George O. Smith

“ You are a prisoner of a culture that is inimical to your own. You are kept alive as a museum piece, a sample of life that refuses to be swayed by your mind-directing machinery. Of all the people of your race, you are the only one that knows and believes.
"Death—or worse—awaits you and yours at the end of some unknown time. You are in the position of being the only one that can do anything at all. Tell me, Rhinegallis, would you sit quietly and accept it?"
"Since I would be unable to do anything alone," replied Rhinegallis, "I would accept fate."
"Then die!" snapped Carroll. "Do nothing? ”

“ Rhinegallis stood up and faced Carroll. "You are quite a man," she said earnestly. "And though we must—use you—we still admire you."
"One might admire the tenacity and ability of a pet dog who is working its way through a maze toward a hunk of steak," he said quietly. "Yet one does not consider the dog our equal."
Rhinegallis shook her head. "Would it please you to know that you are a threat to us?"
"I've known that," he returned quickly. "And so is a dog a threat to man. Dogs can kill. They do not because they know that they are dependent for life upon becoming man's friend." ”

“ The judge asked Carroll, "You have a reason for believing all this?"
"I know why. The alien culture wants to conquer the universe. Because we are very close to them in scientific achievement they have cause to fear us.
"The Lawson Radiation is the spilled energy from their interstellar ships and possession of this secret will permit Terra—or any other system—to fight them on their own terms, even to beat them back to their own system. Therefore they are suppressing all research by clever misdirection."
"I see. You seem to have an answer to every angle," mused the judge. ”

“ Whatever was being done to eliminate Terra as a threat to the aliens' ideas of aggrandizement was being done because James Forrest Carroll had been instrumental in uncovering their schemes. Had he remained in ignorance there would have been no reason for their latest plan—conquest for aggrandizement does not include extermination.
To exterminate an enemy spells economic failure. There is little glory in being the Lord of All when All consists of burned planets, dead cultures and the hollow grinning skulls of a billion billion intelligences. ”

“ Carroll smiled tolerantly. "Light has energy and energy has mass," he said. "Ergo light has mass. Masses attract one another according to the Newtonian Law of Gravitation. Ergo light is bent by passing close to a mass."
"I see," said Pollard leaping to the right conclusion. "Then light radiated from a very distant galaxy may pass close enough to a dark mass—with Terra, the mass and the galaxy in line—to have the distant galaxy focus itself here?"
"Yes," replied Carroll. "The mass acts as a biconvex lens because it bends all tangential light toward the center as the beam passes." ”

“ So go ahead, Rhinegallis, treat me as a child—and tell me, Rhinegallis, why I must not play with the Lawson Radiation."
"It is dangerous," she replied.
"In my lifetime," he said, "I have been responsible for the direction of many children. I have yet to turn away a curious—honestly curious—child. Mankind is always curious—providing we know why."
"It is dangerous," she repeated.
"Dangerous," he echoed. "Dangerous, Rhinegallis, to whom? You?"
"Mr. Carroll," she said quietly, "you think you have trapped me into an admission. You have not. ”

“ Yet it may be quite true that a clever paranoid might question his own sanity regularly as a means of proving to himself that he is sane. Carroll played with this mad spiral often and found it a vicious circle.
So in between his sessions of study, James Forrest Carroll tried to delve into his own mind. He had come to only one conclusion: That so long as Kingallis was studying him, he was able also to study Kingallis.
The problem of why bothered Carroll.
Mankind has never ceased to study anything that might prove dangerous. Almost any discovery made is dangerous in some manner. ”

“ A mere human, he felt ignorant, helpless, blind against the sheer disinterest that emanated from Carroll's blacked-out intelligence. Not so much for the problem of the Lawson Radiation would Pollard like to bring James Carroll back to himself as for the benefit of the man—and mankind—for Carroll had been a definite asset. ”

“ So one of them creased your arm and you reacted as though it were the burn your mind believed it to be.
"We've been through all this before. It's just cause and effect and result. This time it is only the latter that counts. You've destroyed the menace that drove you insane."
"Look," said Carroll, "I've been through it."
"And nothing you've turned up with can be construed as any evidence beyond the manufacture of your own mind. And nothing that you will ever find—"
Carroll nodded angrily. ”

