I lifted the helmet dubiously. For a moment I hesitated. Then the memory of the dead man so near us flashed vividly through my mind and I knew I had no time to lose. It might happen again. I was afraid of what Paynter might discover—but how could I refuse now? How much had he noticed when the killer struck? Perhaps it would be better if he knew the whole story.
The helmet slipped easily on my head and seemed to adjust itself automatically. Paynter was saying something about projection.
“You had books in your time. In a good one there’s projection—you felt the way the author wanted you to feel. This is simply a further development. You may relive the experiences of historical persons, if the screening works out that way. I’ll get certain knowledge from you, you from me—and we draw on the projection library as a supplement, a concordance, if necessary.”
His fingers were busy adjusting controls. I had time enough to think, “This is the forerunning of the Record, of course. One of the steps toward something more complex.”
Then a bar of spinning light sprang up from the larger box, whirling so rapidly that atoms of light seemed to spiral out from it. And—then I was somebody else.
I was a guy named Bannister who’d been born after Hiroshima. I was standing in a room a mile underground. The General was sitting at his desk playing with a pistol. We were temporarily safe here, though it wasn’t really safe anywhere. Still, there was a half mile of valves, Geigers and filters—the atomic absorption stacks—between us and the surface, so not much radiation could get in.
“Let’s have it,” the General said,
This was one war that hadn’t gone by the rules. This time the top men were getting killed—the ones who’d always died in bed before. So they were beginning to grope frantically around in Pandora’s box muttering, “Where’d Hope get to?”
They were beginning to find out they should have stood in bed.
The Second Atomic War. I—whoever I was–never thought about it. I’d lived it for some years. I guess I was one of the early mental mutations, part of the social mutation that had to take place after the world began to rock like a gyroscope slowing down. I knew already I didn’t think in quite the same way the older men did. Sometimes I wondered if the change, after all, meant only a keener ruthlessness.
The General said, “Well? Where’s the report?”
“He’s done it, sir,” I said.
The General put the pistol down on his desk and showed his teeth. “Is is practical? That’s the point.”
“It’s practical sir,” I said. “Inanimate matter only, so far. But such matter can be transported for a thousand-mile radius. A receiver must be spotted first, though. It means interplanetary colonization one of these days—because the first space-ship can take a receiver with it and open up a pipeline for supplies. This is only the start.”
“A matter-transmitter,” the General said and suddenly crumpled the papers on his desk. “Armistice? We’ll forget that now. GHQ will change its tune now we’ve got this new weapon.”
“The inventor wants to use the device for peaceful purposes, sir,” I said. “I heard rumors the war was over.”
He looked at me. “They all do. Yes, the war was over yesterday. But well start it again.”
Then I knew that I was a mutation after all—mentally. The General and I just didn’t think the same way. We didn’t have the same values and we never would. He hadn’t matured in an atomic world.
I had. I picked up the pistol from the General’s desk. His brain was obsolescent anyway.
Then I was somebody else.
“Cities?” I said to my visitor. “No, we’ll never rebuild them. We won’t need to.”
“But the world is in ruins.”
“Technology is the answer.”
“You mean machines can build where men cannot?”
“Aren’t they doing it?”
They were—yes. Old as I was, over a hundred—whoever I was–I could not remember a time when the planet had not been radiotoxic. Not all of it, of course. The men that were left, the survivors, gathered in the islands relatively free from the poison. Travel, even by plane, would have been too dangerous, but we had the matter-transmitters. So we were not insular. There were the colonized planets.
Still, Earth was the home. With the halftime of the radio-dust, it would be a long time before most of the planet would become habitable. Yet Earth could be rebuilt, in preparation, by machines.
“I will show you my plan,” I said. “Come with me. I’ll be dead long before there’s a use for my Mechandroids, but that day will surely come.”
He followed me along the corridor. He was a powerful man, one of the most powerful in the world, but he followed me like a young student.
“It’s hard to know the best plan,” he said, half to himself.
“We have a Galaxy to colonize. Human minds can’t cope with that. Nor can machines. The machines must fail because they’re emotionless and inhuman. What you need is a human machine or a mechanical human. A perfect blend. A synthesis. Like my Mechandroids.”
I pulled back a curtain and showed him the young strong body in the glass coffin. The machines clicked and hummed from all around. The wires quivered slightly.
“This is one of my Mechandroids,” I said. “They cannot reproduce; they do not breed true. But they can be manufactured. It’s as though a machine had given birth to a human.”
“He looks thoroughly normal.”
“I chose his parents. I needed the right heredity. I selected the chromosomes most suited to my needs—and I tried time after time before I succeeded. But then this Mechandroid was born. Almost since birth he has been trained—hypnogenically—educated, indoctrinated, by the thinking-machines.
“He has been taught to think as accurately as a machine. The human brain is theoretically capable of such discipline but the experiment has never been tried before to this extent. Mechandroids, I believe, can solve all human problems, and solve them correctly.”
“Machine-trained?” he said doubtfully. “Machines must serve men. They must free men, so that the capacity of the human brain may be fulfilled. These Mechandroids will smooth the path, so that man may follow the highest science—that of thought.”
“There’s no danger?” he asked, looking at the silent Mechandroid.
“There’s no danger,” I said.
14. Vega-Born
Then I was somebody else.
Saturn blazed in the sky above me, blotting out half the firmament, as I fled down the twisting street from the Mechandroid. I had to find somebody who knew what to do. But nobody seemed alive in the city. Nobody but the silent striding creature that was pursuing me.
Homecoming, eh? I was Vega-born. I was sixteen. I’d taken the great jump across interstellar space in the matter-transmitter with my Age Group—nine of them—for the Earth tour and, because all Solar tours start with the outer planets, we’d stepped out of the matter-receiver in Titan.
Then everything happened at once, too fast for me to follow. The Mechandroid came running toward us—and we began to fall, one by one. So we scattered. With my usual bad luck, I managed to blunder right into a group of the Mechandroids who were working at something.
They were in a big room, gathered around a table where a body lay. Above the table was a shining web—a neural matrix, hooked up to a matter-transmitter. I knew enough about basic physics to get some idea of what was happening and I stopped right there, like a statue, watching.
The Mechandroids were making a super-Mechandroid—if that’s the term. People had talked about the possibility. Everybody, I guess, was a little afraid, because the Mechandroids were plenty smart and if they worked out a collateral mutation—they’re individually sterile—why, then, a super-Mechandroid would be horribly powerful and dangerous.