The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol Xi Part 182

"I told him of the first orders and ceremonies of war, of warnings and ultimatums, and the marshalling and marching of troops. I gave him an idea of manoeuvres and positions and battle joined. I told him of sieges and a.s.saults, of starvation and hards.h.i.+p in trenches, and of sentinels freezing in the snow. I told him of routs and surprises, and desperate last stands and faint hopes, and the pitiless pursuit of fugitives and the dead upon the field. I told, too, of the past, of invasions and ma.s.sacres, of the Huns and Tartars, and the wars of Mahomet and the Caliphs, and of the Crusades. And as I went on, and Phi-oo translated, and the Selenites cooed and murmured in a steadily intensified emotion.

"I told them an ironclad could fire a shot of a ton twelve miles, and go through 20 feet of iron--and how we could steer torpedoes under water. I went on to describe a Maxim gun in action, and what I could imagine of the Battle of Colenso. The Grand Lunar was so incredulous that he interrupted the translation of what I had said in order to have my verification of my account. They particularly doubted my description of the men cheering and rejoicing as they went into battle.

"'But surely they do not like it!' translated Phi-oo.

"I a.s.sured them men of my race considered battle the most glorious experience of life, at which the whole a.s.sembly was stricken with amazement.

"'But what good is this war?' asked the Grand Lunar, sticking to his theme.

"'Oh! as for _good_!' said I; 'it thins the population!'

"'But why should there be a need--?'

"There came a pause, the cooling sprays impinged upon his brow, and then he spoke again."

[At this point a series of undulations that have been apparent as a perplexing complication as far back as Cavor's description of the silence that fell before the first speaking of the Grand Lunar become confusingly predominant in the record. These undulations are evidently the result of radiations proceeding from a lunar source, and their persistent approximation to the alternating signals of Cavor is curiously suggestive of some operator deliberately seeking to mix them in with his message and render it illegible. At first they are small and regular, so that with a little care and the loss of very few words we have been able to disentangle Cavor's message; then they become broad and larger, then suddenly they are irregular, with an irregularity that gives the effect at last of some one scribbling through a line of writing. For a long time nothing can be made of this madly zigzagging trace; then quite abruptly the interruption ceases, leaves a few words clear, and then resumes and continues for the rest of the message, completely obliterating whatever Cavor was attempting to transmit. Why, if this is indeed a deliberate intervention, the Selenites should have preferred to let Cavor go on transmitting his message in happy ignorance of their obliteration of its record, when it was clearly quite in their power and much more easy and convenient for them to stop his proceedings at any time, is a problem to which I can contribute nothing. The thing seems to have happened so, and that is all I can say. This last rag of his description of the Grand Lunar begins in mid-sentence.]

"...interrogated me very closely upon my secret. I was able in a little while to get to an understanding with them, and at last to elucidate what has been a puzzle to me ever since I realised the vastness of their science, namely, how it is they themselves have never discovered 'Cavorite.' I find they know of it as a theoretical substance, but they have always regarded it as a practical impossibility, because for some reason there is no helium in the moon, and helium..."

[Across the last letters of helium slashes the resumption of that obliterating trace. Note that word "secret," for that, and that alone, I base my interpretation of the message that follows, the last message, as both Mr. Wendigee and myself now believe it to be, that he is ever likely to send us.]

Chapter 26.

The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth On this unsatisfactory manner the penultimate message of Cavor dies out. One seems to see him away there in the blue obscurity amidst his apparatus intently signalling us to the last, all unaware of the curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this impression of our race, and then I think it is plain that he made the most fatal admission that upon himself alone hung the possibility--at least for a long time--of any further men reaching the moon. The line the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp realisation of it, must have come to him. One imagines him about the moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in his mind. During a certain time I am inclined to guess the Grand Lunar was deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor may have gone as free as ever he had gone. But obstacles of some sort prevented his getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that message I have just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions. Who can hope to guess?

And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the broken beginnings of two sentences.

The first was: "I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know--"

There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some interruption from without. A departure from the instrument--a dreadful hesitation among the looming ma.s.ses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit cavern--a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late. Then, as if it were hastily transmitted came: "Cavorite made as follows: take--"

There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: "uless."

