First: the nature of his visions, and Granny Jassy’s, and all others similar. They were not extraphysical recollections of the past. They were received messages, or signals.
And the burden of the message was simple: Help me!
In a time when the world was covered with cities of up to tens of millions of people, and not this world only but others, circling other stars, there had come a point at which the sheer numbers wishing to walk to other worlds—restless, bored with their long lives, hungry for the sights, sounds, sensations of alien environments—threatened to outstrip the capacity of the equipment handling the incredible traffic. The means used, in itself, was so complex it had always had to be managed at second-hand—not by individual persons, but by massive thinking machines. And the machines were inadequate.
Hence the development of the organochemic cortex: to all intents, a manufactured brain, with a personality, the gift of consciousness, all the discrimination of a human genius combined with the tireless reliability of an insensitive machine.
Such a cortex was installed at Terminal Station A, the largest centre for interstellar transport on the planet. From the three-mile dome arching above the Station it was possible to walk to any of a thousand distant worlds.
And back.
And from one such distant world somebody returned bearing in the cerebrospinal fluid of his body the virus of a disease named in the traditional lore of the Station as encephalosis dureri, which incubated and brought insanity.
No plague had ever before been transmitted on the scale of this one. Within days of the first outbreak it was on a hundred different worlds; within weeks, it had reached every planet known to mankind. As though one had emptied a bucket of sand into a precisely-tuned engine, the sophisticated complex of interstellar society ground to a halt.
Stripped of their sanity, people died—in accidents, in fires, by famine or explosion or a myriad other disasters. In the midst of primal chaos, the very few who were naturally immune stood as long as possible against the searing blast of the collapse, until they too were overwhelmed.
The ancestors of those now living at the centre of the barrenland had been a group of such natural immunes, sent to try and repair this largest of all interstellar transit points.
They started work under the impression that what had gone wrong was the simple consequence of a madman’s interference—some diseased mind among the Station’s human staff, they believed, had altered control settings or distorted the instructions given to the organochemic cortex. At that time, the cortex operated everything in the Station area: not just the actual process of transportation, but every service provided for the convenience of travellers.
The cortex knew better, and could not explain.
There was something so completely human about the despair Conrad had sensed that it had overcome him; it was as if he himself had been in the tormenting plight which the manufactured organochemic brain had endured uncounted times since the onset of the contagious madness. Which was to know that it was going insane, and to be able to do nothing about it.
The cortex was powered by the same source as the rest of the Station—the original emergency power supply, switched on to keep the cortex functioning after the disaster. When the stored power was low, as for instance after expenditure on the use of heatbeams, the cortex was practically unconscious. As the power built up again, its level of activity rose to a kind of incipient awareness. In this condition, it was sufficiently conscious to realise that when the power reached maximum the sleeping layers of its personality would arouse—and be insane because in the nutrient fluid bathing the entire artificial organism the viruses were still multiplying.
They were not like ordinary viruses. In some manner they made false connections between brain cells; the energy available at a synapse was a sort of stimulus to them. As it were, they caused innumerable short circuits and hence random patterns of response.
The effect on the cortex was to bring into operation an overload device intended primarily to limit the number of simultaneous traffic problems it was coping with. By that time it was no longer able to reason; it sought to expend energy and hurl itself into unconsciousness again for a period of recuperation.
And the way of expending energy which came most readily to the rescue was to initiate an interstellar transportation process.
From worlds once colonised by human beings, where now the native fauna roamed among ruins abandoned by disease-crazed savages, the insane artificial brain brought anything which blundered into a transportation terminal. It had just sufficient discrimination left, at this stage of its madness, to select for objects resembling its vanished human masters in mass—plus or minus a factor of about ten—and mobility.
The operation concluded, and signalled to the community of the Station here by an alarm which one of the immune technicians had rigged up after the very first such happening, the cortex relapsed into its torpid state.
And the cycle resumed, varying in length each time according to how much energy had been used up through other channels like the electrofences and heatbeams, which in turn naturally depended on the ferocity or docility of the thing from an alien planet snatched at by the desperate cortex.
Vegetation, too, had come through in the form of seeds or suckers transported with the animals, and not long after the original disaster had spread to form a jungle-like screen around the site of the cortex, into which unprotected men dared not venture, and which they dared not destroy randomly for fear of wrecking the cortex as well.
When perhaps as much as two centuries had gone by in this vicious circle, the cortex began to recover a little. Self-adjusting, it was able to cope to a limited extent with the harm the virus caused. By that time, however, the people trapped at the centre of the barrenland had suffered the loss of so much information and so many irreplaceable personnel that the best they could do was hold the ground they had gained; they could not advance.
What to do? The cortex was no longer equipped to communicate verbally—it had once been provided with vodors, but a massive monster had smashed the equipment as it stampeded from the arrival area.
