Pebble In The Sky

16. Choose Your Side!

For the moment Schwartz was resting uneasily on a hard bench in one of the small sub-basement rooms of the Chica "Hall of Correction."

The Hall, as it was commonly termed, was the great token of the local power of the High Minister and those surrounding him. It lifted its gloominess in a rocky, angular height that overshadowed the Imperial barracks beyond it, just as its shadow clutched at the Terrestrial malefactor far more than did the unexerted authority of the Empire.

Within its walls many an Earthman in past centuries had waited for the judgment that came to one who falsified or evaded the quotas of production, who lived past his time, or connived at another's such crime, or who was guilty of attempting subversion of the local government. Occasionally, when the petty prejudices of Terrestrial justice made particularly little sense to the sophisticated and usually blasй Imperial government of the time, a conviction might be set aside by the Procurator, but this meant insurrection, or, at the very least, wild riots.

Ordinarily, where the Council demanded death, the Procurator yielded. After all. it was only Earthmen who suffered- Of all this, Joseph Schwartz, very naturally, knew nothing. To him, immediate optical awareness consisted of a small room, its walls transfused with but a dim light, its furniture consisting of two hard benches and a table, plus a small recess in the wall that served as washroom and sanitary convenience combined. There was no window for a glimpse of sky, and the drift of air into the room through the ventilating shaft was feeble.

He rubbed the hair that circled his bald spot and sat up ruefully. His attempt to escape to nowhere (for where on Earth was he safe?) had been short, not sweet, and had ended here.

At least there was the Mind Touch to play with.

But was that bad or good?

At the farm it had been a queer, disturbing gift, the nature of which he did not know, the possibilities of which he did not think of. Now it was a flexible gift to be investigated.

With nothing to do for twenty-four hours but brood on imprisonment, he could have been courting madness. As it was, he could Touch the jailers as they passed, reach out for guardsmen in the adjacent corridors, extend the furthest fibrils of his mind even to the Captain of the Hall in his distant office.

He turned the minds over delicately and probed them. They fell apart like so many walnuts-dry husks out of which emotions and notions fell in a sibilant rain.

He learned much in the process of Earth and Empire-more than he had, or could have, in all two months on the farm.

Of course one of the items that he learned, over and over again, beyond any chance of mistaking, was just this:

He was condemned to death!

There was no escape, no doubt, no reservation.

It might be today; it might be tomorrow. But he would diet

Somehow it sank in and he accepted it almost gratefully.

The door opened, and he was on his feet, in tense fear. One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason. This was it!

No-it wasn't. The entering Mind Touch held nothing of death in it. It was a guard with a metal rod held ready in his hand. Schwartz knew what it was.

"Come with me," he said sharply.

Schwartz followed him, speculating on this odd power of his. Long before his guard could use his weapon, long before he could possibly know he should, he could be struck down without a sound, without a giveaway moment. His Mind was in Schwartz's mental hands. A slight squeeze and it would be over.

But why? There would be others. How many could he handle at once? How many pairs of hands were in his mind?

He followed, docilely.

It was a large, large room that he was brought into. Two men and a girl occupied it, stretched out corpsewise on high, high benches. Yet not corpses-since three active minds were much in evidence.

Paralyzed! Familiar?…Were they familiar?

He was stopping to look, but the guard's hard hand was on his shoulder. "Get on."

There was a fourth slab, empty. There was no death in the guard's mind, so Schwartz climbed on. He knew what was coming.

The guard's steely rod touched each of his limbs. They tingled and left him, so that he was nothing but a head, floating on nothingness.

He turned it.

"Pola," he cried. "You're Pola, aren't you? The girl who-"

She was nodding. He hadn't recognized her Touch as such. He had never been aware of it that time two months ago. At that time his mental progression had reached only the stage of sensitivity to "atmosphere." In the brilliance of hindsight, he remembered that well.

But from the contents he could still learn much. The one past the girl was Dr. Shekt; the one furthest of all was Dr. Bel Arvardan. He could filch their names, sense their despair, taste the last dregs of horror and fright in the young girl's mind.

