Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 14

  He found Prentiss alone in a long gallery packed with devices of incredible complexity. The gallery stretched away from them a hundred feet on either side. It was crammed with cables whose individual wires almost certainly numbered into the millions. Close spaced, islands of components interrupted the streaming flow of wire. A thousand connectors dipped into an opaque housing and reappeared on the other side, regrouped, rearranged, carrying on their joint flow to yet another island where they parted, never to find each other again in all that vast stream.

  As the two men looked upon this “magnificent machine the complexity of their rivalry seemed to diminish for the moment. It was the single common hold their minds could grasp simultaneously. It was the one spot of common ground in all their lives.

  “There’s Fourth Order here,” said Prentiss almost worshipfully.

  ‘There’s got to be. There’s never been a ship like this before in all the galaxies. There’s never a ship that could go beyond the galaxies with such freedom as to permit a crew of only eight. It couldn’t be anything but Fourth Order.”

  “I hope so,” said Glenn. “But whatever it is we’re going to take a devil of a long time to plow through all this and find out what makes it go. We’ve always designed and engineered with the basic belief that the greatest machine is the simplest. Unless all this equipment is absolutely necessary you’d think the Centrasi designed with, just the opposite view”

  “We’ll find it,” said Prentiss confidently. “We’ll find Fourth Order if it’s here. If it isn’t this is no more than a mess of junk that doesn’t matter.”

  With this reminder of Glenn’s obligation to the Centrasi the moment of unity passed.

  “I suppose Gibbs has no objection to my interviewing the Centrasi now that they are revived,” said Prentiss. “I’d like to see what information can be obtained from them.”

  “I have already taken care of that,” said Glenn with sudden defensive coldness. “The crew are astrographers. They know nothing of the ship.”

  “That just doesn’t hold water! If they told you that, then they’re lying!”

  Glenn regarded his assistant for a moment. Prentiss’ eyes were challenging, hostile, but Glenn chose to ignore it. “You’d better take off,” he said. “You’ll be handling the night shift tonight and I don’t want anything done on the shift without your immediate supervision.”

  “Is that an order to leave?” said Prentiss.

  “What would you do if it isn’t?”

  “I’d like to stick around for another couple of hours at least to get some degree of orientation.”

  “Suit yourself in that. What I said was only a suggestion.”

  “Thanks,” said Prentiss stiffly. “I’ll leave by noon.”

  CHAPTER VII

  It worried Glenn too—the thought that Emdor had lied. He left the ship and went to the communication office after removing his suit. A discrepancy had bothered him ever since he had spoken with Emdor in the hospital. It had to be checked.

  He found the original transcripts of the communications with the stranger on the previous night. His memory had been correct. Kendricks had advised him that the Centrasi wanted to use the Base facilities for repairing their ship. That was the way the original was worded. The Centrasi had wanted to do the work. That didn’t jibe with Emdor’s denial of technical abilities.

  Somehow it jolted the problem out of straight black-and-white, shoving it in amongst the indefinable grays, making characters like Prentiss and Kendricks out of the Centrasi.

  There was, or course, the possibility—the immense possibility of error through the transcribing of the Galactic Code. That was a clumsy tool at best. Nevertheless the message stood. Gibbs called while Glenn worried over and around the discrepancy.

  “Emdor is hanging on,” he said. “But two more are dead. I thought you’d like to know. None of them can last much longer.”

  “How long have the two been dead?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  “Are you doing an autopsy?”

  “It hasn’t been started but we’ll get right at it.”

  “Then there’s still time—there’s enough life in the brain cells. Use the Intensifier on the cyberlogue and make a recording of everything you can pick out of the dead brains. Go deep.”

  “But Emdor said — “

  “He can’t kick about reading the dead ones. They’ve got information that can help us, I’m sure. Get the tapes over here to me as soon as you finish running them.”

  “Kendricks must have got to you. Glenn, stay on the level with these Centrasi. They’re decent guys.”

  “I will, Doc. Don’t worry. But I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve been on the level with us. I think they know more than they admit. I think—I’m pretty damned sure now—that they are deliberately trying to keep something from us.”

  “Even if it involves their own sacrifice? That would be a pretty big and important something.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. Get me those tapes as quickly as possible. I’m not violating any promise to the Centrasi and I won’t—as long as they stay on the level with us.”

  “They’ll be ready after lunch.”

  The tapes were on Glenn’s desk when he returned from the cafeteria at noon. He went at once with them into the analysis section, picking up a tape there covering Fourth Order theory.

  The great machines of the analysis section were somewhat analogous to the ancient punched-card machines. They could check the immense store of information gathered from the brains of the dead Centrasi—check this information against the master Fourth Order tape to determine if there was any information of any kind concerning Fourth Order in the Centrasi brains.

  Glenn donned a helmet by which he could observe the record of the Centrasi’s life as the plastic roll slowly unwound between the million-fingered electronic scanning beam. It was a tremendous thing—reliving the alien life of the dead Centrasi. It renewed Glenn’s conviction that Gibbs was right—the Centrasi were decent guys.

