A. E. van Vogt - Supermind.pdf - A. E. Van Vogt - borsukomiks

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Supermind

by A.E.Van Vogt

Version 1.0

Prologue

Take a sentient being—

Even Steve Hanardy could fit that description. He was a

short, stocky man, with the look about him of someone who

had lived too close to the animal stage. His eyes were per-

petually narrowed, as if he were peering against a bright

light. His face was broad and fleshy. But he was human. He

could think and act, and he was a giver and not a taker.

—Put this sentient person in a solar system surrounded by

a two billion light-year ocean of virtual nothingness beyond

which, apparently, is more nothingness—

Hanardy, a product of the Earth's migration to the moon

and to the planets of the solar system, was born on Europa,

one of the moons of Jupiter, before the educational system

caught up to the colonists. He grew up an incoherent roust-

about and a spacehand on the freighters and passenger liners

that sped about among the immense amount of debris—

from moons to habitable meteorites—that surrounded the

massive Jupiter. It was a rich and ever-growing trade area,

and so presently even the stolid, unimaginative Hanardy had

a freighter of his own. Almost from the beginning, his most

fruitful journeys were occasional trips to the meteorite where

a scientist, Professor Ungarn, lived with his daughter, Patri-

cia. For years, it was a lucrative, routine voyage, without in-

cident.

—Confront this sentient individual with the enigma of

being—

Indecision was dark in the man's thoughts as he walked

across the spaceship control room to the cot where the

woman lay so taut and so still. He bent over her. He said in

his deep voice:

"We're slowing down, Merla."

No answer, no movement, not a quiver in her delicate,

abnormally blanched cheeks. Her fine nostrils dilated ever so

slightly with each measured breath. That was all.

The Dreegh lifted her arm, then let it go. It dropped to her

lap like a piece of lifeless wood and her body remained rigid

and unnatural. Carefully, he put his fingers to one eye, raised

the lid, peered into it. It stared back at him, a clouded, sight-

less blue. He straightened. As he stood there in the silence of

the hurtling ship, he seemed the embodiment of grim, icy

calculation. He thought grayly: "If I revived her now, she'd

have more time to attack me, and more strength. If I

waited, she'd be weaker."

Slowly, he relaxed. Some of the weariness of the years he

and this woman had spent together in the dark vastness of

space came to shatter his abnormal logic. Bleak sympathy

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touched him, and he made his decision. He prepared an in-

jection, and fed it into her arm. His gray eyes held a steely

brightness as he put his lips near the woman's ear. In a

ringing resonant voice he said, "We're near a star system.

There'll be blood, Merla! And life!"

The woman stirred. Momentarily, she seemed like a gold-

en-haired doll come alive. No color touched her perfectly

formed cheeks, but her eyes grew alert. She stared up at him

with a hardening hostility, half questioning.

"I've been chemical," she said. Abruptly, she was no long-

er doll-like. Her gaze tightened on him, and some of the pret-

tiness vanished from her face. She said, "It's damned funny,

Jeel, that you're still O.K. If I thought—"

He was cold, watchful. "Forget it," he said curtly. "You're

an energy waster, and you know it. Anyway, we're going to

land."

The flamelike tenseness of her faded. She sat up painfully,

but there was a thoughtful look on her face as she said, "I'm

interested in the risks. This is not a Galactic planet, is it?"

"There are no Galactics out here. But there is an Observer.

I've been catching the secret ultra signals for the last two

hours"—a sardonic note entered his voice—"warning all

ships to stay clear because the system isn't ready for any kind

of contact with Galactic planets."

Some of the diabolic glee that was in his thoughts must

have communicated through his tone. The woman stared at

him, and slowly her eyes widened. She half whispered, "You

mean—"

He shrugged. "The signals ought to be registering full

blast now. We'll see what degree system this is. But you can

start hoping hard right now."

At the control board, he cautiously manipulated the room

into darkness and set the automatics. A picture took form on

a screen on the opposite wall. At first there was only a point

of light in the middle of a starry sky, then a planet floating

brightly in the dark space, continents and oceans plainly

visible. A voice came out of the screen:

"This star system contains one inhabited planet, the third

from the Sun, called Earth by its dominant race. It was

colonized by Galactics about seven thousand years ago in the

usual manner. It is now in the third degree of development,

having attained a limited form of space travel little more

than a hundred years ago."

With a swift movement, the man cut off the picture and

turned on the light, then looked across at the woman tri-

umphantly. "Third degree!" he said softly, and there was an

almost incredulous note in his voice. "Only third degree.

Merla, do you realize what this means? This is the oppor-

tunity of the ages. I'm going to call the Dreegh tribe. If we

can't get away with several tankers of blood and a whole

battery of 'life,' we don't deserve to be immortal."

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He turned toward the communicator; and for that exultant

moment caution was dun in the back of his mind. From the

comer of his eye, he saw the woman leap from the edge of

the cot. Too late, he twisted aside. The movement saved

him only partially. It was their cheeks not their lips that met.

Blue flame flashed from him to her. The burning energy

seared his cheek to instant, bleeding rawness. He half fell to

the floor. And then, furious with the intense agony, he fought

free. "I'll break your bones!" he raged.

Her laughter, unlovely with her own suppressed fury, floated

up at him from the floor where he had flung her. She said,

"So you did have a secret supply of 'life' for yourself. You

damned double-crosser!"

His mortification yielded to the realization that anger was

useless. Tense with the weakness that was already a weight

on his muscles, he whirled toward the control board, and

began feverishly to make the adjustments that would pull the

ship back into normal space and time.

The body urge grew in him swiftly, a dark, remorseless

need. Twice, he reeled to the cot in a fit of nausea. But each

time he fought back to the control board. He sat there finally

at the controls, head drooping, conscious of the numbing

tautness that crept deeper, deeper. He drove the ship too fast.

