Brain Wave (22 page)

THERE is an island in mid-Pacific, not far off the equator, which lies distant from the world of man. The old shipping routes and the later transoceanic airlines followed tracks beyond its horizon, and the atoll had been left to sun and wind and the crying of gulls.

For a brief while it had known humankind. The slow blind patience of coral polyps had built it up, and days and nights had ground its harsh wet face into soil, and the seeds of plants had been blown on a long journey to find it. A few coconuts washed up in the surf, and presently there were trees. They stood for hundreds of years, perhaps, until a canoe came over the world’s rim.

Those were Polynesians, tall brown men whose race had wandered far in the search for Hawaiki the beautiful.
There was sun and salt on them, and they thought little of crossing a thousand miles of emptiness, for they had the stars and the great sea currents to guide them and their own arms to paddle,
tohiha, hioha, itoki, itoki!
When they drew their boat ashore and had made sacrifice to shark-toothed Nan, they wound hibiscus blooms in their long hair and danced on the beach; for they had looked on the island and found it good.

Then they went away, but the next year—or the year after that, or the year after that, for the ocean was big and time was forever—they came back with others, bringing pigs and women, and that night fires burned tall on the beach. Afterward a village of thatch huts arose, and naked brown children tumbled in the surf, and fishermen went beyond the lagoon with much laughter. And this lasted for a hundred years, or two hundred, before the pale men came.

Their big white-winged canoes stopped only a few times at this island, which was not an important one, but nonetheless faithfully discharged their usual cargo of smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, so that there were not many of the brown folk left. Afterward some resistance was built up, aided by Caucasian blood, and it was time for copra planters, religion, Mother Hubbards, and international conferences to determine whether this atoll, among others, belonged to London, Paris, Berlin, or Washington—large villages on the other side of the world.

A
modus vivendi
was finally reached, involving copra, Christianity, tobacco, and trading schooners. The island people, by this time a mixture of several races, were reasonably satisfied, though they did have many toothaches; and when one of their young men, who through a long chain of circumstances had studied in America, came back and sighed for the old days, the people laughed at him. They had only vague memories of that time, handed down through a series of interested missionaries.

Then someone in an office on the other side of the world decided that an island was needed. It may have been for a naval base, or perhaps an experimental station—the pale men had so many wars, and spent the rest of their time preparing for them. It does not matter any longer why the
atoll was desired, for there are no men on it now and the gulls don’t care. The natives were moved elsewhere, and spent some quiet years in a sick longing for home. Nobody paid any attention to this, for the island was needed to safeguard the freedom of man, and after a time the older generation died off and the younger generation forgot. Meanwhile the white men disturbed the gulls for a little, putting up buildings and filling the lagoon with ships.

Then, for some unimportant reason, the island was abandoned. It may have been through treaty, possibly through a defeat in war or an economic collapse. The wind and rain and creeping vines had never been defeated, only contained. Now they began the task of demolition.

For a few centuries, men had disturbed the timelessness of days and nights, rain and sun and stars and hurricanes, but now they were gone again. The surf rolled and chewed at the reef, the slow chill sliding of underwater currents gnawed at the foundations, but there were many polyps and they were still building. The island would endure for a goodly fraction of a million years, so there was no hurry about anything. By day fish leaped in the waters, and gulls hovered overhead, and the trees and bamboo grew with frantic haste; at night the moon was cold on tumbling surf and a phosphorescent track swirled behind the great shark who patrolled the outer waters. And there was peace.

   The airjet whispered down out of darkness and the high bright stars. Invisible fingers of radar probed earthward, and a voice muttered over a beam. “Down—this way—okay, easy does it.” The jet bounced to a halt in a clearing, and two men came out.

They were met by others, indistinct shadows in the moon-spattered night. One of them spoke with a dry Australian twang: “Dr. Grunewald, Dr. Manzelli, may I present Major Rosovsky—Sri Ramavashtar—Mr. Hwang Pu-Yi—” He went on down the list; there were about a score present, including the two Americans.

