Assignment in Eternity

  It gripped the arms of the chair. “Must I do all the thinking for you fools?” it asked in a sweet gentle voice. “You, Arthurson—you let Moulton slip that Shasta Bill past the Senate. Moron.” The epithet was uttered caressingly.

  Arthurson shifted in his chair. “I examined his mind. The bill was harmless. It was a swap on the Missouri Valley deal. I told you.”

  “You examined his mind, eh? Hmm—he led you on a personally conducted tour, you fool. A Shasta bill! When will you mindless idiots learn that no good ever came out of Shasta?” It smiled approvingly.

  “Well, how was I to know? I thought a camp near the mountain might confuse . . . them.”

  “Mindless idiot. The time will come when I will find you dispensable.” The thing did not wait for the threat to sink in, but continued, “Enough of that now. We must move to repair the damage. They are on the offensive now. Agnes—”

  “Yes.” The woman answered.

  “Your preaching has got to pick up—”

  “I’ve done my best.”

  “Not good enough. I’ve got to have a wave of religious hysteria that will wash out the Bill of Rights—before the Shasta camp breaks up for the summer. We will have to act fast before that time and we can’t be hampered by a lot of legalisms.”

  “It can’t be done.”

  “Shut up. It can be done. Your temple will receive endowments this week which you are to use for countrywide television hookups. At the proper time you will discover a new messiah.”

  “Who?”

  “Brother Artemis.”

  “That cornbelt pipsqueak? Where do I come in on this?”

  “You’ll get yours. But you can’t head this movement; the country won’t take a woman in the top spot. The two of you will lead a march on Washington and take over. The Sons of ’76 will fill out your ranks and do the street fighting. Weems, that’s your job.”

  The man addressed demurred. “It will take three, maybe four months to indoctrinate them.”

  “You have three weeks. It would be well not to fail.”

  The last of the three men broke his silence. “What’s the hurry, Chief? Seems to me that you are getting yourself in a panic over a few kids.”

  “I’ll be the judge. Now you are to time an epidemic of strikes to tie the country up tight at the time of the march on Washington.”

  “I’ll need some incidents.”

  “You’ll get them. You worry about the unions; I’ll take care of the Merchants’ and Commerce League myself. You give me one small strike tomorrow. Get your pickets out and I will have four or five of them shot. The publicity will be ready. Agnes, you preach a sermon about it.”

  “Slanted which way?”

  It rolled its non-existent eyes up to the ceiling. “Must I think of everything? It’s elementary. Use your minds.”

  The last man to speak laid down his cigar carefully and said, “What’s the real rush, Chief?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “No, you haven’t. You’ve kept your mind closed and haven’t let us read your thoughts once. You’ve known about the Shasta camp for months. Why this sudden excitement? You aren’t slipping, are you? Come on, spill it. You can’t expect us to follow if you are slipping.”

  The eyeless one looked him over carefully. “Hanson,” he said, in still sweeter tones, “you have been feeling your size for months. Would you care to match your strength with mine?”

  The other looked at his cigar. “I don’t mind if I do.”

  “You will. But not tonight. I haven’t time to select and train new lieutenants. Therefore I will tell you what the urgency is. I can’t raise Brinckley. He’s fallen out of communication. There is not time—”

  “You are correct,” said a new voice. “There is not time.”

  The five jerked puppet-like to face its source. Standing side by side in the study were Ephraim Howe and Joan Freeman.

  * * *

  Howe looked at the thing. “I’ve waited for this meeting,” he said cheerfully, “and I’ve saved you for myself.”

  The creature got out of its wheelchair and moved through the air at Howe. Its height and position gave an unpleasant sensation that it walked on invisible legs. Howe signaled to Joan.

  —“It starts. Can you hold the others, my dear?”

  —“I think so.”

  —“Now!” Howe brought to bear everything he had learned in one hundred and thirty busy years, concentrated on the single problem of telekinetic control. He avoided, refused contact with the mind of the evil thing before him and turned his attention to destroying its physical envelope.

  The thing stopped.

  Slowly, slowly, like a deep sea diver caught in an implosion, like an orange in a squeezer, the spatial limits in which it existed were reduced. A spherical locus in space enclosed it, diminished.

  The thing was drawn in and in. The ungrown stumps of its legs folded against its thick torso. The head ducked down against the chest to escape the unrelenting pressure. For a single instant it gathered its enormous perverted power and fought back. Joan was disconcerted, momentarily nauseated, by the backwash of evil.

  But Howe withstood it without change of expression; the sphere shrank again.

  The eyeless skull split. At once, the sphere shrank to the least possible dimension. A twenty-inch ball hung in the air, a ball whose repulsive superficial details did not invite examination.

  Howe held the harmless, disgusting mess in place with a fraction of his mind, and inquired—“Are you all right, my dear?”

  —“Yes, Senior. Master Ling helped me once when I needed it.”

  —“That I anticipated. Now for the others.” Speaking aloud he said, “Which do you prefer: To join your leader, or to forget what you know?” He grasped air with his fingers and made a squeezing gesture.

  The man with the cigar screamed.

