Night of Light

  "I thought we had a little device that would make us quite safe?" said Carmody, peeling off the last of his sticky clothes and heading for the shower. "Or are you not sure of it?" He laughed at Ralloux's expression of despair and spoke from behind the veil of hot water hurtling over his head. "What's the matter? You really scared?"

  "Yes, I am. Aren't you?"

  "I, frightened? No, I have never been afraid of anything in my whole life. I'm not saying that to cover up, either. I don't really know what it is to feel fear."

  "I strongly suspect you don't know what it is to feel anything," said Ralloux."I wonder sometimes if you do have a soul. It must be there somewhere but thrust down so deep that nobody, including yourself, can see it. Otherwise. . ."

  Carmody laughed and began soaping his hair.

  "The headthumper at Johns Hopkins said I was a congenital psychopath, that I was born incapable of even understanding a moral code, I was beyond guilt, beyond virtue, not born with an illness of the mind, you understand, just lacking something, whatever it is that makes a human being human. He made no bones about telling me that I was one of those rare birds before which the science of the Year of Our Lord 2256 is completely helpless. He was sorry, he said, but I would have to be committed for the rest of my life, probably kept under mild sedation so I would be harmless and cooperative, and undoubtedly would be the subject of thousands of experiments in order to determine what it is that makes a constitutional psychopath."

  Carmody paused, stepped from the shower, and began drying himself.

  "Well," he continued, smiling, "you can see that I couldn't put up with that. Not John Carmody. So -- I escaped from Hopkins, escaped from Earth itself, got to Springboard -- on the edge of the Galaxy, farthest colonized planet of the Federation, stayed there a year, made a fortune smuggling sodompears, was almost caught by Raspold -- you know, the galactic Sherlock Holmes -- but eluded him and got here where the Federation has no jurisdiction. But I don't intend to stay here; not that it wouldn't be a bad world, because I could make money here, too, the food and liquor are good, and the females are just unhuman enough to attract me. But I want to show Earth up for what it is, a stable for stupid asses. I intend to go back to Earth to live there in complete immunity from arrest. And to do pretty well what I please, though I shall be discreet about some things."

  "If you think you can do that, you must be crazy. You would be arrested the moment you stepped off the ship."

  Carmody laughed. "You think so? You know, don' t you, that the Federal Anti-Social Bureau depends for its information and partly for its directives upon the Boojum?"

  Ralloux nodded.

  "Well, the Boojum after all is only a monster protein memory bank and probability computer. It has stored away in its cells all the available information about one John Carmody and it undoubtedly has issued orders that all ships leaving Dante's Joy should be searched for him. But what if proof comes that John Carmody is dead? Then the Boojum cancels all directives concerning Carmody, and it retires the information to mechanical files. Then, when a colonist from say, Wildenwooly, who has made his pile there and wants to spend it on Earth, comes to the home planet, who is going to bother him, even if he does look remarkably like John Carmody?"

  "But that's preposterous! In the first place, how is the Boojum going to get proof positive that you are dead? In the second place, when you land on Earth, your fingers, retina, and brainwaves will be printed and identified."

  Carmody grinned joyfully. "I wouldn't care to tell you how I'll manage the first. As for the second, so what if my prints are filed? They won't be cross-checked; they'll just be those of some immigrant, who was born on a colony-planet and who is being recorded for the first time. I won't even bother to change my name."

  "What if someone recognizes you?"

  "In a world of ten billion population? I'll take my chance."

  "What is to prevent my telling the authorities?"

  "Do dead men tell?"

  Ralloux paled but did not flinch. His expression was still the grave-faced gentle monk's, his large shining black eyes staring honestly at Carmody but giving him a slightly ludicrous appearance because of their unexpectedness in that snub-nosed freckled big-lipped pitcher-eared setting. He said, "Do you intend to kill me?"

  Carmody laughed uproariously. "No, it won't be necessary. Do you think for one moment either you or Skelder will come through the Night alive or in your right mind? You've seen what has happened during the few brief flickers we've had. Those were preludes, tunings up. What of the real Night?"

