The Year's Best Science Fiction 5 Page 6

  Gauck never drank, never went out, never received mail, never sent mail, never spoke a spontaneous word. He was rude, never kind, never friendly, never really withdrawn: He couldn’t withdraw any more than the constant withdrawal of all his life.

  Rogov had turned to his wife in the secrecy of their bedroom soon after Gausgofer and Gauck came and had said, “Anastasia, is that man sane?”

  Cherpas intertwined the fingers of her beautiful, expressive hands. She who had been the wit of a thousand scientific meetings was now at a loss for words. She looked up at her husband with a troubled expression. “I don’t know, comrade ... I just don’t know.”

  Rogov smiled his amused Slavic smile. “At the least then I don’t think Gausgofer knows either.”

  Cherpas snorted with laughter and picked up her hairbrush. “That she doesn’t. She really doesn’t know, does she? I’ll wager she doesn’t even know to whom he reports.”

  That conversation had reached into the past. Gauck, Gausgofer, bloodless eyes and the black eyes-they remained.

  Every dinner the four sat down together.

  Every morning the four met in the laboratory.

  Rogov’s great courage, high sanity, and keen humor kept the work going.

  Cherpas’s flashing genius fuelled him whenever the routine overloaded his magnificent intellect.

  Gausgofer spied and watched and smiled her bloodless smiles; sometimes, curiously enough, Gausgpfer made genuinely constructive suggestions. She never understood the whole frame of reference of their work, but she knew enough of the mechanical and engineering details to be very useful on occasion.

  Gauck came in, sat down quietly, said nothing, did nothing. He did not even smoke. He never fidgeted. He never went to sleep. He just watched.

  The laboratory grew and with it there grew the immense configuration of the espionage machine.

  In theory what Rogov had proposed and Cherpas seconded was imaginable. It consisted of an attempt to work out an integrated theory for all the electrical and radiation phenomena accompanying consciousness, and to duplicate the electrical functions of mind without the use of animal material.

  The range of potential products was immense.

  The first product Stalin had asked for was a receiver, if possible, one capable of tuning in the thoughts of a human mind and of translating those thoughts either into a punch tape machine, an adapted German Hellschreiber machine, or phonetic speech. If the grids could be turned around, the brain-equivalent machine as a transmitter might be able to send out stunning forces which would paralyze or kill the process of thought.

  At its best, Rogov’s machine was designed to confuse human thought over great distances, to select human targets to be confused, and to maintain an electronic jamming system which would jam straight into the human mind without the requirements of tubes or receivers.

  He had succeeded-in part. He had given himself a violent headache in the first year of work.

  In the third year he had killed mice at a distance of ten kilometers. In the seventh year he had brought on mass hallucinations and a wave of suicides in a neighboring village. It was this which impressed Khrushchev.

  Rogov was now working on the receiver end. No one had ever explored the infinitely narrow, infinitely subtle bands of radiation which distinguished one human mind from another, but Rogov was trying, as it were, to tune in on minds far away.

  He had tried to develop a telepathic helmet of some kind, but it did not work. He had then turned away from the reception of pure thought to the reception of visual and auditory images. Where the nerve-ends reached the brain itself, he had managed over the years to distinguish whole packets of microphenomena, and on some of these he had managed to get a fix.

  With infinitely delicate tuning he had succeeded one day in picking up the eyesight of their second chauffeur, and had managed, thanks to a needle thrust in just below his own right eyelid, to “see” through the other man’s eyes as the other man, all unaware, washed their Zis limousine sixteen hundred meters away.

  Cherpas had surpassed his feat later that winter, and had managed to bring in an entire family having dinner over in a near-by city. She had invited B. Gauck to have a needle inserted into his cheekbone so that be could see with the eyes of an unsuspecting spied-on stranger. Gauck had refused any kind of needles, but Gausgofer had joined in the experiment and had expressed her satisfaction with the work.

  The espionage machine was beginning to take form.