Not so long ago, it would have been a strange, even impossible group: a Russian officer, a Hindu mystic, a French philosopher and religious writer, an Irish politician, a Chinese commissar, an Australian engineer, a Swedish
financier—it was as if all the earth had gathered for a quiet insurrection. But none of them were now what they had been, and the common denominator was a yearning for something lost.

“I’ve brought the control apparatus,” said Grunewald briskly. “How about the heavy stuff?”

“It’s all here. We can start anytime,” said the Irishman.

Grunewald glanced at his watch. “It’s a couple of hours to midnight,” he said aloud. “Can we be ready by then?”

“I think so,” said the Russian. “It is almost all assembled.”

Walking down toward the beach, he gestured at the bulking shape which lay black and awkward on the moon-whitened lagoon. He and one comrade had gotten the tramp steamer months ago and outfitted her with machines such that they two could sail her around the world. That had been their part of the job: not too difficult for determined men in the confusion of a dying civilization. They had sailed through the Baltic, picking up some of their cargo in Sweden, and had also touched in France, Italy, Egypt, and India on their way to the agreed destination. For some days, now, the work of assembling the spaceship and her load had progressed rapidly.

The surf roared and rumbled, a deep full noise that shivered underfoot, and spouted whitely toward the constellations. Sand and coral scrunched beneath boots, the palms and bamboos rustled dryly with the small wind, and a disturbed parakeet racketed in the dark. Beyond this little beating of sound, there were only silence and sleep.

Further on, the ruin of an old barracks moldered in its shroud of vines. Grunewald smelled the flowers there, and the heavy dampness of rotting wood—it was a pungency which made his head swim. On the other side of the ruin stood some tents, recently put up, and above them towered the spaceship.

That was a clean and beautiful thing, like a pillar of gray ice under the moon, poised starward. Grunewald looked at her with a curious blend of feelings: taut fierce glory of conquest, heart-catching knowledge of her loveliness, wistfulness that soon he would not understand the transcendent
logic which had made her swift designing and building possible.

He looked at Manzelli. “I envy you, my friend,” he said simply.

Several men were to ride her up, jockey her into an orbit, and do the final work of assembling and starting the field generator she bore. Then they would die, for there had not been time to prepare a means for their return.

Grunewald felt time like a hound on his heels. Soon the next star ship would be ready, and they were building others everywhere. Then there would be no stopping the march of the race, and of time. Tonight the last hope of mankind—human mankind—was being readied; there could not be another, if this failed.

“I think,” he said, “that all the world will cry with relief before sunrise.”

“No,” said the Australian practically. “They’ll be mad-der’n a nest of hornets. You’ll have to allow a while for them to realize they’ve been saved.”

Well, there would be time, then. The spaceship was equipped with defenses beyond the capacity of pre-change man to overcome in less than a century. Her robots would destroy any other ships or missiles sent up from Earth. And man, the whole living race, would have a chance to catch his breath and remember his first loves, and after that he would not want to attack the spaceship.

The others had unloaded the jet from America and brought its delicate cargo to this place. Now they laid the crates on the ground, and Grunewald and Manzelli began opening them with care. Someone switched on a floodlight, and in its harsh white glare they forgot the moon and the sea around them.

Nor were they aware of the long noiseless form which slipped overhead and hung there like a shark swimming in the sky, watching. Only after it had spoken to them did they look up.

The amplified voice had been gentle, there was almost a note of regret in it. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’ve done enough.”

Staring wildly upward, Grunewald saw the steel shimmer above and his heart stumbled within him. The Russian
yanked out a pistol and fired, the shots yammering futilely under the steady beat of surf. A gabble came from wakened birds, and their wings flapped loud among the soughing palms.

Manzelli cursed, whirled on his heel, and plunged into the spaceship. There were guns in it which could bring down that riding menace, and—Grunewald, diving for cover, saw a turret in the vessel’s flank swing about and thrust a nose skyward. He threw himself on his belly. That cannon fired atomic shells!