“ You see, the living hookup produces a double flow of information—which is what I meant to tell you. You are studying me as I am studying you—and, as in the case of an infant with erroneous information, you are placing errata in the teacher's mind."
"All children know—from their limited visible evidence—that the earth is flat. Only deep study proves otherwise. I can see where a continued youthful insistence upon a flat earth might cause a bit of mental collision in any teacher's mind." Carroll's voice was sharp.
"You have the point exactly," smiled Kingallis. ”

“ Carroll undoubtedly discovered something that his mind refuses to recognize. Therefore this hallucination of the inimical race that is barring Terra from progress.
"What Terra needs more than the man himself is to know what Carroll discovered. I don't know what he's doing nor where he's doing it, but we'll find out—and we'll let him alone."
"Sort of futile, isn't it?" asked Majors.
"It's soul-scarringly futile," said Pollard hopelessly. "He will resent any outside help that does not eagerly agree with him—and then suspect it of chiding tolerance. He can come back only of his own machination. ”

“ Kingallis smiled tolerantly. "You wouldn't expect me to tell you?"
Carroll shrugged. "I suppose not," he said. "But just why do you think I am a basic threat to your plans?"
"Obvious. Of all, you are the first that ever came back to full control of his faculties after we erased your mind. The others have pain syndromes every time they consider research at all. You do not.
"Not only that, you were capable of avoiding the block. We used mass hypnosis on the people within a visible radius of that corner. Of them all, you alone can see the black sedan and the resulting interception." ”

“ Now tell me what might drive a man into instability?"
"You tell us," laughed Majors shortly. His laugh was not genuine for he felt the loss of Carroll deeply.
"Is there any insoluble dilemma in this at all?"
"Not that we know of."
Pollard nodded. "People are always confronted with insoluble dilemmas of one sort or another, but most of them could be avoided entirely by a slight change in personal attitude. The man who cannot get a job because of inexperience, and can get no experience for lack of job is in an insoluble dilemma. ”

“ And the words of Kingallis returned to him. "You won't live long enough!" the alien had said. "The universe isn't big enough for both of us!"
The rats had deserted the doomed ship!
It was so pat—so perfect! Now they would say that there never had been any aliens. At every turn Carroll was blocked and stopped and frustrated. How long the aliens had been guarding Terra he did not know. Perhaps about the time that the Lawson Radiation was discovered, or perhaps even before.
No matter how good they were at intercepting things, the aliens could not keep some things from leaking out. ”

“ There have been many cases in the world of history when one man alone stood against the world and was right.
Let them scoff.
Yet Carroll felt the full impact of helpless frustration. He was pitted against an alien culture capable of scientific marvels such as the teleport and interstellar travel and other things. They were capable of destroying the solar system while the only man who stood against them was incapable even of discovering how they intended to do it. ”

“ Rhine nodded. "If celestial bodies can travel faster than light," she said, "it stands to reason that some form of energy can travel faster than light also. After all, matter is one form of energy."
Carroll smiled quietly. "This is negative matter," he said. "And so far as I have been able to calculate, the only thing that can avoid the Einstein increase in mass with increase in energy would be some object having negative mass. But negative mass is as meaningless a term as negative energy." ”

“ There was, however, the whole matrix of mental gadgets, hypnotic beams, educators and other gewgaws of the alien culture. The old thought patterns could easily be erased and replaced by a new system. That would—despite theological arguments to the contrary—result in a new person. For all beings are what their experiences and their training makes them.
A sentience produced in a humanoid body on a remote planet and mentally hurled into a human brain will change the human to an alien in thought and deed—but capable of living as a human! ”

“ How can you believe that this danger really exists?"
"The danger is what drove him mad."
"And made him believe that Rita and I are aliens?"
"Merely manifestations of the hallucination."
Kingston Galloway growled in his throat. "I ought to kill you," he snarled. "Not only have you left my sister unprotected, but you've condoned her kidnaping and now you sit there and tell me that the fate of the world lies in the mind of a lunatic."
Pollard smiled. "There have been many historic times when civilization was nearly torn down by a madman. ”

