Brain Wave (13 page)

“Uh-huh,” said Lewis. “I’m not working on that just now, though, except as a kibitzer. Bronzini and MacAndrews can handle it. I’m co-opting myself into the psychological department, which is not only more interesting but of more immediate practical importance. I’ll handle the neurological-cybernetic aspect of their work.”

“Our old psychology is almost useless,” nodded Corinth. “We’re changing too much to understand our own motivations any more. Why am I spending most of my time here, when maybe I should be home helping Sheila face her adjustment? I just can’t help myself, I have to explore this new field, but—To start afresh, on a rational basis, we’ll have to know something about the dynamics of man —As for me, I’m off this baby too, now that we’ve actually succeeded in generating a field. Rossman wants me to work on his spaceship project as soon as he can get it organized.”

“Spaceship—faster-than-light travel, eh?”

“That’s right. The principle uses an aspect of wave mechanics which wasn’t suspected before the change. We’ll generate a psi wave which—Never mind, I’ll explain it
to you when you’ve gotten around to learning tensor analysis and matrix algebra. I’m collaborating with some others here in drawing up plans for the thing, while we wait for the men and materials to start building. We should be able to go anywhere in the galaxy once we’ve got the ship.”

The two threads coalesced: “Running away from ourselves,” said Grunewald. “Running into space itself to escape.” For a moment the four men were silent, thinking.

Corinth got to his feet. “I’m going home,” he said harshly.

His mind was a labyrinth of interweaving thought chains as he went down the stairs. Mostly he was thinking of Sheila, but something whispered of Helga too, and there was a flow of diagrams and equations, a vision of chill immensity through which the Earth spun like a bit of dust. An oddly detached part of himself was coolly studying that web of thought, so that he could learn how it worked and train himself to handle his own potentialities.

Language: The men of the Institute, who knew each other, were involuntarily developing a new set of communication symbols, a subtle and powerful thing in which every gesture had meaning and the speeding brain of the listener, without conscious effort, filled in the gaps and grasped the many-leveled meaning. It was almost too efficient, you gave your inmost self away. The man of the future would likely go naked in soul as well as in body, and Corinth wasn’t sure he liked the prospect.

But then there was Sheila and himself; their mutual understanding made their talk unintelligible to an outsider. And there were a thousand, a million groups throughout the world, creating their own dialects on a basis of past experience which had not been shared with all humanity. Some arbitrary language for the whole world would have to be devised.

Telepathy? There could no longer be any doubt that it existed, in some people at least. Extrasensory perception would have to be investigated when things had quieted down. There was so much to do, and life was so terribly short!

Corinth shivered. Fear of personal extinction was supposed to be an adolescent reaction; but in a sense, all men
were adolescents once more, on a new plane—no, children, babies.

Well, no doubt the biologists would within the next few years find some means of lengthening the lifespan, prolonging it for centuries perhaps. But was that ultimately desirable?

He came out on the street and located the automobile Rossman had provided for him.
At least
, he thought wryly as he entered it,
the parking problem has been solved. No more traffic like there once was
.

Eventually, no more New York. Big cities had no real economic justification. He came from a small town, and he had always loved mountains and forests and sea. Still, there was something about this brawling, frenetic, overcrowded, hard, inhuman, magnificent city whose absence would leave an empty spot in the world to come.

It was a hot night. His shirt stuck clammily to him, and the air seemed thick. Overhead, between the darkened buildings and the dead neon signs, heat lightning flickered palely and all the earth yearned for rain. His headlights cut a dull swath through the gummy blackness.

There were more cars abroad than there had been even a week ago. The city was just about tamed now; the gang war between Portmen and Dynapsychists, suppressed two weeks back, seemed to have been the last flare of violence. Rations were still short, but people were being put to work again and they’d all live.

Corinth pulled up in the parking lot behind his apartment and walked around to the front. The power ration authority had lately permitted this building to resume elevator service, which was a mercy. He hadn’t enjoyed climbing fifteen flights when electricity was really short.

