No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (23 page)

Thomas put his empty glass on the table beside him, rose to his feet. “The others are starting in for dinner,” he said. “Shall we join them.”

6

Robert Allen, the project psychiatrist, rotated the brandy snifter between his palms.

“You sent word you wanted to see me, Paul. Has something come up?”

“I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “Not anything I can put a finger on. Maybe just a bad day, that’s all. Ben Russell was in to raise hell with me. Said we were holding back on him.”

“He’s always saying that.”

“I know. He’s probably catching heat himself. When he catches heat, he turns it back on me. A feedback mechanism. A defensive gesture. He was upset that we’d not passed FTL data on to him.”

“Have we got anything to pass?”

“Just a lot of nothing. Some meaningless equations. I don’t see how Jay stands up under it. He picked up that allergy of his again.”

“Tension,” said Allen. “Frustration. That could bring it on.”

“Later in the day,” said Thomas, “Brown phoned.”

“The senator?”

“The senator. It was FTL again. He was all over me. The budget’s coming up again.”

“Faster-than-light is something that the administrative mind can understand,” said Allen. “Hardware.”

“Bob, I’m not too sure it’s hardware. It could be something else. Jay’s an astrophysicist. If it was plain physics, he would have it pegged.”

“Maybe there are many kinds of physics.”

“I don’t think so. Physics should be basic. The same throughout the universe.”

“You can be sure of that?”

“No, I can’t be sure of that. But my logic rejects …”

“Paul, you’re over-reacting. If I were you, I’d disregard this sudden flurry over FTL. It’s something that comes periodically and then dies down again.”

“I can’t disregard it,” said Thomas. “Not this time. Brown’s out to get us. His power base is slipping and he needs a new issue. We would make a good issue. Here we are, here we’ve been for a quarter century, gobbling up tax money that could be used for something else. That’s the kind of issue the people would accept. They definitely are not with us; they have a feeling that we were crammed down their throats. They were never with us. Not only do we cost a lot, but we pose threats. What if we gave away our location, so that some barbaric, bloodthirsty alien horde could come crashing in on us? What if we find out something that would upset the apple-cart, wrecking a lot of our time-honored, comfortable concepts?”

“You mean he’d destroy us just to get elected?”

“Bob, you don’t know politics. I am sure he would. Even if he believed in us, he might. I have a feeling that he doesn’t believe in us. If he destroyed us, he’d be a public hero. We have to do something, come up with something in the next few months or he’ll have a go at us.”

“We have support,” said Allen. “There are people in authority, in positions of power, who are committed to the project. Good people, reasonable people.”

“Good and reasonable people don’t have too much chance when they come up against a demagogue. The only way to beat Brown, if he decides to make us an issue, is to pile up some points we can make with the public.”

“How can I help you, Paul?”’

“Honestly, I don’t know. A psychiatrist as a political adviser? No, I guess not. I suppose I only wanted to unload on you.”

“Paul, you didn’t ask me in to talk about FTL. That’s an administrative matter. You can handle it. Nor about the politics of the project. You know I’m a child in politics. There is something else.”

Thomas frowned. “It’s hard to tell you. Hard to put into words. I’m beginning to sense something that disturbs me. Nothing concrete. Fuzzy, in fact. Tonight Jennie—you know Jennie?”

“Yes, the little car-hop we picked up a few years ago. Nice girl. Smart.”

Tonight Jennie was talking about her people. They talk about death, she said. I knew it, of course. She’d been in a couple of times to talk with me about it. Depressed. Perhaps even frightened. After all, death can be a grisly subject. She had wanted to drop these people, try to pick up someone else. I urged her to hang in there a little longer. Never can tell what will happen, I told her. Tonight, when I suggested that she should drop it, she opposed me. Let me stay a while longer, she said, some worthwhile philosophy might develop out of it. I think there was something she wasn’t telling me, something she is holding back.”

“Maybe the discussion has advanced beyond death,” said Allen. “Maybe it’s getting into what happens after death—if anything happens after death.”