It turned a blazing white when at last it struck the atmo-

sphere of the third planet. But those hard metals held their

shape; and the terrible speeds yielded to the fury of the

reversers and to the pressure of air that thickened with every

mile.

It was the woman who helped his faltering form into the

tiny lifeboat. He lay there, gathering strength, staring

eagerly down at the blazing sea of lights that was the first

city he had seen on the night side of this strange world.

Dully, he watched as the woman eased the small ship into the

darkness behind a shed in a little back alley. And, because

succor seemed suddenly near, he was able to walk beside her

to the dimly lighted residential street near by.

He would have walked on blankly into the street, but the

woman's fingers held him back into the shadows of the alley.

"Are you mad?" she whispered. "Lie down. We'll stay here

until someone comes."

The concrete was hard beneath his body, but after a mo-

ment of the painful rest it brought, he felt a fault surge of

energy, and he was able to voice his bitter thought. "If you

hadn't stolen most of my carefully saved 'life,' we wouldn't

be in this desperate position. You well know that it's more

important that I remain at full power."

In the dark beside him, the woman lay quiet for a while.

Then her defiant whisper came. "We both need a change

of blood, and a new charge of 'life.' Perhaps I did take a

little too much out of you, but that was because I had to

steal it. You wouldn't have given it to me of your own free

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will, and you know it."

For a time, the futility of argument held him silent, but

as the minutes dragged, that dreadful physical urgency once

more tainted his thought. He said heavily:

"You realize, of course, that we've revealed our presence.

We should have waited for the others to come. There's no

doubt at all that our ship was spotted by the Galactic Ob-

server in this system before we reached the outer planets.

They'll have tracers on us wherever we go, and no matter

where we bury our machine, they'll know its exact location.

It's impossible to hide the interstellar drive energies; and

since they wouldn't make the mistake of bringing such

energies to a third-degree planet, we can't hope to locate

them in that fashion. But we must expect an attack of some

kind. I only hope one of the great Galactics doesn't take part

in it."

"One of them!" Her whisper was a gasp. She controlled her-

self, and snapped irritably, "Don't try to scare me. You've

told me time and again that—"

"All right, all right!" He spoke grudgingly, wearily.

"Time has proved that they consider us beneath their

personal attention. And"—in spite of his appalling weakness,

scorn came—"let any of the kind of agents they have in

these lower category planets try to stop us."

"Hush!" Her whisper was tense. "Footsteps! Quick, get to

your feet!"

He was aware of the shadowed form of her rising. Then

her hands were tugging at him. Dizzily, he stood up.

"I don't think," he began wanly, "that I can—"

"Jeel!" Her whisper beat at him; her hands shook him. "It's

a man and a woman. They're 'life,' Jeel, 'life!'"

Life!

He straightened. A spark of the unquenchable will to live

that had brought him across the black miles and the blacker

years burst into flame inside him. Lightly, swiftly, he fell into

step beside Merla, and strode into the open. He saw the

shapes of the man and the woman. In the half-night under

the trees of that street, the couple came towards them, draw-

ing aside to let them pass. First the woman came, then the

man—and it was as simple as if all his strength had been

there in his muscles.

He saw Merla launch herself at the man; and then he was

grabbing the woman, his head bending instantly for that

abnormal kiss.

Afterwards—after they had taken the blood, too—grim-

ness came to the man, a hard fabric of thought and counter-

thought, that slowly formed into purpose. He said, "We'll

leave the bodies here."

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Her startled whisper rose in objection, but he cut her short,

harshly. "Let me handle this. These dead bodies will draw to

this city news gatherers, news reporters, or whatever their

breed are called on this planet. And we need such a person

now. Somewhere in the reservoir of facts possessed by a per-

son of this type must be clues, meaningless to him but by

which we can discover the secret base of the Galactic Ob-

server in this system. We must find that base, discover its

strength, and destroy it if necessary when the tribe comes."

His voice took on a steely note. "And now, we've got to

explore this city, find a much frequented building under which

we can bury our ship, learn the language, replenish our own

vital supplies, and capture that reporter.

"After I'm through with him"—his tone became silken-

smooth—"he will undoubtedly provide you with that physical

diversion which you apparently crave when you have been

particularly chemical."

He laughed gently, as her fingers gripped his arm in the

darkness, a convulsive gesture. She said, "Thank you, Jeel.

You do understand, don't you?"

BEGIN I.Q. REHABILITATION

Behind Leigh, a door opened. Instantly the clatter of voices

in the room faded to a murmur. He turned alertly, tossing

his cigarette onto the marble floor and stepping on it, all in

one motion.

Overhead, the lights brightened to daylight intensity. In

that blaze he saw what the other eyes were already staring

at: the two bodies, the man's and the woman's, as they were

wheeled in. The dead couple lay side by side on the flat,

gleaming top of the carrier. Their bodies were rigid, their

eyes closed. They looked as dead as they were, and not at all,

Leigh thought, as if they were sleeping.

He caught himself making a mental note of that fact,

and felt shocked at himself. The first murders on the North

American continent in twenty-seven years. And it was only

another job. He was tougher than he'd ever believed.

Around him, the voices had stopped. The only sound was

the hoarse breathing of the man nearest him, the scrape

of his own shoes as he went forward. His movement acted

like a signal on that tense group of men. There was a general

pressing forward. Leigh had a moment of anxiety. And

then his bigger, harder muscles brought him where he wanted

to be, opposite the two heads. He leaned forward, absorbed.

His fingers probed gingerly where the incisions showed on

the neck of the woman. He did not look up at the attendant

as he said softly:

"This is where the blood was drained?"

"Yes."

Before he could speak again, another reporter interjected,

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