  "What about what happened to you?" said Ralloux, still pale.

  Carmody shrugged his shoulders, ran his hand through his blue-black porcupinelike hair, now clean of blood. "Apparently my unconscious or whatever you call it is projecting pieces of Mary's body, reconstructing the crime, you might say. How it can take a strictly subjective phenomenon and turn it into objective reality, I don't know. Tand says there are several theories that attempt to explain the whole thing scientifically, that leaves the supernatural out. It doesn't matter. It didn't bother me when I cut up Mary into little pieces, and it won't bother me to have pieces of her come floating back into my life. I could swim through her blood, or anybody else's, to reach my goal."

  He paused, looked narrow-eyed but still grinning at Ralloux and said, "What did you see during those flickers?"

  Ralloux, even paler, gulped. He made the sign of the cross.

  "I don't know why I should tell you. But I will. I was in Hell."

  "In Hell?"

  "Burning. With the other damned. With ninety-nine percent of all those who had lived, are living, and will live. Billions upon billions."

  Sweat poured out of his face. "It was not something imagined. I felt the agony. Mine, and the others'."

  He fell silent, while Carmody cocked his head to one side like one puzzled bird trying to figure out another. Then Ralloux murmured, "Ninety-nine percent."

  "So," Carmody said, "that is what you worry about most, that is the basic premise of your mind."

  "If so, I did not know it," murmured the monk.

  "How ridiculous can you get? Why, even your Church no longer insists upon the medieval conception of literal flames. Still, I don't know. From what I see of most people, they ought to fry. I'd like to be supervisor of the furnaces; there are some I've met in my short life whose fat egotism I'd like to burn right out of them.. . ."

  Ralloux said, incredulously, "You resent egotists?"

  Carmody, clean and dressed, grinned and started downstairs.

  The mess, Mrs. Kri announced, was cleaned up and now she was going down into the vault to Sleep. She would leave the house open for their convenience, she said, but she hoped that when she awoke she wouldn't find everything too dirty, that they would wipe their feet before they came in and would empty the ashtrays and wash their dishes. Then she insisted upon giving each of them a peace-kiss, and broke down and cried, saying she might never see any of them again, and she asked Skelder's forgiveness for her attack upon him. He was quite gracious about it and gave her his blessing.

  Five minutes later, Mrs. Kri, having injected herself with the necessary hibernatives, slammed the big iron door of the basement vault and locked herself in.

  Tand bade them good-bye. "If I'm caught before I get to my own vault, I'll have to go through the Night, willy-nilly. And once started, there's no holding back. It's all black and white then; you either get through or you don't. At the end of the seventh day, you are god, corpse, or monster."

  "And what do you do with the monsters?" asked Carmody.

  "Nothing, if they're harmless, like Mrs. Kri's husband. Otherwise, we kill them."

  After a few more remarks, he shook hands, knowing this was an Earth custom, wishing them, not luck, but a suitable reward. He said good-bye to Carmody last, holding his hand the longest and looking into his eyes. "This is your last chance ever to become anything. If the Night does not break up the frozen deeps of your soul, if you r
emain iceberg from top to bottom, as you now are, then you are done for. If there exists the least spark of warmth, of humanity, then let it burst into flame and consume you, no matter what the pain. The god Yess once said if you would gain your life you must lose it. Nothing original in it -- other gods, other prophets, everywhere there are sentient beings, have said so. But it is true in many ways, unimaginable ways."

  As soon as Tand had left, the three Earthmen silently walked upstairs and took from a large trunk three helmets, each with a small box on its top, from which nodded a long antenna. These they put over their heads, then turned a dial just above the right ear.

  Skelder smacked his thin lips doubtfully and said, "I certainly hope the scientists at Jung were correct in their theory. They said that the moment an electromagnetic wave is detected by this device, it will set up a canceling wave; that no matter how vast the energies of the magnetic storm, we will be able to walk through them unaffected."

  "I hope so," said Ralloux, looking downcast. "I see now that in thinking I could conquer what better men than I have found invincible, I was committing the worst sin of all, that of spiritual pride. May God forgive me. I thank Him for these helmets."