Helpless, dumb, the cortex faced the recurrent cycle of insanity in full awareness, and the mere intensity of its longing for a return to the orderly past began to solve its problem.
This was where Conrad, even though he had experienced the actuality, began to lose his grip on the slippery concepts. It seemed, he thought, that there were—perhaps had always been—people slightly sensitive to the thoughts of others. At some time, somewhere, a person so gifted thought with longing of the happier past of which legends had survived, and responded to the neural currents—subliminally faint—generated by the organochemic cortex. Its maximum power consumption was on the machine level; its signals might be as strong as a radio’s.
Relaxed, in an autohypnotic state, someone like Granny Jassy or Conrad could tap the very thought-stream of the cortex in its lucid moments. Pictures of the past mingled with pictures of the present, but the present was hateful and discoloured by frustration, whereas the cortex was yearning for the past, and so little attention was paid to the available knowledge that people survived in the barrenland. Conrad had opened his mind to impressions of that sort only because he was thinking of growing up to kill devils like the one which had come to Lagwich, and had glimpsed Nestamay’s likeness and later dredged it from his subconscious; however, like most people, he abandoned pursuit of barrenland images and preferred to seek visions of the distant past.
But today, within a shorter distance of the point of origin of the signals than anyone else with his gift had ever reached, he had happened to turn his maximum concentration on the idea of the organochemic cortex at precisely the moment when it realised the mounting power level made its return to insanity imminent.
As though a bolt of lightning had flashed between his mind and the artificial brain, the truth had stormed in and taken possession of him.
He stopped talking. There was
much more that he hadn’t said, but his sense of urgency was growing. He looked at his hearers. Nestamay, withdrawn into a corner, was staring at him with round-eyed wonder. Yanderman, his forehead etched with a deep frown, was biting the back of his knuckles and wrestling with the facts Conrad had offered. Maxall had his head forward and his fingers buried in the thick hair at the back of his scalp.
“It makes a kind of sense,” Yanderman ventured at last. He glanced at Maxall.
“But why him?” the old man groaned. “He was never here before! I know you told me he was right about water in the desert and helped you to find your way here—” He checked, raising his head.
“Now explain that!” he challenged. “You’ve said that these visions of yours are messages from the cortex here; well, how is it that the cortex happened to think about the location of water so conveniently for you? Hey?”
Sickly, Conrad realised the old man was looking for any excuse to avoid believing the story he’d heard. It was too great a blow to his vanity to accept that a total stranger could cut through the fog of mystery which had baffled him a lifetime long, and his ancestors before him.
“It was a total awareness!” he exclaimed. “It’s not limited the way you and I are. It’s got usable senses still—it can see outside the dome, for instance. And not just that. If it sees you, it automatically pictures to itself what you can see from your point of view, and the same applies to all the other people around it. Similarly, when it remembers the past, it remembers in a way which is much fuller and more comprehensive than we can manage. It remembers everything simultaneously. After all, if it was designed to direct literally hundreds of processes at once—Oh, what’s the use? You’re not even trying to follow what I’m saying, are you?”
He put his head in his hands.
Unexpectedly, Nestamay moved in her corner. She said in a low voice, “Grandfather, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“What?” the old man started and looked around.
“I said you should be ashamed!” The girl gathered courage and her tone grew firmer. “You’ve taught me all you were able to, and you never managed to show me an explanation which all fitted together. Conrad’s does fit. It may not be right, but it’s got to be tried. You said yourself we were at the end of our resources here. If you were desperate enough to spare Jasper till he couldn’t be spared any longer, just to give us a chance of going on, then you can get desperate enough to do as Conrad tells you!”
She set her chin mutinously and met the old man’s gaze fair and square.
After a long moment, Maxall said, “But—but we don’t know how to cut back the power as he wants us to.”
“I do,” Conrad repeated. “The cortex has always known what had to be done. It just hasn’t any way of doing it by itself.”
XXIV
Rather sullen, some of them visibly scared, the people of the barrenland community stood around Conrad. In the forefront of the group were the thin, tired-faced men and childless women who had spent their adult lives on endless routine working parties, checking the spread of the vegetation, salvaging scrap, clearing up after the destructive passage of alien monsters. Behind were the mothers and children, gazing at him almost without expression.
For a dreadful moment it came home to Conrad that their lives depended on him. They hung on the thread of his supposed insight into the secret of the Station. He quailed, horrified at the possibility of having to answer to them for a failure.
But he caught at memory, rigid as an iron bar, and found something less than confidence but more than mere hope. He drew a deep breath and glanced at Yanderman.
“Everything’s ready,” Yanderman confirmed. He hesitated, then drew closer to Conrad and added in a voice not meant to be overheard, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“You seemed pretty confident I was right when you decided to cross the barrenland on the strength of what I could tell you.”