For a moment he pitied them, and then he remembered who they were and what they were. And he hardened his heart.

Let them die!

The other three had been there for the better part of an hour. The room in which they were left was evidently one used for assemblies of several hundred. The prisoners were lost and lonely in its size. Nor was there anything to say. Arvardan's throat bummed dryly and he turned his head from side to side with a futile restlessness. It was the only part of his body that he could move.

Shekt's eyes were closed and his lips were colorless and pinched.

Arvardan whispered fiercely, "Shekt. Shekt, I say!"

"What?…What?" A feeble whisper at best.

"What are you doing? Going to sleep? Think, man, think!"

"Why? What is there to think of?"

"Who is this Joseph Schwartz?"

Pola's voice sounded, thin and weary. "Don't you remember, Bel? That time in the department store, when I first met you-so long ago?"

Arvardan wrenched wildly and found he could lift his head two aching inches. A bit of Pola's face was just visible.

"Pola! Pola!" If he could have moved toward her-as for two months he might have and hadn't. She was looking at him, smiling so wanly that it might be a statue's smile, and he said, "We'll win out yet. You'll see."

But she was shaking her head-and his neck gave way, its tendons in panging agony.

"Shekt," he said again. "Listen to me. How did you meet this Schwartz? Why was he a patient of yours?"

"The Synapsifier. He came as a volunteer."

"And was treated?"

"Yes."

Arvardan revolved that in his mind. "What made him come to you?"

"I don't know."

"But then-Maybe he is an Imperial agent."

(Schwartz followed his thought well and smiled to himself. He said nothing, and he meant to keep on saying nothing.)

Shekt stirred his head. " An Imperial agent? You mean because the High Priest's Secretary says he is. Oh, nonsense. And what difference does it make? He's as helpless as we…Listen, Arvardan, maybe, if we tell some sort of concerted story, they might wait. Eventually we might-"

The archaeologist laughed hollowly, and his throat burned at the friction. "We might live, you mean. With the Galaxy dead and civilization in ruins? Live? I might as well die!"

"I'm thinking of Pola," muttered Shekt.

"I am too," said the other. "Ask her…Pola, shall we surrender? Shall we try to live?"

Pola's voice was firm. "I have chosen my side. I don't want to die, but if my side dies, I'll go with it."

Arvardan felt somehow triumphant. When he brought her to Sirius, they might call her an Earthgirl, but she was their equal, and he would, with a great and good pleasure, smash teeth into the throat of any- And he remembered that he wasn't likely to bring her to Sirius-to bring anyone to Sirius. There wasn't likely to be a Sirius.

Then, as though to escape from the thought, to escape anywhere, he shouted, "You! Whatchername! Schwartz!"

Schwartz raised his head for a moment and allowed a glance to ooze out toward the other. He still said nothing.

"Who are you?" demanded Arvardan. "How did you get mixed up in this? What's your part in it?"

And at the question, all the injustice of everything descended on Schwartz. All the harmlessness of his past, all the infinite horror of the present burst in upon him, so that he said in a fury, "1? How did I get mixed up in it? Listen. I was once a nobody. An honest man, a hard-working tailor. I hurt nobody, I bothered nobody, I took care, of my family. And then, for no reason, for no reason-I came here."

"To Chica?" asked Arvardan, who did not quite follow.

"No, not to Chica!" shouted Schwartz in wild derision. "I came to this whole mad world…Oh, what do I care if you believe me or not? My world is in the past. My world had land and food and two billion people, and it was the only world."

Arvardan fell silent before the verbal assault. He turned to Shekt. "Can you understand him?"

"Do you realize," said Shekt in feeble wonder, "that he has a vermiform appendix, which is three and a half inches long? Do you remember, Pola? And wisdom teeth. And hair on his face."