  Two more steps remained. The first step consisted of tuning in on some remote target, such as the White House in Washington or the NATO Headquarters outside Paris.

  The second problem consisted of finding a method of jamming those minds at a distance, stunning them so that the subject personnel fell into tears, confusion, or insanity.

  Rogov had tried, but he had never gotten more than thirty kilometers from the nameless village of Ya. Ch.

  One November there had been seventy cases of hysteria, most of them ending in suicide, down in the city of Kharkov several hundred kilometers away, but Rogov was not sure that his own machine was doing it.

  Comrade Gausgofer dared to stroke his sleeve. Her white lips smiled and her watery eyes grew happy as she said in her high, cruel voice, “You can do it, comrade. You can do it.”

  Cherpas looked on with contempt. Gauck said nothing.

  The female agent Gausgofer saw Cherpas’s eyes upon her, and for a moment an arc of living hatred leaped between the two women.

  The three of them went back to work on the machine.

  Gauck sat on his stool and watched them.

  It was the year in which Eristratov died that the machine made a breakthrough. Eristratov died after the Soviet and People’s democracies had tried to end the cold war with the Americans.

  It was May. Outside the laboratory the squirrels ran among the trees. The leftovers from the night’s rain dripped on the ground and kept the earth moist. It was comfortable to leave a few windows open and to let the smell of the forest into the workshop.

  The smell of their oil-burning heaters, the stale smell of insulation, of ozone, and of the heated electronic gear was something with which all of them were much too familiar.

  Rogov had found that his eyesight was beginning to suffer because he had to get the receiver needle somewhere near his optic nerve in order to obtain visual impressions from the machine. After months of experimentation with both animal and human subjects he had decided to copy one of their last experiments, successfully performed on a prisoner boy fifteen years of age, by having the needle slipped directly through the skull, up and behind the eye. Rogov had disliked using prisoners, because Gauck, speaking on behalf of security, always insisted that a prisoner used in experiments be destroyed in not less than five days from the beginning of the experiment. Rogov had satisfied himself that the skull-and-needle technique was safe, but he was very tired of trying to get frightened, unscientific people to carry the load of intense, scientific attentiveness required by the machine.

  Somewhat ill-humored, he shouted at Gauck, “Have you ever known what this is all about? You’ve been here years. Do you know what we’re trying to do? Don’t you ever want to take part in the experiments yourself? Do you realize how many yean of mathematics have gone into the making of these grids and the calculation of these wave patterns? Are you good for anything?”

  Gauck had said, tonelessly and without anger, “Comrade professor, I am obeying orders. You are obeying orders too. I’ve never impeded you.”

  Rogov raved, “I know you never got in my way. We’re all good servants of the Soviet State. It’s not a question of loyalty. It’s a question of enthusiasm. Don’t you ever want to glimpse the science we’re making? We are a hundred yean or a thousand yean ahead of the capitalist Americans. Doesn’t that excite you? Aren’t you a human being? Why don’t you take part? How will you understand me when I explain it?”

  Gauck said nothing; he looked at Rogov with his beady eyes. His dirty-g
ray face did not change expression. Cherpas said, “Go ahead, Nikolai. The comrade can follow if he wants to.”

  Gausgofer looked enviously at Cherpas. She seemed inclined to keep quiet, but then had to speak. She said, “Do go ahead, comrade professor.”

  Said Rogov, “Kharosho, I’ll do what I can. The machine is now ready to receive minds over immense distances.” He wrinkled his lip in amused scorn. “We may even spy into the brain of the chief rascal himself and find out what Eisenhower is planning to do today against the Soviet people. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our machine could stun

  him and leave him sitting addled at his desk?”

  Gauck commented, “Don’t try it. Not without orders.”

  Rogov ignored the interruption and went on. “First I receive. I don’t know what I will get, who I will get, or where they will be. All I know is that this machine will reach out across all the minds of men and beasts now living and it will bring the eyes and ears of a single mind directly into mine. With the new needle going directly into the brain it will be possible for me to get a very sharp fixation of position. The trouble with that boy last week was that even though we knew he was seeing something outside this room, he appeared to be getting sounds in a foreign language and did not know enough English or German to realize where or what the machine had taken him to see.”