“So if you’re wrong I can take the blame. I see.” Yanderman’s cynical words were belied a moment later by a wry smile. He clapped Conrad on the shoulder and turned to pick up the awkward bulk of one of the heatbeam projectors. Keefe had instructed him in its use, with the warning that below a certain power level it would cease to operate altogether; this fitted with Conrad’s idea of a kind of idling condition of the organochemic cortex.
There was no longer any reason for delay. He squared his shoulders and walked towards the huge rent in the side of the dome left by the monster of yesterday afternoon. He would have liked to have his gun with him—it had dealt with that monster in a reassuringly efficient manner—but the most important aid inside the gloomy dome was sure to be a handlight, and he would need his other hand free.
Already the twining stems of the alien plants were reaching out across the gap the thing had torn in their tangled masses. Cautiously Conrad turned the beam of his handlight upwards, in case there were any of the deadly black clusters of seeds nearby. He could see none, and the pseudo-leaves with their toothed edges which were everywhere on the ground had been crushed and ripped by the passing thing. It was safe to proceed.
The twilight of the dome interior closed around him. This was not one of the long-ago reclaimed areas, through which even young girls could safely pass at night on their way to keep watch in the office. The office was an improvisation, like the alarm Jasper had disconnected and then, at the cost of his life, wired up again. Presumably the repair team had been already unable to get to the cortex itself, and had needed a remote base of operations.
But Conrad had to go to the cortex, or at least to a point very close. It was a minor miracle disguised as a disaster, the fact that yesterday’s intruder had been so big and had cut such a clear swathe through the jungle.
He kept moving. Behind him, circumspectly, Yanderman and Keefe followed, and then others of the Station community, their voices hushed as though they were afraid of waking a lurking monster, but commenting continually on the nature of the plants now revealed to view.
A hundred yards from the exterior, Conrad paused and turned his handlight upwards. Among the screening tangle of creepers it was just possible to pick out a huge curved structural member which might formerly have supported a walkway.
“We’ll have to get up there,” he whispered, copying without meaning to the hushed tones of his companions. “Can someone burn a way through the plants?”
Yanderman came up beside him, swinging his heatbeam to the ready. Just before activating it, he paused to ask, “You’re sure it won’t do any harm?”
“The cortex is over there,” Conrad said, pointing directly towards the centre of the dome. “Don’t ask how I know.”
Reassured, Yanderman activated the beam. A few seconds sufficed to crisp the trailing fronds into ash, and a sickly stench drifted up. Through wisps of smoke Conrad’s handlight shone on a spiral stairway leading upward.
It rang under his boots as he climbed.
Then the way was along the distorted back of the curved girder he had seen from the ground. All around, strange forgotten machines peered from swathes of strong-scented foliage; huge fungi in rainbow colours posed proudly on the ruins of man’s labour. Twice something slithered away from the inquiring beam of light, and Conrad shivered and had to force himself not to think of any danger other than that of the mounting power level in the cortex.
Down next, to a once-level platform a hundred yards square, where the heatbeam had to be used to clear a path a second time. Here there were metal frames, rust-pitted, that might have been furniture—flat tables, skeletal chairs, overturned in the course of the centuries by the feeble pull of the omnipresent creepers.
“We’re getting near,” he whispered. “I can feel it!”
“Then keep moving!” Yanderman rasped. “We can’t use the heatbeam indefinitely, you know!”
Conrad nodded and crossed the tilting floor of the platform to another winding stair at the other side. No, not a stair this time—a spiralling ramp wh
ich he half-expected to move as he stepped on it. But it would not have moved since the Station was switched to emergency power four and a half centuries ago.
The going was slippery with decaying vegetation now. Rather than exhaust the heatbeam here where there were no threatening seed-masses, Conrad called for hatchets and sticks to slash at the creepers. With agonising slowness they ascended the ramp.
“There,” he breathed when they reached the top, and flung out his arm.
Before them, discernible among the close-set creepers and fungi, was the upper surface of a huge once-shiny sphere, posed on a support which they could not see for leaves. In the beam of the handlight it still had a dull lustre, pitted now with centuries of corrosion. It was more than a man’s height in diameter. Once it had been protected by a curved glass superstructure, but the glass had fallen in shards long since and crunched under their feet as they approached.
“This?” Yanderman demanded.
Conrad gave a weary nod. “It’s inside the metal ball. Now all we have to do is locate the power controls and adjust them. There’s a switch, and it’s not far away. Everybody hunt around here!” he added, raising his voice and gesturing largely. “A switch—a red switch on a white board somewhere nearby!”
The others looked blankly about them.
“How are we going to find it in this tangle?” Keefe demanded of Conrad. “I take it we can’t burn the plants back without risking damage to the switch!”
“I’m afraid not,” Conrad muttered. “But it’s not far away, I’m sure of that.” He raised his own hatchet and began to chop at obscuring creepers. Within minutes he had laid bare a strange man-tall device of convoluted crystal on a white stone base. But that wasn’t what he wanted.