complex nucleus which he did not understand.

His eagerness quarreled with his caution; he dared not run excessive heat, corrosion, and bombardment tests on it. Wildly frustrated, he sent to it a blast of the refined hatred which he had developed over the years, and the thing—screamed.

There was no sound. It was a pressure in his mind. There was no word, but the pressure was an agonized negation, a “no”-flavored impulse.

Pierre Monetre sat stunned at his battered table, staring out of the dark of his room at the jewel, which he had placed in the pool of light under a gooseneck lamp. He leaned forward and narrowed his eyes, and with complete honesty—for he had a ravening dislike of anything which bid to defy his understanding—he sent out the impulse again.

“No!”

The thing reacted, by that soundless cry, as if he had prodded it with a hot pin.

He was, of course, quite familiar with the phenomena of piezoelectricity, wherein a crystal of quartz or Rochelle salts would yield a small potential when squeezed, or would slightly change its dimensions when voltage was applied across it. Here was something analagous, for all the jewel was not a true crystal. His thought-impulse apparently brought a reaction from the jewel in thought “frequencies.”

He pondered.

There was an unnatural tree, and it had been connected, in some way, with this buried jewel, fifty feet away; for when flame came near the jewel, the tree trembled. When he flicked the jewel with the flame of his hatred, it reacted.

Could the jewel have
built
that tree, with the other as a model? But how?
How?

“Never mind how,” he muttered. He’d find that out in good time. He could hurt the thing. Laws and punishment hurt; oppression hurts; power is the ability to inflict pain. This fantastic object would do what he wanted it to do or he would flog it to death.