  Cherpas laughed. “I’m not worried. I saw then it was safe. You go first, my husband. If our comrades don’t mind-?”

  Gauck nodded.

  Gausgofer lifted her bony hand breathlessly to her skinny throat and said, “Of course, Comrade Rogov, of course. You did all the work. You must be the first.”

  Rogov sat down.

  A white-smocked technician brought the machine over to him. It was mounted on three rubber-tired wheels and it resembled the small X-ray units used by dentists. In place of the cone at the head of the X-ray machine there was a long, incredibly tough needle. It had been made for them by the best surgical steel craftsmen in Prague.

  Another technician came up with a shaving bowl, a brush, and a straight razor. Under the gaze of Gauck’s deadly eyes he shaved an area of four square centimetres on the top of Rogov’s head.

  Cherpas herself then took over. She set her husband’s head in the clamp and used a micrometer to get the skull-fittings so tight and so accurate that the needle would push through the dura mater at exactly the right point.

  All this work she did deftly with kind, very strong fingers. She was gentle, but she was firm. She was his wife, but she was also his fellow scientist and his colleague in the Soviet State.

  She stepped back and looked at her work. She gave him one of their own very special smiles, the secret gay smiles which they usually exchanged with each other only when they were alone. “You won’t want to do this every day. We’re going to have to find some way of getting into the brain without using this needle. But it won’t hurt you.”

  ”Does it matter if it does hurt?” said Rogov. “This is the triumph of all our work. Bring it down.”

  Cherpas, her eyes gleaming with attention, reached over and pulled down the handle which brought the tough needle to within a tenth of a millimetre of the right place.

  Rogov spoke very carefully: “All I felt was a little sting. You can turn the power on now.”

  Gausgofer could not contain herself. Timidly she addressed Cherpas, “May I turn on the power?”

  Cherpas nodded. Gauck watched. Rogov waited. Gausgofer pulled down the bayonet switch.

  The power went on.

  With an impatient twist of her hand, Anastasia Cherpas ordered the laboratory attendants to the other end of the room. Two or three of them had stopped working and were staring at Rogov, staring like dull sheep. They looked embarrassed and then they huddled in a white-smocked herd at the other end of the laboratory.

  The wet May wind blew in on all of them. The scent of forest and leaves was about them.

  The three watched Rogov.

  Rogov’s complexion began to change. His face became flushed. His breathing was so loud and heavy they could hear it several meters away. Cherpas fell on her knees in front of him, eyebrows lifted in mute inquiry.

  Rogov did not dare nod, not with a needle on his brain. He spoke through flushed lips, speaking thickly and heavily, “Do-not-stop-now.”

  Rogov himself did not know what was happening. He had thought he might see an American room, or a Russian room, or a tropical colony. He might see palm trees, or forests, or desks. He might see guns or buildings, washrooms or beds, hospitals, homes, churches. He might see with the eyes of a child, a woman, a man, a soldier, a philosopher, a slave, a worker, a savage, a religious, a Communist, a reactionary, a governor, a policeman. He might hear voices; he might hear English, or French, or Russian, Swahili, Hindi, Malay, Chinese, Ukrainian, Armenian, Turkish, Greek. He did not know.

  None of these things had happened.

  It seemed to him that he had left the world, that he had left time. The hours and the centuries shrank up like the meters, and the machine, unchecked, reached out for the most powerful signal which any human mind had transmitted. Rogov did not know it, but the machine had conquered time.

  The machine had reached the dance, the human challenger and the dance festival of the year that might have been A.D. 13,582.

  Before Rogov’s eyes the golden shape and the golden steps shook and fluttered in a ritual a thousand times more compelling than hypnotism. The rhythms meant nothing and everything to him. This was Russia, this was Communism. This was his life-indeed it was his soul acted out before his very eyes.