  “I take that to be an answer,” said Howe. “Very well, Joan, pass them to me, one at a time.”

  He operated subtly on their minds, smoothing out the patterns of colloidal gradients established by their corporal experience.

  A few minutes later the room contained four sane but infant adults—and a gory mess on the rug.

  Coburn stepped into a room to which he had not been invited. “School’s out, boys,” he announced cheerfully. He pointed a finger at one occupant. “That goes for you.” Flame crackled from his finger tip, lapped over his adversary. “Yes, and for you.” The flames spouted forth a second time. “And for you.” A third received his final cleansing.

  Brother Artemis, “God’s Angry Man,” faced the television pick-up. “And if these things be not true,” he thundered, “then may the Lord strike me down dead!”

  The coroner’s verdict of heart failure did not fully account for the charred condition of his remains.

  A political rally adjourned early because the principal speaker failed to show up. An anonymous beggar was found collapsed over his pencils and chewing gum. A director of nineteen major corporations caused his secretary to have hysterics by breaking off in the midst of dictating to converse with the empty air before lapsing into cheerful idiocy. A celebrated stereo and television star disappeared. Obituary stories were hastily dug out and completed for seven members of Congress, several judges, and two governors.

  The usual evening sing at Camp Mark Twain took place that night without the presence of Camp Director Moulton. He was attending a full conference of the adepts, assembled all in the flesh for the first time in many years.

  Joan looked around as she entered the hall. “Where is Master Ling?” she inquired of Howe.

  He studied her face for a moment. For the first time since she had first met him nearly two years before she thought he seemed momentarily at a loss. “My dear,” he said gently, “you must have realized that Master Ling remained with us, not for his own benefit, but for ours. The crisis for which he waited has been met; the rest of the work we must do alone.”

  A hand went to her throat. ??
?You . . . you mean . . . ?”

  “He was very old and very weary. He had kept his heart beating, his body functioning, by continuous control for these past forty-odd years.”

  “But why did he not renew and regenerate?”

  “He did not wish it. We could not expect him to remain here indefinitely after he had grown up.”

  “No.” She bit her trembling lip. “No. That it true. We are children and he has other things to do . . . but—Oh, Ling! Ling! Master Ling!” She buried her head on Howe’s shoulder.

  —“Why are you weeping, Little Flower?”

  Her head jerked up—“Master Ling!”

  —“Can that not be which has been? Is there past or future? Have you learned my lessons so poorly? Am 1 not now with you, as always?” She felt in the thought the vibrant timeless merriment, the gusto for living which was the hallmark of the gentle Chinese.

  With a part of her mind she squeezed Howe’s hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I was wrong.” She relaxed as Ling had taught her, let her consciousness flow in the revery which encompasses time in a single deathless now.

  Howe, seeing that she was at peace, turned his attention to the meeting.

  He reached out with his mind and gathered them together into the telepathic network of full conference.—

  “I think that you all know why we meet,” he thought—“I have served my time; we enter another and more active period when other qualities than mine are needed. I have called you to consider and pass on my selection of a successor.”

  Huxley was finding the thought messages curiously difficult to follow. I must be exhausted from the effort, he thought to himself.

  But Howe was thinking aloud again—“So be it; we are agreed.” He looked at Huxley. “Philip, will you accept the trust?”

  “What?!!”

  “You are Senior now—by common consent.”

  “But. . . but . . . I am not ready.”

  “We think so,” answered Howe evenly. “Your talents are needed now. You will grow under responsibility.”

  —“Chin up, pal!” It was Coburn, in private message.

  —“It’s all right, Phil.” Joan, that time.

  For an instant he seemed to hear Ling’s dry chuckle, his calm acceptance.

  “I will try!” he answered.

  On the last day of camp Joan sat with Mrs. Draper on a terrace of the Home on Shasta, overlooking the valley. She sighed. Mrs. Draper looked up from her knitting and smiled. “Are you sad that the camp is over?”

  “Oh, no! I’m glad it is.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I was just thinking . . . we go to all this effort and trouble to put on this camp. Then we have to fight to keep it safe. Tomorrow those boys go home—then they must be watched, each one of them, while they grow strong enough to protect themselves against all the evil things there are still in the world. Next year there will be another crop of boys, and then another, and then another. Isn’t there any end to it?”

  “Certainly there is an end to it. Don’t you remember, in the ancient records, what became of the elders? When we have done what there is for us to do here, we move on to where there is more to do. The human race was not meant to stay here forever.”

  “It still seems endless.”

  “It does, when you think of it that way, my dear. The way to make it seem short and interesting is to think about what you are going to do next. For example, what are you going to do next?”

  “Me?” Joan looked perplexed. Her face cleared. “Why . . . why I’m going to get married!”

  “I thought so.” Mrs. Draper’s needles clicked away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  “—AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE!”

  THE GLOBE STILL SWUNG AROUND THE SUN. The seasons came and the seasons went. The sun still shone on the mountainsides the hills were green, and the valleys lush. The river sought the bosom of the sea, then rode the cloud, and found the hills as rain. The cattle cropped in the brown plains, the fox stalked the hare through the brush. The tides answered the sway of the Moon, and the gulls picked at the wet sand in the wake of the tide. The Earth was fair and the earth was full; it teemed with life, swarmed with life, overflowed with life—a stream in spate.