"Yes, yes," shouted Schwartz defiantly. '.And I wish I had a tail I could show you. I'm from the past. I traveled through time. Only I don't know how, and I don't know why. Now leave me alone." He added suddenly, "They will soon be here for us. This wait is just to break us."

Arvardan said suddenly, "Do you know that? Who told you?"

Schwartz did not answer.

"Was it the Secretary? Stocky man with a pug nose?" Schwartz had no way of telling the physical appearance of those he Touched only by mind, but-secretary? There had been just a glimpse of a Touch, a powerful one of a man of power, and it seemed he had been a secretary.

"Balkis?" he asked in curiosity.

"What?" said Arvardan, but Shekt interrupted, "That's the name of the Secretary."

"Oh-What did he say?"

"He didn't say anything," said Schwartz. "I know. It's death for an of us, and there's no way out."

Arvardan lowered his voice. "He's mad, wouldn't you say?"

"I wonder…His skull sutures, now. They were primitive, very primitive."

Arvardan was amazed. "You mean-Oh, come, it's impossible."

"I've always supposed so." For the moment Shekt's voice was a feeble imitation of normality, as though the presence of a scientific problem had switched his mind to that detached and objective groove in which personal matters disappeared. "They've calculated the energy required to displace matter along the time axis and a value greater than infinity was arrived at, so the project has always been looked upon as impossible. But others have talked of the possibility of 'time faults,' analogous to geological faults, you know. Space ships have disappeared, for one thing, almost in fun view. There's the famous case of Hor Devallow in ancient times, who stepped into his house one day and never came out, and wasn't inside, either…And then there's the planet, which you'll find in the Galactography books of the last century, which was visited by three expeditions that brought back fun descriptions-and then was never seen again.

"Then there are certain developments in nuclear chemistry that seem to deny the law of conservation of mass-energy. They've tried to explain that by postulating the escape of some mass along the time axis. Uranium nuclei, for instance, when mixed with copper and barium in minute but definite proportions, under the influence of light gamma irradiation, set up a resonating system-"

"Father," said Pola, "don't! There's no use-"

But Arvardan's interruption was peremptory. "Wait, now. Let me think. I'm the one who can settle this. Who better? Let me ask him a few questions…Look, Schwartz."

Schwartz looked up again.

"Yours was the only world in the Galaxy?"

Schwartz nodded, then said dully, "Yes."

"But you only thought that. I mean you didn't have space travel, so you couldn't check up. There might have been many other inhabited worlds."

"I have no way of telling that."

"Yes, of course. A pity. What about atomic power?"

"We had an atomic bomb. Uranium-and plutonium-I guess that's what made this world radioactive. There must have been another war after all-after I left…Atomic bombs." Somehow Schwartz was back in Chicago, back in his old world, before the bombs. And he wits sorry. Not for himself, but for that beautiful world…

But Arvardan was muttering to himself. Then, " All right. You had a language, of course."

"Earth? Lots of them."

"How about you?"

"English-after I was a grown man."

"Well, say something in it."

For two months or more Schwartz had said nothing in English. But now, with lovingness, he said slowly, "I want to go home and be with my own people."

Arvardan spoke to Shekt. "18 that the language he used when he was Synapsified, Shekt?"

"I can't tell," said Shekt, in mystification. "Queer sounds then and queer sounds now. How can I relate them?"

"Well, never mind…What's your word for 'mother' in your language, Schwartz?"

Schwartz told him.

"Uh-huh. How about 'father'… 'brother'…'one'-the numeral, that is…'two'…'three'…'house'…'man'…'wife'…"

This went on and on, and when Arvardan paused for breath his expression was one of awed bewilderment.

"Shekt," he said, "either this man is genuine or I'm the victim of as wild a nightmare as can be conceived. He's speaking a language practically equivalent to the inscriptions found in the fifty-thousand-year-old strata on Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, and twenty others. He speaks it. The language has only been deciphered in the last generation, and there aren't a dozen men in the Galaxy besides myself who can understand it."

"Are you sure of this?"

"Am I sure? Of course I'm sure. I'm an archaeologist. It's my business to know."