And that is all.

It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell "useless" when his fate was close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my help, and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of these insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly as they press upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last fighting, and being forced backwards step by step out of all speech or sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown--into the dark, into that silence that has no end....

COGITO, ERGO SUM.

by John Foster West

A warped instant in s.p.a.ce--and two egos are separated from their bodies and lost in a lonely abyss.

I think, therefore I am. That was the first thought I had. Of course not in the same symbols, but with the same meaning.

I awakened, or came alive, or came into existence suddenly, at least my mental consciousness did. "Here am I," I thought, "but what am I, why am I, where am I?"

I had nothing to work with except pure reason. I was there because I was not somewhere else. I was certain I was there and that was the extent of my knowledge at the moment.

I looked about me--no, I reasoned about me. I was surrounded by nothingness, by black nothingness, a vacuum. Immense distances away I could detect light; or rather, I could perceive waves of force pa.s.sing around me which originated at points vast distances away, vast in relation to my position in the nothingness.

There were waves of force all about me, varying in frequency. The nothingness was alive with waves of force, traveling parallel and tangential to each other without seeming to interfere one with another. I measured them, differentiated between them and finished with the task in a matter of seconds.

How could I do it? It was one of the capabilities I was created with.

What was I? I perceived the waves of force. I perceived great quant.i.ties of ma.s.s--solid, liquid, gas--whirling in vacuum, ma.s.s built up out of patterns of basic force. I searched my own being, a.n.a.lyzed myself. I was not gas. I was not solid. I was not even force. Yet I existed. I could reason. I was a beginning, a sudden beginning. And I had duration because I knew that time had elapsed since the moment I awakened though I had no means of telling how much time or of even naming the period.

Could I really be pure reason? Can reason exist? Can rational ent.i.ty exist without a groundwork of matter, or at least of force?

It could. It must. I was rational ent.i.ty and I existed. Yet I could find nothing of force, nothing to occupy s.p.a.ce about my self. For all I could ascertain, I might have covered a one-dimensional point in eternity or I might have been spread throughout vast distances.

From this reasoning I concluded that rational ent.i.ty might occur either as some force unlike that of all natural phenomena in s.p.a.ce, or as some combination of these forces at the moment beyond my own power to a.n.a.lyze, even detect. I finished with that for the time being.

How did I come into being? I discarded the question as unanswerable temporarily. What was I before that instant I suddenly reasoned cogito, ergo sum? I could not say.

How did I know I even existed, really? Obviously because I was capable of rational thought. But what was thinking? First it was perceiving and accepting my own existence; beyond that, it was recognizing the dark nothingness around me and the forces it contained. I had to exist.

But how did I know nothingness was right? And how did I know its darkness was right? And how did I know the waves of force were waves and force? And how did I know matter was matter and that I was none of these?

"Symbols," I reasoned. "I'm thinking in symbols. I could not reason without symbols; therefore I could not exist as I am without symbols to think with."

Yet whose symbols were they? Where and how did I come by them? I could think back clearly to the instant of my creation, yet I had not invented the symbols in the interim of my existence, nor had they been given to me. What then? They were part of me when I came alive in this universe, had been invented some other time and elsewhere by someone else or by what I was before I became the ent.i.ty of reason I now was.

Then that first flash of perception in nothingness was not spontaneous. There was something behind it. I was something before that moment, in another era of time, perhaps a creature of substance. But what?

I concentrated. I remembered the symbol Marl. I was or had been an ent.i.ty Marl. Were there others back there, somewhere? There must have been, must be yet. Was I the only Marl who metamorphosed into this state of rational ent.i.ty? Surely not. Yet I could contact no other rationale around me as far away as I could probe. How far was that? How could I know. Was it far enough to reach the other Marls, or were they scattered thinly throughout infinity around me like the flecks of ma.s.s?