Thomas looked in amazement at the psychiatrist. “My thought, exactly. With one qualification. If nothing happens after death, she’d be more depressed than ever. Her interest must mean that these folks do believe something happens. They may even have proof of it. Not faith, not a religious conviction. Jennie’s a hard-headed little piece. She’d not buy simple faith. It would have to be more than that.”

“You could pull the data. Have a look at it.”

“No, I can’t. Not yet. She’d know. I’d be snooping on her private project. My operators are fiercely jealous of what they are putting into their data banks. I have to give her time. She’ll let me know when it’s time to have a look.”

“We must always keep in mind,” said Allen, “that more than words, more than thoughts and ideas, come through from the aliens. Other things are transmitted. Things the operators hear but that can’t be put into the banks. Fears, hopes, perceptions, residual memories, philosophical positions, moral evaluations, hungers, sorrow …”

“I know,” said Thomas, “and none of it gets into the banks. It would be easier in one way if it did, perhaps more confusing in another.”

“Paul, I know how easy it must be for someone in your position to become overly concerned, overwhelmed with worry, perhaps, even at times doubtful of the wisdom of the project. But you must remember, we’ve been at it only a little more than twenty years. We’ve done well in that short space of time …”

“The project,” said Thomas, “really started about a hundred years ago. With that old gentleman who was convinced he was talking with the stars. What was his name? Do you recall it?”

“George White. The last years of his life must have been a nightmare. The government took him over, ran him through all sorts of tests. They never let him be. I suspect he might have been happier if everyone had continued not believing him. They pampered him, of course. That might have, in some measure, made it up to him. We still pamper our telepaths. Giving them a luxurious residential compound, with country club overtones, and …”

“They have it coming to them,” snapped Thomas. “They are all we have. They’re our one great hope. Sure, we’ve made strides. Progress if you want to call it that. The world existing in a sort of loose confederation; wars a thing of the past. Colonies and industries in space. A start made on terraforming Mars and Venus. One largely abortive voyage to the nearest stars. But we have our problems. Despite expansion into space, our economy still is kicked all out of shape. We continually ride on the edge of economic disaster. Our disadvantaged are still stockpiled against that day, that probably will never come, when we will be able to do something for them. The development of synthetic molecules would give us a boost if R&D would get cracking on it instead of moaning about not having FTL. I have some hopes that Garner may get some feedback from the aliens he is trying to teach economics to, but nothing yet, maybe nothing ever. It’s the only economics show we have going. I had hoped others might come up, but they haven’t. The hell of it is that so much of what we have going is producing so little. Much of it is seemingly off on the wrong track. Yet you can’t junk all this stuff and start grabbing out frantically for something else. Mary Kay, for example. She has found something that might be big, but she’s so hooked on it that she can’t look for answers. When she tries, there are no answers. No idea communications at all, apparently. Just this feeling of euphoria. Worthless as it stands, but we can’t pass it by. We have to keep on trying. There may be something there that is worth waiting for.”

“I think the greatest problem lies in the kind of people who turn out to be the right kind of telepaths,” said Allen. “Jay is the only man trained in science that we have. The others are not equipped to handle some of the material they are getting. I still think we could try to give some of them training in certain fields.”

“We tried it,” said Thomas, “and it didn’t work. These are a special breed of people. Sensitives. They have to be handled with kid gloves or you destroy them. And under special kinds of strain. The strange thing about it, fragile as some of their personalities may be, they stand up to these special strains. Many ordinary people would crack if they knew they were in contact with an alien mind. A few of ours have, but not many. They have stood up under it. But they occasionally need support. It’s my job to try to give it to them. They come to me with their fears, their doubts, their glory and elation. They cry on my shoulder, they scream at me …”

“The one thing that astounds me,” said Allen, “is that they still maintain their relationships with non-telepaths. They are, as you have said, a very special breed. To them, it might seem, the rest of us would be little better than cloddish animals. Yet that does not seem to be the case. They’ve retained their humanity. It has been my observation, as well, that they don’t get chummy with the aliens they are working with. Books. I guess that’s it. They treat the aliens as books they’d take down off the shelf to read for information.”