“ The latter reason was both logical and also a perfect answer to a paranoid question.
He shied away from it, and recognized his own unwillingness to face the fact. That in itself bothered Carroll because he disliked to think himself insane, even though he often questioned his sanity.
Carroll found that none of this was reassuring. There was no equitable yardstick that the mind could apply to itself. It is often said that the insane cannot question their own sanity—that to question your own sanity is a sign of stability. ”

“ Taking any science as a parallel, civilization makes its discoveries as it is ready for them. The discovery of radio would have been impossible before the knowledge of electricity. Nuclear physics would have been impossible without a working knowledge of simple chemistry.
Each science stood upon the shoulders of the other. Electronics aided astronomy, mechanics aided electronics and chemistry aided mechanics. Physics gave men more information about chemistry and chemistry was a foundation stone for electronics.
How long that had been here Carroll did not care. ”

“ There was little to be gained but open ridicule to be forced to admit to this woman that he, James Forrest Carroll, reputed to be one of the Solar System's foremost physicists, was in a position seldom if ever occupied by any human being. ”

“ Pollard nodded. "It has been the opinion of the men at the Lawson Laboratory that all of these men have discovered something that has driven them into amnesia. Amnesia, you understand, is the mind's withdrawal from a distasteful reality.
"Of all of them, however, Carroll is the only one who has shown a sign of recovery from a state of complete amnesia pertaining to his work. Carroll returned with an hallucination of a strange alien culture at work to suppress any research." ”

“ It is our job to prevent the spread of knowledge about the Lawson Radiation, to discourage research and to cause the importance of the Radiation to diminish.
"We employ mass hypnotism to intercept the reports, to read them, to make the minor changes that prevent correlation of certain data that would lead to some discovery of importance. This happens only once in a few months.
"We can tell by the title of the experiment whether it may or may not include a clue. When someone comes upon a real find we erase his mind." ”

“ But you do have respect."
"What manner of respect can you possibly have for me?" he said with an open sneer.
"You are a strong man," replied Rhinegallis. "Your strength is sufficient to penetrate the mental beam. To defy King's attempts to study you, bar my tries at following your reason. Kingallis can point the remote hypnosis beam at me and from it can read my innermost thought.
"Against all resistance the hypnoscope is best—except against James Forrest Carroll. You, Carroll, resent this studying and prying. ”

“ Using his knowledge of the alien tongue and coupling it to many of the so-called "harmless" records he had been permitted to toy with, Carroll found his work much simpler. There was that business of the circlet of wire mounted on the cylindrical podium in which vibrated a crystal.
He had a whole measure of that science, most of which, he admitted, was ridiculous, and meaningless to any Terran physicist unless he had the key to the art. A complete volume on electronic techniques would be meaningless to any man who knew nothing of electricity. ”

“ The other is that James Forrest Carroll, for all of his insanity, is still a brilliant physicist.
"He knows something about the Lawson Radiation that men have gone mad for previously, that men have sought for thirty years, that time and money has been spent for. Therefore, in this institution, James Forrest Carroll should be permitted to experiment at his own will.
"For if nothing else he will produce many other marvelous things in an effort to prove that the science of the aliens is far greater than ours." ”

“ Thus Carroll will be completely self-justified and will be returned to normal."
"You talk a lot about self-justification," snarled Kingston.
"Everybody is self-justified," said Pollard. "Sanity is when the self-justification of the individual is, within certain limits, similar to the self-justification of the average human being. Insanity is when the self-justification of the individual lies outside of reasonable limits. Once Carroll's self-justification—which is one more way of saying his 'viewpoint'—is reasonably similar to others, sanity will return." ”

“ Carroll seated himself indolently on Pollard's desk. "If you are really alien," he observed ironically, "you will most heartily object!"
"I'm Terran," she insisted.
"Then why cavil at proving it?" he urged.
"I don't have to!"
"I'm afraid you do," he said. "Fact of the matter is I'm still holding a rather high position in the Lawson Laboratory. I can—and will—order Dr. Pollard to do it!"
Rhinegallis faced the doctor. "I'll not have it."
Carroll spread his hands out in a self-satisfied gesture. "Q.E.D.," he said. "Aliens will object. True Terrans have nothing to fear." ”