I was suddenly ill. The symbol malaise came to me as the proper description of my malady. I grew dizzy with my sickness. I wished to regurgitate, to cast off this cold, frightening sensation. Yet I was provided with no physical means of doing it. It filled me throughout all my thinking. It was I. I thought to exist. I thought depression, sickness. Therefore I was the malady and it was a h.e.l.l of malcontent beyond symbolical description.

What was wrong with me? I was frightened. I was concerned for my existence here alone. What was it called? The idea s.h.i.+mmered there on the fringe of perception, then fairly leaped into my consciousness. Existing alone as pure reason was worse than no-existence, was worse than dying or never having been at all. I need another Marl. To exist happily, I must have at least one other Marl to communicate with, to share my thoughts, to share my being.

Is this a necessity, a condition peculiar to me as I am, as reason, or is it a condition that came across the barrier with me from that other state? It must be the latter. An ent.i.ty of pure reason, having come into existence as reason, would need nothing but himself. Why? Because he would be without emotion.

"I am emotional," I thought. "I am ent.i.ty of almost pure reason, but I have inherited emotion from my previous state. It is a disorder of thought, but it can be a pleasant disorder when the emotion is the right one; or, if unpleasant, when satisfied.

"But I could not have emotions as I am now. They are cortical responses, or are supposed to be. What is cortical? No, they are a sort of illogical reasoning, nothing physical--" The rest eluded me.

"I am lonely," I thought. "Loneliness stems from fear and fear is a basic emotion. I am very lonely. I have been lonely for a long time, bringing it with me here. I would rather sate my loneliness than live to eternity, than know all there is to know. What can quell my loneliness? Another like me, another Marl--whatever a Marl is. I must have, must find another Marl."

I began to search. I darted frantically about s.p.a.ce like a frightened thing, though I could perceive no movement. I knew I pa.s.sed from one area of s.p.a.ce to another because I could measure slight changes in the position of the stars about me. I knew the points of light were stars.

There was duration. I could not know how much. Eternity? A split second? But at last I discovered another like me. No, almost like me, but another Marl. The other ent.i.ty had less of reason, more emotion. It was frightened and lonely. The Marl's whole existence was that of sickness--of loneliness, which is fear. The Marl was darting about madly, seeking, seeking a thing like itself. What was it, like me but different?

As I came in, I measured our similarity and differences. Rationally we were identical, or almost so. Emotionally we were different, vastly different. "Marls appear to exist as rationale and emotion," I reasoned. "Beyond that I cannot go."

The other Marl perceived me, darted frantically toward me, then slowed. We came together, touched like--like two cautious fish meeting in a dark pool and touching mouths to substantiate identical species.

The other Marl was satisfied with my ident.i.ty. It leaped frantically at me, raced around me, through me, finally stopped, pervading me, while vibrating in sheer relief and happiness. I felt the great fear-loneliness in the other Marl begin to recede and in its place came an almost overpowering euphoria. It was contentment, and it stemmed from the basic emotion love. I knew this at once.

I suddenly realized that I too was relieved, that I was no longer sick with fear-loneliness. It was good, this existing of the other within me or simultaneously with me. Or was it I within the other? It sated our fear emotion and made, created a love-euphoria.

"I am happy I found you," I communicated. "I was lonely for another Marl. You are a Marl?"

The other hesitated, thinking. "No. I am Pat. I am different from you. But it is chiefly emotional. It is good."

"You are a Pat," I returned in disappointment. "I had hoped to find another Marl."

"Don't be disappointed," the Pat soothed. "We are alike, really. Almost so. Like--like flame and gas are both substance yet different. We are two types of the same thing. I am no longer frightened. I am no longer lonely. You are good for me."

I was relieved because I wanted to be. I believed the other Marl--no, the Pat--because I wanted to believe. I did not bother to rationalize. I felt elation.

"Then in that other time, that other place we both belonged to a--a common group, with another name?" I suggested.

"I believe so," the Pat answered.

"How was it when you came awake?" I asked. "Can you remember?"

"I think so. I recall I was born here in fright because it was all wrong. I was not in my natural state, so it was not right." The Pat paused to think. "I remember there was great speed and I was born in fright. Were you?"

