The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (17 page)

Warren sat at his desk and held his head in his hands, trying to think.

Maybe he should have let them go ahead with what they had been doing. But if he had, they'd have kept right on, using variations of the same approach – and when the approach had failed twice, they should have figured out that approach was wrong and tried another.

Spencer had said that they'd lost knowledge and not known they had lost it, and that was the insidious part of the whole situation. They still thought of themselves as men of science, and they were, of course, but not as skilled, not as knowledgeable as they once had been.

That was the hell of it – they still thought they were.

They despised him now and that was all right with him. Anything was all right with him if it would help them discover a way to escape.

Forgetfulness, he thought. All through the Galaxy, there was forgetfulness. There were explanations for that forgetfulness, very learned and astute theories on why a being should forget something it had learned. But might not all these explanations be wrong? Might it not be that forgetfulness could be traced, not to some kink within the brain, not to some psychic cause, but to thousands upon thousands of memory traps planted through the Galaxy, traps that tapped and drained and nibbled away at the mass memory of all the sentient beings which lived among the stars?

On Earth a man would forget slowly over the span of many years and that might be because the memory traps that held Earth in their orbit were very far away. But here a man forgot completely and suddenly. Might that not be because he was within the very shadow of the memory traps?

He tried to imagine Operation Mind Trap and it was a shocking concept too big for the brain to grasp. Someone came to the backwoods planets, the good-for-nothing planets, the sure-to-be-passed-by planets and set out the memory traps.

They hooked them up in series and built towers to protect them from weather or from accident, and set them operating and connected them to tanks of nutrients buried deep within the soil. Then they went away.

And years later – how many years later, a thousand, ten thousand? – they came back again and emptied the traps of the knowledge they had gathered. As a trapper sets out traps to catch animals for fur, or a fisherman should set the pots for lobsters or drag the seine for fish.

A harvest, Warren thought – a continual, never-ending harvest of the knowledge of the Galaxy.

If this were true, what kind of race would it be that set the traps? What kind of trapper would be plodding the starways, gathering his catch?

Warren's reason shrank away from the kind of race that it would be.

The creatures undoubtedly came back again, after many years, and emptied the traps of the knowledge they had snared. That must be what they'd do, for why otherwise would they bother to set out the traps? And if they could empty the traps of the knowledge they had caught, that meant there was some way to empty them. And if the trappers themselves could drain off the knowledge, so could another race.

If you could only get inside the tower and have a chance to figure out the way, you could do the job, for probably it was a simple thing, once you had a chance to see it. But you couldn't get inside. If you did, you were robbed of all memory and came out a squalling child. The moment you got inside, the egg grabbed onto your mind and wiped it clean and you didn't even know why you were there or how you'd got there or where you were.

The trick was to get inside and still keep your memory, to get inside and still know what there was to do.

Spencer and the others had tried shielding the brain and shielding didn't work. Maybe there was a way to make it work, but you'd have had to use trial and error methods and that meant too many men coming out with their memories gone before you had the answer. It meant that maybe in just a little while you'd have no men at all.

There must be another way.

When you couldn't shield a thing, what did you do?

A communications problem, Lang had said. Perhaps Lang was right – the egg was a communications set up. And what did you do to protect communications? When you couldn't shield a communication, what did you do with it?

There was an answer to that one, of course – you scrambled it.

But there was no solution there, nor any hint of a solution. He sat and listened and there was no sound. No one had stopped by to see him; no one had dropped in to pass the time of day.

They're sore, he thought. They're off sulking in a corner. They're giving me the silent treatment.

To hell with them, he said.

He sat alone and tried to think and there were no thoughts, just a mad merry-go-round of questions revolving in his skull.

Finally there were footsteps on the stair and from their unsteadiness, he knew whose they were.

It was Bat Ears coming up to comfort him and Bat Ears had a skin full.

He waited, listening to the stumbling feet tramping up the stairs, and Bat Ears finally appeared. He stood manfully in the doorway, putting out both hands and bracing them against the jambs on either side of him to keep the place from swaying.

Bat Ears nerved himself and plunged across the space from doorway to chair and grabbed the chair and hung onto it and wrestled himself into it and looked up at Warren with a smirk of triumph.

“Made it,” Bat Ears said.

“You're drunk,” snapped Warren disgustedly.

“Sure, I'm drunk. It's lonesome being drunk all by yourself. Here …”

He found his pocket and hauled the bottle out and set it gingerly on the desk.

“There you are,” he said. “Let's you and me go and hang one on.”

Warren stared at the bottle and listened to the little imp of thought that jigged within his brain.

“No, it wouldn't work.”

“Cut out the talking and start working on that jug. When you get through with that one, I got another hid out.”

“Bat Ears,” said Warren.

“What do you want?” asked Bat Ears. “I never saw a man that wanted –”

“How much more have you got?”

“How much more what, Ira?”

“Liquor. How much more do you have stashed away?”

“Lots of it. I always bring along a marg … a marg …”

“A margin?”

“That's right,” said Bat Ears. “That is what I meant. I always figure what I need and then bring along a margin just in case we get marooned or something.”

Warren reached out and took the bottle. He uncorked it and threw the cork away.

“Bat Ears,” he said, “go and get another bottle.”

Bat Ears blinked at him. “Right away, Ira? You mean right away?”

“Immediately,” said Warren. “And on your way, would you stop and tell Spencer that I want to see him soon as possible?”

Bat Ears wobbled to his feet.

He regarded Warren with forthright admiration.

“What you planning on doing, Ira?” he demanded.

“I'm going to get drunk,” said Warren. “I'm going to hang one on that will make history in the survey fleet.”

XV

“You can't do it, man,” protested Spencer. “You haven't got a chance.”