  "I thank Him, too," said Skelder, "though I think that we should not have to have recourse to them. We two should put our full trust in Him and bare our heads, and our souls, to the evil forces of this heathen planet."

  Carmody smiled cynically. "There is nothing holding you back. Go ahead. You might earn yourself a halo."

  "I have my orders from my superiors," Skelder replied stiffly.

  Ralloux rose and began pacing back and forth. "I don't understand it. How could magnetic storms, even if of unparalleled violence, excite the atomic nuclei of beings on a planet eighty million miles away, and at the same time probe and stir the unconscious mind, cause it to fasten an iron grip upon the conscious, provoke inconceivable psychosomatic changes? The sun turns violet, extends its invisible wand, rouses the image of the beast that lives in the dark caves of our minds, or else wakens the sleeping golden god. Well, I can understand some of that. Changes in electromagnetic frequencies on Earth's sun not only influence our climate and weather, they control human behavior. But how could this star act upon flesh and blood so that skin tension lessens, bones grow soft, bend, harden into alien shapes that are not found in the genes. . .?"

  "We still don't know enough about genes to say what shapes are implicit in them," interrupted Carmody. "When I was a medical student at Hopkins, I saw some very strange things." He fell silent, thinking about those days.

  Skelder sat upright and thin-lipped on a chair, his helmet making him look more like a soldier than a monk.

  "It won't be long," said Ralloux, still pacing, "before the Night will start. If what Tand says is true, the first twenty hours or so will put everybody who has stayed up -- except us, who are protected by our helmets -- into a deep coma. Seemingly, the bodies of the sleepers then build up a partial resistance so that they later wake up. Once awakened, they are so charged with energy or some sort of drive, that they cannot sleep until the sun is over its violent phase. It is while they are sleeping that we --"

  "-- shall do our dirty work!" said Carmody joyfully.

  Skelder rose. "I protest! We are here on a scientific investigation, and we are allied with you only because there is certain work that we --"

  "-- don't want to soil our lily-white hands with," said Carmody.

  At that moment the light in the room became dark, a heavy violet. There was dizziness, then a fading away of the senses. But it lasted only a second, though long enough to weaken their knees and send them crashing to the floor.

  Carmody got up shakily on all fours, shook his head like a dog struck by a club, and said, "Wow, what a jolt that was! Good thing we had these helmets. They seem to have pulled us through."

  He rose to his feet, his muscles aching and stiff. The room seemed to be hung with many violet veils, it was so dark and silent.

  "Say, Ralloux, what's the matter with you?" he said.

  Ralloux, white as a ghost, his face twisted with agony, leaped to his feet, screamed, tore the helmet off his head, and ran out the door. His footsteps could be heard pounding down the hall, down the steps. And the front door banged hard.

  Carmody turned to the other monk. "He. . . now what's the matter with you?"

  Skelder's mouth was open and he was staring at the clock on the wall. Suddenly, he whirled on Carmody. "Get away from me," he snarled.

  Carmody blinked, then smiled and said, "Sure, why not? I never thought you had the skin I loved to touch, anyway."

  He watched amusedly as Skelder began to edge along the wall towards the door. "Why are you limping?"

  The monk did not reply but walked crabwise from the room. A moment later the front door banged again. Carmody, quite alone, stood a moment in thought, then examined the clock at which the monk had been staring. Like most Kareenan timepieces, it told the time of the day, the day, month, and year. The attack of violet had taken place at 17:25. It was now 17:30.

  Five minutes had elapsed.

  Plus twenty-four hours.

  "No wonder my every muscle aches! And I'm so hungry!" Carmody said aloud. He took the helmet off and dropped it on the floor.

  "Well, that's that. Noble experiment." He went downstairs into the kitchen, half-expecting to be struck in the face with more blood. But there was nothing untoward. Whistling to himself, he took food and milk from the refrigerator, made himself sandwiches, ate heartily, then checked the action of his gun. Satisfied, he rose and walked toward the front door.

  The telephone rang.