  For a second, the last second of his ordinary life, he looked through flesh and blood eyes and saw the shabby woman whom he had once thought beautiful. He saw Anastasia Cherpas, and he did not care.

  His vision concentrated once again on the dancing image, this woman, those postures, that dance!

  Then the sound came in-music that would have made a Tschaikovsky weep, orchestras which would have /silenced Shostakovich or Khachaturian forever.

  The people-who-were-not-people between the stars had taught mankind many arts. Rogov’s mind was the best of its time, but his time was far, far behind the time of the great dance. With that one vision Rogov went firmly and completely mad.

  He became blind to the sight of Cherpas, Gausgofer, and Gauck. He forgot the village of Ya. Ch. He forgot himself.

  He was like a fish, bred in stale fresh water, which is thrown for the first time into a living stream. He was like an insect emerging from the chrysalis. His twentieth-century mind could not hold the imagery and the impact of the music and the dance.

  But the needle was there and the needle transmitted into his mind more than his mind could stand.

  The synapses of his brain flicked like switches. The future flooded into him.

  He fainted.

  Cherpas leaped forward and lifted the needle. Rogov fell out of the chair.

  It was Gauck who got the doctors. By nightfall they had Rogov resting comfortably and under heavy sedation. There were two doctors, both from the military headquarters. Gauck had obtained authorization for their services by a direct telephone call to Moscow.

  Both the doctors were annoyed. The senior one never stopped grumbling at Cherpas.

  ”You should not have done it, Comrade Cherpas. Comrade Rogov should not have done it either. You can’t go around sticking things into brains. That’s a medical problem. None of you people are doctors of medicine. It’s all right for you to contrive devices with the prisoners, but you can’t inflict things like this on Soviet scientific personnel. I’m going to get blamed because I can’t bring Rogov back. You heard what he was saying. All he did was mutter, ‘That golden shape on the golden steps, that music, that me is a true me, that golden shape, that golden shape, I want to be with that golden shape,’ and rubbish like that. Maybe you’ve ruined a first-class brain forever-” He stopped short as though he had said too much. After all, the problem was a security problem and apparently bot
h Gauck and Gausgofer represented the security agencies.

  Gausgofer turned her watery eyes on the doctor and said in a low, even, unbelievably poisonous voice, “Could they have done it, comrade doctor?”

  The doctor looked at Cherpas, answering Gausgofer, “How? You were there. I wasn’t. How could she have done it? Why should she do it? You were there.”

  Cherpas said nothing. Her lips were compressed tight with grief. Her yellow hair gleamed, but her hair was all that remained, at that moment, of her beauty. She was frightened and she was getting ready to be sad. She had no time to hate foolish women or to worry about security, she was concerned with her colleague, her lover, her husband Rogov.

  There was nothing much for them to do except to wait. They went into a large room and waited.

  The servants had laid out immense dishes of cold sliced meat, pots of caviar, and an assortment of sliced breads, pure butter, genuine coffee, and liquors.

  None of them ate much. At 9:15 the sound of rotors beat against the house. The big helicopter bad arrived from Moscow.

  Higher authorities took over.

  The higher authority was a deputy minister, a man named V. Karper.

  Karper was accompanied by two or three uniformed colonels, by an engineer civilian, by a man from the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by two doctors.

  They dispensed with the courtesies. Karper merely said, “You are Cherpas. I have met you. You are Gausgofer. I have seen your reports. You are Gauck.”

  The delegation went into Rogov’s bedroom. Karper snapped, “Wake him.” The military doctor who had given him sedatives said, comrade, you mustn’t-”

  Karper cut him off. “Shut up.” He turned to his own physician, pointed at Rogov. “Wake him up.”

  The doctor from Moscow talked briefly with the senior military doctor. He too began shaking his head. He gave Karper a disturbed look. Karper guessed what he might bear. He said, “Go ahead. I know there is some danger to the patient, but I’ve got to get back to Moscow with a report.”