For an instant Schwartz felt his armor of aloofness cracking. For the first time he felt himself regaining the individuality he had lost. The secret was out; he was a man from the past, and they accepted it. It proved him sane, stilled forever that haunting doubt, and he was grateful. And yet he held aloof.

"I've got to have him." It was Arvardan again, burning in the holy flame of his profession. "Shekt, you have no idea what this means to archaeology. Shekt-it's a man from the past. Oh, Great Space!…Listen, we can make a deal. This is the proof Earth is looking for. They can have him. They can-"

Schwartz interrupted sardonically. "I know what you're thinking. You think that Earth will prove itself to be the source of civilization through me and that they will be grateful for it. I tell you, no! I've thought of it and I would have bartered for my own life. But they won't believe me-or you."

"There's absolute proof."

"They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions."

"Bel," said Pola, "I think he's right."

Arvardan ground his teeth. "We could try."

"We would fail," insisted Schwartz.

"How can you know?"

"I know!" And the words fell with such oracular insistence that Arvardan was silent before them.

It was Shekt who was looking at him now with a strange light in his tired eyes.

He asked softly, "Have you felt any bad effects as a result of the Synapsifier?"

Schwartz didn't know the word but caught the meaning. They had operated, and on his mind. How much he was learning!

He said, "No bad effects."

"But I see you learned our language rapidly. You speak it very well. In fact, you might be a native. Doesn't it surprise you?"

"I always had a very good memory," was the cold response.

"And so you feel no different now than before you were treated?"

"That's right."

Dr. Shekt's eyes were hard now, and he said, "Why do you bother? You know that I'm certain you know what I'm thinking."

Schwartz laughed shortly. "That I can read minds? Well. what of it?"

But Shekt had dropped him. He had turned his white, helpless face to Arvardan. "He can sense minds, Arvardan. How much I could do with him. And to be here-to be helpless…"

"What-what-what-" Arvardan popped wildly.

And even Pola's face somehow gained interest. "Can you really?" she asked Schwartz.

He nodded at her. She had taken care of him. and now they would kill her. Yet she was a traitor.

Shekt was saying, " Arvardan, you remember the bacteriologist I told you about, the one who died as a result of the effects of the Synapsifier? One of the first symptoms of mental breakdown was his claim that he could read minds. And he could. I found that out before he died, and it's been my secret. I've told no one-but it's possible, Arvardan, it's possible. You see, with the lowering of brain-cell resistance, the brain may be able to pick up the magnetic fields induced by the microcurrents of other's thoughts and reconvert it into similar vibrations in itself. It's the same principle as that of any ordinary recorder. It would be telepathy in every sense of the word-"

Schwartz maintained a stubborn and hostile silence as Arvardan turned slowly in his direction. "If this is so, Shekt, we might be able to use him." The archaeologist's mind was spinning wildly, working out impossibilities. "There may be a way out now. There must be a way out. For us and the Galaxy."

But Schwartz was cold to the tumult in the Mind Touch he sensed so clearly. He said, "You mean by my reading their minds? How would that help? Of course I can do more than read minds. How's that, for instance?"

It was a light push, but Arvardan yelped at the sudden pain of it..

"I did that," said Schwartz. "Want more?"

Arvardan gasped, "You can do that to the guards? To the Secretary? Why did you let them bring you here? Great Galaxy, Shekt, there'll be no trouble. Now, listen, Schwartz-"

"No," said Schwartz, "you listen. Why do I want to get out? Where will I be? Still on this dead world. I want to go home, and I can't go home. I want my people and my world, and I can't have them. And I want to die."

"But it's a question of all the Galaxy, Schwartz. You can't think of yourself."

"Can't I? Why not? Must I worry about your Galaxy now? I hope your Galaxy rots and dies. I know what Earth is planning to do, and I am glad. The young lady said before she had chosen her side. Well, I've chosen my side, and my side is Earth."

"What?"

"Why not? I'm an Earthman!"