I hope
—He was thinking of Sheila, but he left the thought unfinished. She’d been getting thin, poor kid, and she didn’t sleep well and sometimes she woke with a dry scream in her throat and groped blindly for him. He wished his work didn’t take him away from her. She needed companionship badly. Maybe he could get her some kind of job to fill the hours.

When he came out on his floor, the hall was darkened save for a vague night light, but radiance streamed under
his door. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was later than her usual bedtime. So she couldn’t sleep tonight, either.

He tried the door, but it was locked and he rapped. He thought he heard a smothered scream from within, and knocked harder. She opened the door so violently that he almost fell inside.

“Pete, Pete, Pete!” She pressed herself to him with a shudder. With his arms about her, he felt how close the delicate ribs lay to her skin. The lamplight was harsh, filling the room, and oddly lusterless on her hair. When she lifted her face, he saw that it was wet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He spoke aloud, in the old manner, and his voice was suddenly wavering.

“Nerves.” She drew him inside and closed the door. In a nightgown and bathrobe she looked pathetically young, but there was something ancient in her eyes.

“Hot night to be wearing a robe,” he said, groping for expression.

“I feel cold.” Her lips trembled.

His own mouth fell into a harsh line, and he sat down in an easy chair and pulled her to his lap. She laid arms about him, hugging him to her, and he felt the shiver in her body.

“This is not good,” he said. “This is the worst attack you’ve had yet.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d been much longer about coming,” she said tonelessly.

They began to talk then, in the new interweaving of word and gesture, tone and silence and shared remembering, which was peculiarly theirs.

“I’ve been thinking too much,” she told him. “We all think too much these days.” (Help me, my dearest! I am going down in darkness and only you can rescue me.)

“You’ll have to get used to it,” he answered dully. (How can I help? My hands reach for you and close on emptiness.)

“You have strength—” she cried. “Give it to me!” (Nightmares each time I try to sleep. Waking, I see the world and man as a flickering in cold and nothingness,
empty out to the edge of forever. I can’t endure that vision.)

Weariness, hopelessness: “I’m not strong,” he said. “I just keep going somehow. So must you.”

“Hold me close, Pete,”
Father image
, “hold me close,” she whimpered. Pressing to him as if he were a shield against the blackness outside and the darkness within and the things rising through it: “Don’t ever let me go!”

“Sheila,” he said. (Beloved: wife, mistress, comrade.) “Sheila, you’ve got to hang on. All this is just an increased power to think—to visualize, to handle data and the dreams you yourself have created. Nothing more.”

“But it is changing
me!”
The horror of death was in her now. She fought it with something like wistfulness: “—and where has our world gone? Where are our hopes and plans and togetherness?”

“We can’t bring them back,” he replied. Emptiness, irrevocability: “We have to make out with what we have now.”

“I know, I know—and I can’t!” Tears gleamed along her cheeks. “Oh, Pete, I’m crying more for you now,” (Maybe I won’t even go on loving you.) “than for me.”

He tried to stay cool. “Too far a retreat from reality is insanity. If you went mad—” Unthinkableness.

“I know, I know,” she said. “All too well, Pete. Hold me close.”

“And it doesn’t help you to know—” he said, and wondered if the engineers would ever be able to find the breaking strength of the human spirit. He felt very near to giving way.

SUMMER waned as the planet turned toward winter. On a warm evening late in September, Mandelbaum sat by the window with Rossman, exchanging a few low-voiced words. The room was unlit, full of night. Far below them the city of Manhattan glowed with spots of radiance, not the frantic flash and glare of earlier days but the lights of a million homes. Overhead, there was a dull blue wash of luminance across the sky, flickering and glimmering on the edge of visibility. The Empire State Building was crowned with a burning sphere like a small sun come to rest, and the wandering air held a faint tingle of ozone. The two men sat quietly, resting, smoking the tobacco which had again become minutely available, Mandelbaum’s pipe and Rossman’s cigarette like two ruddy eyes in the twilit room. They were waiting for death.