  Nowhere was man.

  Seek the high hills; search him in the plains. Hunt for his spoor in the green jungles; call for him; shout for him. Follow where he has been in the bowels of earth; plumb the dim deeps of the sea.

  Man is gone; his house stands empty; the door open.

  A great ape, with a brain too big for his need and a spirit that troubled him, left his tribe and sought the quiet of the high place that lay above the jungle. He climbed it, hour after hour, urged on by a need that he half understood. He reached a resting place, high above the green trees of his home, higher than any of his tribe had ever climbed. There he found a broad flat stone, warm in the sun. He lay down upon it and slept.

  But his sleep was troubled. He dreamed strange dreams, unlike anything he knew. They woke him and left him with an aching head.

  It would be many generations before one of his line could understand what was left there by those who had departed.

  THE END

  JERRY WAS

  A MAN

  * * *

  JERRY WAS A MAN

  * * *

  DON’T BLAME THE MARTIANS. The human race would have developed plasto-biology in any case.

  Look at the older registered Kennel Club breeds—glandular giants like the St. Bernard and the Great Dane, silly little atrocities like the Chihuahua and the Pekingese. Consider fancy goldfish.

  The damage was done when Dr. Morgan produced new breeds of fruit flies by kicking around their chromosomes with X-ray. After that, the third generation of the Hiroshima survivors did not teach us anything new; those luckless monstrosities merely publicized standard genetic knowledge.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel did not have social reform in mind when they went to the Phoenix Breeding Ranch; Mr. van Vogel simply wanted to buy a Pegasus. He had mentioned it at breakfast. “Are you tied up this morning, my dear?”

  “Not especially. Why?”

  “I’d like to run out to Arizona and order a Pegasus designed.”

  “A Pegasus? A flying horse? Why, my sweet?”

  He grinned. “Just for fun. Pudgy Dodge was around the Club yesterday with a six-legged dachshund—must have been over a yard long. It was clever, but he swanked so much I want to give him something to stare at. Imagine, Martha—me landing on the Club ’copter platform on a winged horse. That’ll snap his eyes back!”

  She turned her eyes from the Jersey shore to look indulgently at her husband. She was not fooled; this would be expensive. But Brownie was such a dear! “When do we start?”

  They landed two hours earlier than they started. The airsign read, in letters fifty feet high:

  PHOENIX BREEDING RANCH

  Controlled Genetics—licensed Labor Contractors

  “‘Labor Contractors’?” she read. “I thought this place was used just to burbank new animals?”

  “They both design and produce,” he explained importantly. “They distribute through the mother corporation ‘Workers’. You ought to know; you own a big chunk of Workers common.”

  “You mean I own a bunch of apes? Really?”

  “Perhaps I didn’t tell you. Haskell and I—” He leaned forward and informed the field that he would land manually; he was a bit proud of his piloting.

  He switched off the robot and added, briefly as his attention was taken up by heading the ship down, “Haskell and I have been plowing your General Atomics dividends back into Workers, Incorporated, Good diversification—still plenty of dirty work for the anthropoids to do.” He slapped the keys; the scream of the nose jets stopped conversation.

  Bronson had called the manager in flight; they were met—not with red carpet, canopy, and footmen, though the manager strove to give that impression. “Mr. van V
ogel? And Mrs. van Vogel! We are honored indeed!” He ushered them into a tiny, luxurious unicar; they jeeped off the field, up a ramp, and into the lobby of the administration building. The manager, Mr. Blakesly, did not relax until he had seated them around a fountain in the lounge of his offices, struck cigarets for them, and provided tall, cool drinks.

  Bronson van Vogel was bored by the attention, as it was obviously inspired by his wife’s Dun & Bradstreet rating (ten stars, a sunburst, and heavenly music). He preferred people who could convince him that he had invented the Briggs fortune, instead of marrying it.

  “This is business Blakesly. I’ve an order for you.”

  “So? Well, our facilities are at your disposal. What would you like, sir?”

  “I want you to make me a Pegasus.”

  “A Pegasus? A flying horse?”

  “Exactly.”

  Blakesly pursed his lips. “You seriously want a horse that will fly? An animal like the mythical Pegasus?”

  “Yes, yes—that’s what I said.”

  “You embarrass me, Mr. van Vogel. I assume you want a unique gift for your lady. How about a midget elephant, twenty inches high, perfectly housebroken, and able to read and write? He holds the stylus in his trunk—very cunning.”

  “Does he talk?” demanded Mrs. van Vogel.

  “Well, now, my dear lady, his voice box, you know—and his tongue—he was not designed for speech. If you insist on it, I will see what our plasticians can do.”

  “Now, Martha—”

  “You can have your Pegasus, Brownie, but I think I may want this toy elephant. May I see him?’

  “Most surely. Hartstone!”

  The air answered Blakesly. “Yes, boss?”