From the hovering enemy sprang a beam of intense, eye-searing flame. The cannon muzzle slumped, glowed white. The thin finger wrote destruction down the flank of the ship until it reached the cones of her gravitic drive. There it played for minutes, and the heat of melting steel prickled men’s faces.

A giant atomic-hydrogen torch
—Grunewald’s mind was dazed.
We can’t take off now—

Slowly, the very walls of the crippled spaceship began to glow red. The Swede screamed and pulled a ring off his finger. Manzelli stumbled out of the ship, crying. The force-field died, the machines began to cool again, but there was something broken in the men who stood waiting. Only the heavy sobs of Manzelli spoke.

The enemy craft—it was a star ship, they saw now—remained where it was, but a small antigravity raft floated out of her belly and drifted earthward. There were men standing on it, and one woman. None of the cabal moved as the raft grounded.

Grunewald took one step forward then, and stopped with his shoulders slumping. “Felix,” he said in a dead voice. “Pete. Helga.”

Mandelbaum nodded. The single floodlight threw a hard black shadow across his face. He waited on the raft while three quiet burly men, who had been detectives in the old world, went among the conspirators and collected the guns they had thrown away as too hot to hold. Then he joined the police on the ground. Corinth and Helga followed.

“Surely you didn’t expect to get away with this,” said Mandelbaum. His voice was not exultant but tired. He shook his head. “Why, the Observers had your pitiful little
scheme watched almost from its beginning. Your very secrecy gave you away.”

“Then why did you let it get so far?” asked the Australian. His tones were thick with anger.

“Partly to keep you out of worse mischief and partly so you’d draw in others of like mind and thus locate them for us,” said Mandelbaum. “We waited till we knew you were all set to go, and then we came.”

“That was vicious,” said the Frenchman. “It was the sort of coldbloodedness that has grown up since the change. I suppose the intelligent, the expedient thing for you now is to shoot us down.”

“Why, no,” said Mandelbaum mildly. “As a matter of fact, we used a reaction damper along with the metal-heating field, just to keep your cartridges from going off and hurting you. After all, we’ll have to find out from you who else has backed you. And then you all have good minds, lots of energy and courage—quite a big potential value. It’s not your fault the change drove you insane.”

“Insane!” The Russian spat, and recovered himself with a shaking effort. “Insane you call us!”

“Well,” said Mandelbaum, “if the delusion that you few have the right to make decisions for all the race, and force them through, isn’t megalomania, then what is? If you really had a case, you could have presented it to the world soon enough.”

“The world has been blinded,” said the Hindu with dignity. “It can no longer see the truth. I myself have lost the feeble glimpse of the ultimate I once had, though at least I know it was lost.”

“What you mean,” said Mandelbaum coldly, “is that your mind’s become too strong for you to go into the kind of trance which was your particular fetalization, but you still feel the need for it.”

The Hindu shrugged contemptuously.

Grunewald looked at Corinth. “I thought you were my friend, Pete,” he whispered. “And after what the change did to your wife, I thought you could see—”

“He’s had nothing to do with this,” said Helga, stepping forward a little and taking Corinth’s arm. “I’m the one who fingered you, Grunewald. Pete just came along with us
tonight as a physicist, to look over your apparatus and salvage it for something useful.”
Occupational therapy—O Pete, Pete, you have been hurt so much!

Corinth shook his head and spoke harshly, with an anger new to his mildness. “Never mind finding excuses for me. I’d have done this alone, if I’d known what you planned. Because what would Sheila be like if the old world came back?”

“You’ll be cured,” said Mandelbaum. “Your cases aren’t violent, I think the new psychiatric techniques can straighten you out pretty quick.”

“I wish you’d kill me instead,” said the Australian.

Manzelli was still crying. The sobs tore at him like claws.

“Why can you not see?” asked the Frenchman. “Are all the glories man has won in the past to go for nothing? Before he has even found God, will you turn God into a nursery tale? What have you given him in return for the splendors of his art, the creation in his hands, and the warm little pleasures when his day’s work is done? You have turned him into a calculating machine, and the body and the soul can wither amidst his new equations.”