“Wife,” said Rossman with a note of gentle reproach. It could be rendered as: (I still don’t see why you wouldn’t tell your wife of this, and be with her tonight. It may be the last night of your lives.)

“Work, city, time,” and the immemorial shrug and the wistful tone: (We both have our work to do, she at the relief center and I here at the defense hub. We haven’t told the city either, you and I and the few others who know. It’s best not to do so, eh?)
We couldn’t have evacuated them, there would have been no place for them to go and the fact of our attempting it would’ve been a tip-off to the enemy, an invitation to send the rockets immediately. Either we can save the city or we can’t; at the moment, there’s nothing anyone can do but wait and see if the defense works
. (I wouldn’t worry my Liebchen—she’d worry on my account and the kids’ and grandchildren’s. No, let it happen, one way or the other. Still I do wish we could
be together now, Sarah and I, the whole family—) Mandelbaum tamped his pipe with a horny thumb.

(The Brookhaven men think the field will stop the blast and radiation), implied Rossman.
We’ve had them working secretly for the past month or more, anticipating an attack. The cities we think will be assailed are guarded now—we hope
. (But it’s problematic. I wish we didn’t have to do it this way.)

“What other way?”
We knew, from our spies and deductions, that the Soviets have developed their intercontinental atomic rockets, and that they’re desperate. Revolution at home, arms and aid being smuggled in to the insurgents from America. They’ll make a last-ditch attempt to wipe us out, and we believe the attack is due tonight. But if it fails, they’ve shot their bolt. It must have taken all their remaining resources to design and build those rockets
. “Let them exhaust themselves against us, while the rebels take over their country. Dictatorship is done for.”

“But what will replace it?”

“I don’t know. When the rockets come, it seems to me they’ll be the last gasp of animal man. Didn’t you once call the twentieth century the Era of Bad Manners? We were stupid before—incredibly stupid! Now all that’s fading away.”

“And leaving—nothing.” Rossman lit a fresh cigarette and stubbed out the old one. The brief red light threw his gaunt, fine-boned face into high relief against darkness.

“Oh, yes,” he went on, “the future is not going to look anything like the past. Presumably there will still be society—or societies—but they won’t be the same kind as those we’ve known before. Maybe they’ll be purely abstract, mental things, interchanges and interactions on the symbolic level. Nevertheless, there can be better or worse societies developed out of our new potentialities, and I think the worse ones will grow up.”

“Hm.” Mandelbaum drew hard on his pipe. “Aside from the fact that we have to start from scratch, and so are bound to make mistakes, why should that necessarily be so? You’re a born pessimist, I’m afraid.”

“No doubt. I was born into one age, and saw it die in blood and madness. Even before 1914, you could see the
world crumbling. That would make a pessimist of anyone. But I think it’s true what I say. Because man has, in effect, been thrown back into utter savagery. No, not that either; the savage does have his own systems of life. Man is back on the animal plane.”

Mandelbaum’s gesture swept over the huge arrogance of the city. “Is that animal?”

“Ants and beavers are good engineers.”
Or were. I wonder what the beavers are doing now
. “Material artifacts don’t count for much, really. They’re only possible because of a social background of knowledge, tradition, desire—they’re symptoms, not causes. And we have had all our background stripped from us.

“Oh, we haven’t forgotten anything, no. But it’s no longer of value to us, except as a tool for the purely animal business of survival and comfort. Think over your own life. What use do you see in it now? What are all your achievements of the past? Ridiculous!

“Can you read any of the great literature now with pleasure? Do the arts convey anything to you? The civilization of the past, with its science and art and beliefs and meanings, is so inadequate for us now that it might as well not exist. We have no civilization any longer. We have no goals, no dreams, no creative work—nothing!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Mandelbaum with a hint of amusement. “I’ve got enough to do—to help out with, at least—for the next several years. We’ve got to get things started on a worldwide basis, economics, politics, medical care, population control, conservation, it’s a staggering job.”

“But after that?” persisted Rossman. “What will we do then? What will the next generation do, and all generations to come?”