Warren put out a hand against the tower and tried to hold himself a little steadier, for the whole planet was gyrating at a fearful pace.

“Bat Ears,” Warren called out.

“Yes, Ira.”

“Shoot the –
hic
– man who tries to shtop me.”

“I'll do that, Ira,” Bat Ears assured him.

“But you're going in there unprotected,” Spencer said anxiously. “Without even a spacesuit.”

“I'm trying out a new appro … appro …”

“Approach?” supplied Bat Ears.

“Thash it,” said Warren. “I thank you, Bat Ears. Thash exactly what I'm doing.”

Lang said, “It's got a chance. We tried to shield ourselves and it didn't work. He's trying a new approach. He's scrambled up his mind with liquor. I think he might have a chance.”

“The shape he's in,” said Spencer, “he'll never get the wires connected.”

Warren wobbled a little. “The hell you shay.”

He stood and blurredly watched them. Where there had been three of each of them before, there now, in certain cases, were only two of them.

“Bat Ears.”

“Yes, Ira.”

“I need another drink. It's wearing off a little.”

Bat Ears took the bottle from his pocket and handed it across. It was not quite half full. Warren tipped it up and drank, his Adam's apple bobbing. He did not quit drinking until the last of it was gone. He let the bottle drop and looked at them again. This time there were three of each of them and it was all right.

He turned to face the tower.

“Now,” he said, “if you gen'men will jush –”

Ellis and Clyne hauled on the rope and Warren sailed into the air.

“Hey, there!” he shouted. “Wha' you trying to do?”

He had forgotten about the pulley rigged on the tripod above the tower.

He dangled in the air, kicking and trying to get his balance, with the blackness of the tower's mouth looming under him and a funny, shining glow at the bottom of it.

Above him the pulley creaked and he shot down and was inside the tower.

He could see the thing at the bottom now. He hiccoughed politely and told it to move over, he was coming down. It didn't move an inch. Something tried to take his head off and it didn't come off.

The earphones said, “Warren, you all right? You all right? Talk to us.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, all right. Wha' matter wish you?”

They let him down and he stood beside the funny thing that pulsated in the pit. He felt something digging at his brain and laughed aloud, a gurgling, drunken laugh.

“Get your handsh out my hair,” he said. “You tickle.”

“Warren,” said the earphones. “The wires. The wires. You remember, we talked about the wires.”

“Sure,” he said. “The wires.”

There were little studs on the pulsating thing and they'd be fine things to attach a wire to.

Wires? What the hell were wires?

“Hooked on your belt,” said the earphones. “The wires are hooked on your belt.”

His hand moved to his belt and he found the wires. He fumbled with them and they slipped out of his fingers and he got down and scrabbled around and grabbed hold of them again. They were all tangled up and he couldn't make head or tail of them and what was he messing around with wires for, anyhow?

What he wanted was another drink – another little drink.

He sang:
“I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer!”

He said to the egg: “Friend, I'd be mosh pleashed if you'd join me in a drink.”

The earphones said, “Your friend can't drink until you get those wires hooked up. He can't hear without the wires hooked up. He can't tell what you're saying until you get those wires hooked up.

“You understand, Warren? Hook up the wires. He can't hear till you do.”

“Now, thash too bad,” said Warren. “Thash an awful thing.”

He did the best he could to get the wires hooked up and he told his new friend just to be patient and hold still, he was doing the best he could. He yelled for Bat Ears to hurry with the bottle and he sang a ditty which was quite obscene. And finally he got the wires hooked up, but the man in the earphones said that wasn't right, to try it once again. He changed the wires around some more and they still weren't right, and so he changed them around again, until the man in the earphones said, “That's fine! We're getting something now!”

And then someone hauled him out of there before he even had a drink with his pal.

XVI

He stumbled up the stairs and negotiated his way around the desk and plopped into the chair. Someone had fastened a steel bowl securely over the top half of his head and two men, or possibly three, were banging it with a hammer, and his mouth had a wool blanket wadded up in it, and he could have sworn that at any moment he'd drop dead of thirst.

He heard footsteps on the stairs and hoped that it was Bat Ears, for Bat Ears would know what to do.

But it was Spencer.

“How're you feeling?” Spencer asked.

“Awful,” Warren groaned.

“You turned the trick!”

“That tower business?”

“You hooked up the wires,” said Spencer, “and the stuff is rolling out. Lang has a recorder hooked up and we're taking turns listening in and the stuff we're getting is enough to set your teeth on edge.”

“Stuff?”

“Certainly. The knowledge that mind trap has been collecting. It'll take us years to sort out all the knowledge and try to correlate it. Some of it is just in snatches and some of it is fragmentary, but we're getting lots of it in hunks.”

“Some of our own stuff being fed back to us?”

“A little. But mostly alien.”

“Anything on the engines?”

Spencer hesitated. “No, not on
our
engines. That is –”

“Well?”

“We got the dope on the junkyard engine. Pollard's already at work. Mac and the boys are helping him get it assembled.”

“It'll work?”

“Better than what we have. We'll have to modify our tubes and make some other changes.”

“And you're going to –”

Spencer nodded. “We're ripping out our engines.”

Warren couldn't help it. He couldn't have helped it if he'd been paid a million dollars. He put his arms down on the desk and hid his face in them and shouted raucously with incoherent laughter.

After a time he looked up again and mopped at laughter-watered eyes.

“I fail to see –” Spencer began stiffly.

“Another junkyard,” Warren said. “Oh, God, another junkyard!”

“It's not so funny, Warren. It's brain-shaking – a mass of knowledge such as no one ever dreamed of. Knowledge that had been accumulating for years, maybe a thousand years. Ever since that other race came and emptied the trap and then went away again.”