  There were scenes of a pleasant world and impressions of quiet life devoid of the tensions and conflicts that seared the galaxy of the council worlds. There were the words of great books, and the sound of exquisite music.

  Glenn saw other Centrasi who loved the dead creature—and who were loved by him. These would never see him again, for there would be another strange grave on the hill beyond the Base. But there was nothing in all that to give an Earthman fear because of what the Centrasi might be hiding. There was no clue at all as to why anything should be hidden—of great weapons or the whisper of conquest, which could so incite the dread of war within Council worlds, there was not an inkling.

  There was not time enough to relive a whole life moment by moment. Reluctantly Glenn sped the tape ahead at a pace that he could not follow.

  There was only one thing he had to find at this moment.

  * * * *

  One the screen before him he watched anxiously for a sign. The signal of congruence would appear there if one of the millions of neural patterns of the Centrasi conformed with the Fourth Order array on the master tape.

  He had been there an hour and a half when the green fantasies on the screen began to slow their irrelevant contortions. He straightened in his chair. His hand touched a knob for sharper outline.

  A structure of infinite complexity was slowly building on the face of the screen in three-dimensional perspective. He watched it, scarcely breathing, awed by the complexity of that figure and what it signified.

  They had Fourth Order. There was no question about it. But the figure continued building and it told an even broader tale.

  These eight who had come to Earth were engineers—Fourth Order engineers. So vastly competent with it were they that they could have designed and built the entire ship from base elements. They could have designed its great Fourth Order engines from scratch.

  And this they had lied about.

  He wondered now what his promise
to Emdor meant. The Centrasi had said they could duplicate anything found in the ship. He remembered how the Centrasi had emphasized that, how terrified he had been at the thought of a brain recording.

  Glenn understood now. Earthmen could never—for decades, at least, perhaps centuries—they could never achieve Fourth Order. It would be like an aborigine trying to copy a common automobile engine by merely examination and duplication. The parts would be there. He could observe and measure. But the machine could not be duplicated from that alone. It could not be understood without all the vast science of metallurgy and chemistry and engineering behind it.

  So with the Centrasi ship. Men could take it apart, measure it, analyze it—but they could never make it go. There were unknown and unsuggested sciences which would stand indefinitely between them and Fourth Order machines that would work. The essential things were locked in the brains of the Centrasi. And the Centrasi were willing to die to keep them there.

  It made no sense. He glanced down at tapes in his hand. He ought to march triumphantly into Kendricks’ office and lay them before the Commander.

  It would assure his career and put him forever beyond Kendricks’ petty nepotism. He would never have to be afraid of Prentiss again.

  But he couldn’t do it—not now anyway. He had to know why the Centrasi considered it worth their lives to keep the secret of Fourth Order from men.

  If it was worth their lives, would it be worth his career? He wondered.

  * * * *

  When he reached his own office again there was a second message from Gibbs. “Come over as soon as you can. I’ll show you what’s killing the Centrasi. Emdor is alone. The rest are gone.”

  Glenn locked the tapes in the desk and took the scooter across the field. The sun was low in the sky, and he rode almost all the way in the shadow of the towering Centrasi ship. Gibbs was at his desk, seemingly idle when Glenn walked in.

  “What have you found?” said Glenn. “Can we cure Emdor?”

  “What have you found? Fourth Order?”

  Glenn nodded. “They’ve got it. They lied to us. They know the stuff from the ground up.”

  “I know. They don’t want us to have it.”

  “Why?”

  Gibbs hesitated. “It’s the damnedest most complex series of factors that you could ever hope to run into. Look at this.”

  He held up a brown object the size of a walnut. “Know what that thing is?”

  Glenn shook his head.

  “It’s one of their adrenal glands.”

  “I wouldn’t be likely to know it from a football. Is there anything wrong with it?”

  “They have an endocrine system almost identical with ours—which is not as surprising as it might be. We know that evolution can be parallel in widely scattered galaxies.”

  “And so?”

  “A normal adrenal is yellow. The outer structure, the cortex, is normally filled with fat droplets containing a score or so of hormones. The brownish color of this one indicates that it has been drained of its hormones.”

  Gibbs picked up another specimen. “Here is a thymus gland—almost atrophied. And here is a color picture of the stomach lining. Bleeding ulcers. Finally here is a section of kidney tissue. It has turned into a hormone-producing gland. We call it endocrine kidney. It raises the blood pressure.”

  “But what caused such terrific damage?” exclaimed Glenn. “And what can be done about it before it becomes fatal?”

  “We call it AR,” said Gibbs. “Alarm reaction. Back in the twentieth century when it was first identified it was responsible for about eighty percent of the deaths among Caucasian peoples outside of the major bacteriological pathologies and cancer. Men are still dying of it, though not to the extent they were in that day.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “No, it’s not often spoken of by name. It’s called by some name to describe the affliction of the organ it destroys—heart, kidney, pancreas or whatnot. Strictly speaking it’s a jungle disease, an illness that can afflict only the inhabitants of a jungle where life is precarious from moment to moment and there is no assurance of survival from one day to the next.”