“All of them except Jay. He has worked up a fairly easy relationship with this last one. Calls him Einstein. None of the others have names for their aliens.”

“Jay is a good man. Wasn’t he the one who came up with the synthetic molecules?”

“That’s right. He was one of the first successful operators. The first, if I remember rightly, who tolerated the brain implant. Others got the implant, but they had trouble with it. Some of them a lot of trouble. Of course, by the time Jay got his, there had been some improvement.”

“Paul, is the implant absolutely necessary?”

“The boys upstairs think it is. I don’t know enough about it, technically that is, to be sure. First, you have to find the right kind of telepath—not just a high quality telepath, but the right kind. Then the implant is made, not to increase the range, as some people will tell you, but to re-enforce the natural ability. It also has something to do, quite a bit to do, with the storage of the information. Range, as such, probably is not really important. On the face of it, it shouldn’t be, for the waves or pulses or whatever they are that enable telepaths to talk to one another are instantaneous. The time and distance factors are cancelled out entirely and the pulses are immune to the restrictions of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are a phenomenon entirely outside the spectrum.”

“Key, of course, to the entire project,” said Allen, “lay in the development of the capability to record and store the information that is exchanged in the telepathic communication. A development of the earlier brain-waves studies.”

“You’re right,” said Thomas. “It would have been impossible to rely on the memories of the telepaths. Many of them, most of them, in fact, have only a marginal understanding of what they are told; they are handling information that is beyond their comprehension. They have a general idea, probably, but they miss a lot of it. Jay is an exception, of course. And that makes it easier with him. But with the others, the ones who do not fully understand, we have a record of the communications in the memory bank.”

“We need more operators,” said Allen. “We’re barely touching all the sources out there. And we can’t go skipping around a lot because if we did, we might be passing up some fairly solid material. We do our recruiting and we uncover a lot of incipient telepaths, of course, but very few of the kind we are looking for.”

“At no time,” said Thomas, “are there ever too many of them to find.”

“We got off what we were talking about,” said Allen. “Mary Kay and Jennie, wasn’t it?”

“I guess it was. They’re the question marks. Jay either will pin down the matter of FTL or he’ll not be able to. Dick will keep on with the economics and will either get some worth-while feedback or he won’t. Those are the kinds of odds we have to play. Hal will go on talking with his alien computer and we eventually may get something out of it. One of these days, we’ll jerk the memory banks on that one and see what we have. I’d guess there might be some nebulous ideas we could play around with. But Mary Kay and Jennie—Christ, they’re into something that is beyond anything we ever bargained for. Mary Kay a simulation—or maybe even the actuality—of a heavenly existence, a sort of Paradise, and Jennie with overtones of an existence beyond the grave. These are the kinds of things that people have been yearning for since the world began. This is what made billions of people, over the ages, tolerate religions. It poses a problem—both of them pose problems.”

“If something came of either of them,” said Allen, “what would we do with it?”

“That’s right. Yet, you can’t go chicken on it. You can’t just turn it off because you’re afraid of it.”

“You’re afraid of it, Paul?”

“I guess I am. Not personally. Personally, like everyone else, I would like to know. But can you imagine what would happen if we dumped it on the world?”

“I think I can. A sweep of unrealistic euphoria. New cults rising and we have more cults than we can handle now. A disruptive, perhaps a destructive impact on society.”

“So what do we do? It’s something we may have to face.”

“We play it by ear,” said Allen. “We make a decision when we have to. As project manager, you can control what comes out of here. Which may make Ben Russell unhappy, but something like this business of Mary Kay and Jennie is precisely why the director was given that kind of authority.”

“Sit on it?” asked Thomas.

“That’s right. Sit on it. Watch it. Keep close tabs on it. But don’t fret about it. Not now at least. Fretting time may be some distance down the road.”

“I don’t know why I bothered you,” said Thomas. “That’s exactly what I intended all along.”