  He hesitated, then decided to answer it. Wothehell, he said to himself.

  He lifted the receiver. "Hello!"

  "John!" said a lovely female voice.

  His head jerked away as if the receiver were a snake.

  "John?" repeated the voice, now sounding far away, ghostly.

  He sucked in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, resolutely put the phone to his ear again.

  "John Carmody speaking. Who is this?"

  There was no answer.

  Slowly, he put the phone back on the hook.

  When he left the house, he found himself in a darkness lit only by the street lamps, islanded at hundred-feet intervals, and by the huge moon, hanging dim and violet and malevolent above the horizon. The sky was clear, but the stars seemed far away, blobs straining to pierce the purplish haze. The buildings were like icebergs looming in a fog, threatening with their suddenness, seeming about to topple over. Only when he got close to them did they crystallize into stability.

  The city lay silent. No bark of dog, no shrill of nighthawk, no toot of horn, no coughing, no slamming of door, no hard heels ringing on the sidewalk, no shout of laughter. If sight was muffled, sound was dead.

  Carmody hesitated, wondering if he shouldn't commandeer a car he'd found parked by the curb. Four miles to the temple was a long walk when you thought about what might be roaming the violet-hazed darkness. Not that he was scared, but he didn't care for unnecessary obstacles. A car would give him speed for a getaway; on the other hand, it was much more noticeable.

  Deciding he would ride it for the first two miles, then walk, he opened the door. He recoiled, and his hand grabbed for his gun. But it dropped. The occupant, lying face up on the seat, was dead. Carmody's flashlight, briefly turned upon the man's face, showed a mass of dried sores. Apparently, the driver had either been one who'd taken the Chance or else put off too long going to Sleep. Something, maybe an explosion of cancer, had eaten him up, had even devoured the eyeballs and gulped away half of his nose.

  Carmody pulled the body out and let it lie in the street. It took several minutes to get the water in the boiler heated up, then he drove off slowly, the headlights extinguished. As he cruised along, peering from side to side for strangers, keeping close to the curb on his left so he'd have contact with something solid, he kept thinking about the voice over the phone, tr
ying to analyze how this thing could have come about.

  To begin with, he thought, he must accept absolutely that he, John Carmody, through the power of his mind, out of the thin air, was creating something solid and objective. At least, he was the transmitter of energy. He didn't think his own body contained nearly enough power for the transmutation of energy into matter; if his own cells had to furnish it, they would burn up before the process was barely begun. Therefore, he must be, not the engine, but the transmitter, the transformer. The sun was supplying the energy; he, the blueprint.

  Granted. So, if something he couldn't control -- what a hateful but not to be denied thought! -- if something he couldn't control was refashioning his dead wife, he at least was the engineer, the sculptor. What she was depended on him.

  The only explanation he could find was that this process somehow utilized, not his conscious knowledge of the human body, but his body's unconscious self-knowledge. Through some means, his cells reproduced themselves directly in Mary's newly born body. Were the cells in her body, then, mirror-images, as the cells of one twin were of the other's?

  That he could understand. But what about those organs that were peculiarly female? It was true that his memory contained a minute file on interior female anatomy. He'd dissected enough corpses; and as far as her own particular organs went, he knew those well enough, having taken her apart quite scientifically and carefully before feeding the pieces to the garbage disposal. He had even examined the four-months embryo, the prime cause of his anger and revulsion toward her, the swelling thing within her that was turning her from the most beautiful creature in the world to a huge-bellied monster, that would inevitably demand at least a small share of her love for John Carmody. Even a little bit was too much; he possessed the most precious, exquisite, absolutely unflawed thing of beauty; she was his, nobody else's.

  And then, when he had proposed that they get rid of this flawing growth, and she had said no, and he had insisted, and had tried to force her, and she had fought him, then she had cried that she did not love him as she once had, that this child was not even his but that of a man who was a man, not a monster of egotism; then, for the first time in his life, as far as he remembered, he had been angry. Angry was an understatement. He had completely lost himself, had, literally, seen red, thought red, drowned in a crimson flood.