"From the time I was five," the old man said aloud, wondering, "it was never the same. She thought I was — I don't know. A devil. She thought I had the power of second sight, because I'd been scared by the accident before it happened."
He looked around the room. "And my son!" he cried. "I knew when he died—telepathy, at a distance of a good eight thousand miles. And—" he stopped, thinking. "There were other things," he mumbled ...
Dr. Shugart fussed kindly: "Impossible, don't you see? It's all part of your delusion. Surely a scientist should know that this—witchcraft can't be true! If only you hadn't come down here tonight, when you were so close to a cure ..."
Noah Sidorenko said terribly: "Do you want to cure me again?"
"Doctor!"
The old man shouted: "You've done it a hundred times, and a hundred times, with pain and fear, I've had to undo the cure—not because I want to! My God, no. But because I can't help myself. And now you want me to go through it again. 1 won t let you cure me!" He pushed the electric buttons; the chair began to spin but too slowly, too slowly. The old man fought his way to his feet, shouting at them. "Don't you see? I don't want to do this, but it does itself ; it's like a baby that's getting born, I can't stop it now. It's difficult to have a baby. A woman in labor," he cried, seeing the worry in their eyes, knowing he must seem insane, "a woman in labor is having a fit, she struggles and screams—and what can a doctor do for her? Kill the pain? Yes, and perhaps kill the baby with it. That happened, over and over, until the doctors learned how, and—and you don't know how ...
"You mustn't kill it this time! Let me suffer. Don't cure me!"
And they stood there looking at him. No one spoke at all.
The room was utterly silent; the old man asked himself, Can I have convinced them? But that was so improbable. His words were such poor substitutes for the thoughts that raced about his thumping head. But—the thoughts, yes, they were clear now; maybe for the first time. He understood. Psionic power, telepathy, precognition, all the other hard-to-handle gifts that filled the gap between metaphysics and muscle . . . they lay next door to madness. Worse! By definition, they were "madness", as a diamond can be "dirt" if it clogs the jet of a rocket. They were mad, since they didn't fit self-defining "sane" science.
But how many times he had come so close, all the same! And how often, how helpfully, he had been "cured." The delusional pattern had been so clear to "sane" science; and with insulin shock and hypnosynthesis, with electrodes in his shaved scalp and psychodrama, with Group therapy and the silence—with every pill and incantation of the sciences of the mind they had, time after time, rooted out the devils. Precognition had been frightened out of him by his mother's panic. Telepathy had been electroshocked out of him in the Winford Retreat. But they returned and returned.
Handle them? No, the old man admitted, he couldn't handle them, not yet. But if God was good and gave him more time, an hour or two perhaps ... or maybe some years; if the doctor was improperly kind and allowed him his "delusion"—why, he might learn to handle them after all. He might, for example, be able to peer into minds at will and not only when some randomly chosen mind, half-shattered itself, created such a clamorous beacon of noise that then the (tele-pathically) nearly deaf might hear it. He might be able to stare into the future at will, instead of having his attention chance-caught by the flicker of some catastrophic terror projecting its shadow ahead. And this ancient and useless hulk that was his body, for example. He might yet force it to live, to move, to walk about, to stand-
To stand?
The old man stood perfectly motionless beside his chair. To stand? And then, rather late, he followed the direction of the staring eyes of Maureen and Shugart and the others.
He was standing.
But not as he had visioned it, in wretched bedridden hours. He was standing tall and straight; but between the felt soles of his slippers and the rubber tiles of the office floor there were eight inches of untroubled air.
No. They wouldn't cure him again, not ever. And with luck, he realized slowly, he might now proceed to infect the world.
The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass
When I was still in my teens, L. Sprague de Camp published a wonderful novel called Lest Darkness Fall, which had to do with a man who was thrust back through time into the years just before Rome fell to the barbarians, and through skill and sagacity averted that fall and, thus, the Dark Ages. This is both a sort of belated rejoinder to de Camp and a snap at the heels of the pronatalists and other sweet, dangerous people who believe that there is some way of dealing with the world's ills that does not include population limitation.
This is the story of Phineas Snodgrass, inventor. He built a time machine.
He built a time machine and in it he went back some two thousand years, to about the time of the birth of Christ. He made himself known to the Emperor Augustus, his lady Livia and other rich and powerful Romans of the day and, quickly making friends, secured their cooperation in bringing about a rapid transformation of Year One living habits. (He stole the idea from a science-fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp, called Lest Darkness Fall.)
His time machine wasn't very big, but his heart was, so Snodgrass selected his cargo with the plan of providing the maximum immediate help for the world's people. The principal features of ancient Rome were dirt and disease, pain and death. Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through twentieth-century medicine. Everything else could take care of itself, once the human race was free of its terrible plagues and early deaths.
Snodgrass introduced penicillin and aureomycin and painless dentistry. He ground lenses for spectacles and explained the surgical techniques for removing cataracts. He taught anesthesia and the germ theory of disease, and showed how to purify drinking water. He built Kleenex factories and taught the Romans to cover their mouths when they coughed. He demanded, and got, covers for the open Roman sewers, and he pioneered the practice of the balanced diet.
Snodgrass brought health to the ancient world, and kept his own health, too. He lived to more than a hundred years. He died, in fact, in the year a.d. 100, a very contented man.
When Snodgrass arrived in Augustus's great palace on the Palatine Hill, there were some 250,000,000 human beings alive in the world. He persuaded the principate to share his blessings with all the world, benefiting not only the hundred million subjects of the Empire, but the other one hundred millions in Asia and the tens of millions in Africa, the Western Hemisphere and all the Pacific islands.
Everybody got healthy.
Infant mortality dropped at once, from 90 deaths in a hundred to fewer than two. Life expectancies doubled immediately. Everyone was well, and demonstrated their health by having more children, who grew in health to maturity and had more.
It is a feeble population that cannot double itself every generation if it tries.
These Romans, Goths, and Mongols were tough. Every 30 years the population of the world increased by a factor of two. In the year a.d. 30, the world population was a half billion. In a.d. 60, it was a full billion. By the time Snodgrass passed away, a happy man, it was as large as it is today.
It is too bad that Snodgrass did not have room in his time machine for the blueprints of cargo ships, the texts on metallurgy to build the tools that would make the reapers that would harvest the fields—for the triple-expansion steam turbines that would generate the electricity that would power the machines that would run the cities—for all the technology that 2,000 subsequent years had brought about.