"No," I answered. "I was not frightened at first. And I was never frightened to the degree you were. I was mostly lonely, which is related to fear. But when I first conceived of my existence here I was coolly logical. I awakened reasoning--realizing that I existed."

"I suppose it has to do with our emotional differences," the Pat beside me or with me or within me communicated.

"Do you recall where in s.p.a.ce you came from?" I asked. "I must have been doubting my existence at first so intensely I did not observe. You seem to have taken your own being for granted, thus you were, perhaps, more observant."

"I--I think so." The Pat hesitated and I knew it was observing the stars around us. "Yes. Come with me. I think I know where."

I stayed with the Pat, a part of it, and we lurched through s.p.a.ce. Rather, we ceased to exist at one point in s.p.a.ce and existed in another. How far? Distances meant nothing.

"It was here," the Pat informed me finally.

Something was wrong here. The interweaving waves of force were all wrong. There was a disorder, a great cancer in s.p.a.ce. The waves interfered with the progress of each other all along a great barrier. It was not natural, not like it was elsewhere.

"Something is wrong with the waves of force crossing this area. They interfere with each other. New forces are created. Do you detect it?" I communicated.

"I feel it," the Pat answered. "It is a sickness in s.p.a.ce like--like our loneliness."

I knew the comparison was ridiculous but I let it pa.s.s. "You said you came alive at great speed. I could have been traveling too. We must have plunged into this barrier. It seems to me that emotions must originate in a physical being; perhaps reason could be free, but not emotion. I don't know. But I have a theory. I believe our physical selves still exist somewhere in s.p.a.ce. The barrier, perhaps, interfered with the normal functioning of our mental equipment. We exist at one point in s.p.a.ce and we are thinking, experiencing emotions at another point. It's as if our minds are--are broadcasting our thoughts and emotions far away from our physical selves. Either that, or our rationales were torn free and only our emotions are broadcast. Does that sound logical?"

"Yes," the Pat agreed, "I believe that is the answer."

I felt that the Pat was pleased with my theory, that it greatly admired my reasoning. I also perceived that it had no idea what I meant by the explanation. I did not mind.

"You said you were moving at great speed," I continued. "Can you remember the line, the direction you were traveling in?"

The Pat hesitated only a moment. "Yes. You perceive the star cl.u.s.ter there, the triangular one? My heading was in that direction, but it was changing fast."

"Then we could find nothing by traveling toward the triangular cl.u.s.ter?"

"No. I was moving in an arc in the direction of the distorted square cl.u.s.ter there. Do you see it?"

"Yes," I answered, knowing her use of the word see was unconscious. "That is Cetus."

"Cetus?" The Pat was startled. "How do you know that?"

"I don't know. The name came to me. It seemed right to call it that."

"It--it's all so frightening!"

I had no time for pampering our emotions, though I was at great peace with the Pat so near me. Time might prove vital. "Neither would it do any good to travel in the direction of Cetus," I said.

"No. No," the Pat communicated. "If there is any object of matter or force I was a part of in that other existence traveling through s.p.a.ce, it is in an arc. The best we can do is take an arbitrary direction between the triangular cl.u.s.ter and the one called Cetus and hope to intercept the object, the other part of me, whatever it is."

"Come with me," I ordered.

I discovered the object of ma.s.s hurtling through s.p.a.ce before the Pat did. It was symmetrical and metallic. I tore myself away from my companion and darted to meet it. I discovered it was a sh.e.l.l, a hollow thing, and I pa.s.sed inside. There was a room there. There were projections and circles of transparent matter. I experienced the symbol dials.

There were two other creatures seated close to the dials, things of matter, and their substance was protoplasm. But there was no rationale present in either of them. I examined the living matter of the smaller one swiftly. Organs seemed poised in a suspended state. The creature I observed, housed in a protective sh.e.l.l, seemed paralyzed or dead. I remembered the word dead.

Then the Pat was with me again. "I--I feel something, Marl. I am frightened. What are they, those things there?"

"They seem to be--" I stopped communicating.

The Pat had disappeared!

The thing of protoplasm nearest me was moving but I was no longer interested. I remember the Pat had touched the upper extremity of the creature and had vanished, had ceased to be.