  Glenn laughed sharply. “That’s not our civilization you’re speaking of—or is it?”

  “A civilization can be pretty well defined by what its members die of. And any community in which AR exists is a jungle society regardless of technological accomplishments.”

  “But the Centrasi?”

  “All organisms of the basic type of endocrine structure which they share with us are subject to the alarm reaction. It works this way—any kind if stress situation causes the pituitary gland to release a protein substance called adrenocorticotrophic hormone, ACTH for short. In turn this discharges the hormones from the adrenals into the blood stream.

  “This is a normal process, designed to enable the body to meet stress. If the condition of stress is such that it cannot be overcome, however, as in a perpetual jungle environment, this endocrine process defeats its own purpose. The protective mechanism turns upon the body itself and destroys it.

  “The hormones destroy the thymus, produce enlarged heart and sclerotic blood vessels, destroy the kidneys. The organism finally dies of exhausted resources if no relief is obtained from the stress situation—literally killed by its own defenses. That is the alarm reaction.

  “It was first demonstrated in rats by forcing them to endure extremes of temperature, activity and wakefulness. But, more significantly, AR can be set off in higher creatures by any kind of stress—psychic stress in particular. The initial trigger action is a neural stimulus of the pituitary.”

  “What is the cause of this neural stimulus in the Centrasi?”

  “We are.”

  * * * *

  For a moment Glenn sat motionless as if still awaiting Gibbs’ answer. The words were like a delayed explosion. Then he half rose from his chair and leaned across the desk. “What the devil are you talking about? We haven’t done anything to them!”

  “I think we have—we do. Scanning through the tapes we ran off from the dead brains I found proof of it. You see, the structure of the universe seems to be formed of widely scattered galaxy clusters. Our own Council is composed of the civilizations of one such cluster.

  “But we know that the distance from any Council world to the next cluster is so fantastic as to make hopeless any contact with even Third Order ships. The Centrasi come from a similar cluster all the way across the curvature of space.”

  “That could be what Emdor meant by saying he came from the back-side of space,” Glenn mused thoughtfully.

  “Perhaps. I don’t understand the technical aspects of it. At any rate the Centrasi come from a cluster such as ours at an immense distance. They have just found Fourth Order. This ship was an exploratory one attempting to go all around the curve of space just as you say you would like to do. And then they broke down with some kind of mechanical trouble they couldn’t repair in space.

  “Their race is so old, and they have had a stabilized evolution for so long that they have never encountered any form of life but their own in all the recorded history of their race. This single Centrasi race has colonized hundreds of thousands of planets.

  “Behavior has become so stabilized and eccentricities so thoroughly removed from their makeup that wherever they go in their own galaxy cluster they know what to expect from a fellow creature. They know how he will react, what their mutual obligations are. Does that give you an idea of what we have done to them?”

  Glenn stared at the Doctor. “Stress—they can’t predict our behavior.

  Our very presence is a continuing stress…”

  Gibbs nodded. “We cannot know all the details of the psychobiological chain involved but it is safe to conclude that contact with sentient life other than their own is sufficient to set off the alarm reaction in them. They are in the peculiar position of having to live out their existence in utter isolation or die.

  “It would be a majo
r evolutionary change for them to adapt to other species. They might do it on a long-term biological basis but it would involve the destruction of their present culture in the process.

  “It appears that their first contacts set it off, perhaps on Paramides. Then they went through the resistance stage of AR in which they built up adrenal reserves again and partially regained a biochemical balance. There was recovery of the thymus and sugar and chloride levels in the blood.

  “Now these things are deteriorating again. They are in the final stage of exhaustion—preparatory to actual death.

  We’re like a disease to them. Can you understand that fully, Glenn?

  Each one of us is a single germ. We infect them as surely as if they had breathed a deadly virus.”

  Glenn’s eyes were focused far across the field where a giant gray structure nosed towards the sky. “They’ve got Fourth Order,” he said almost in a whisper. “They’ve got Fourth Order for sure. They could take us all the way around the curve of space. We could see all there is to see, know all there is to know in the whole universe.”

  Gibbs sighed and shifted lower in his chair. “Another year or two now and our expeditions will be overrunning their galaxies. In time it is just barely possible that some individuals of their race might develop a resistance to the situation but it’s not likely.

  “We won’t give them time for that anyway. We’ll rush in, trying to bargain and trade, selling them soap and deodorants. We’ll sap their scientific resources. And they’ll be utterly helpless. It will be another case of ‘Lo, the poor Indian.’ On a galactic scale this time.”

  Glenn reached across the desk and took the small brown object in his hand. The adrenal felt cold now and faintly resilient like old rubber—the coldness and fleshy resilience of something too long dead. He glanced from it to the great ship again.

  “It’s so intangible,” he murmured. “You can’t get hold of it with your brain. That ship out there—it’s more alive than this hunk of meat. Yet this little thing stands in the way of obtaining that ship. Your mind can’t get hold of something as intangible as that.”