August 17, 2025 • 28 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Instinct by George O. Smith. You can keep a good
man down if you've got enough head start, are alert
and persistent, so long as he limits himself to acting
like a good man. It was zero four seven dash
six three dash ten when he opened the door before
(00:21):
his superior could chew him for prepunctuality, Houvain said, as
the Chief looked up and open his mouth to start. Sorry,
but you should know Tara is at it again. Chealin's
jaw snapped shut. He passed a hand over his face
and asked, in a tone of pure exasperation, the same,
(00:41):
And as Houvain nodded, Chelan went on, why can't they
make a mistake and blow themselves out of our hair?
How far did they get this time? All the way
and out? Houvain sat down, shaking his head slowly. Not yet,
but they're over the hump, you know. Huvain's face brightened
(01:01):
ever so slightly. I can't be criticized for not counting them, Chief,
but I'll estimate that there must be at least a
couple of hundred atoms of one O nine already. And
you know that nobody could make one O nine if
they hadn't already evolved methods of measuring the properties of
individual atoms. So as soon as they find that their
(01:22):
boom sample doesn't behave like the standard mess out of
a bombardment chamber, they won't rest until they find out why.
They'll find out, and then it will be one O nine,
one O nine, one o nine until we're forced to
clobber them again. Bitterly, Chilin looked up. I don't think
I need the lecture. I admire their tenacity, I admire
(01:45):
their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity, attitude of
acting as if the great Creator had concocted the whole
glorious universe for their own playground. Yes, said the chief wearily, singly,
they aren't bad traits boiled down into the self esteem
of a single race. I don't admire them anymore. I'm
(02:07):
simply scared. Yeah, well, we've got time, not much. What's
their space potential this time? Still scragged on the mass, inertia, relativity, barrier,
tail burners, er chemical reaction engines, manned and unmanned orbital flights,
half a dozen landings on their sister planet. No, said
(02:30):
Uvain as he saw the Chief's puzzlement. I don't mean
number two, the one they call Venus this time. I
mean their co orbital companion, the moon. They still call
it that. The Chief looked up, wonderingly. Do you suppose,
he asked solemnly, that there is really something called a
racial memory. It's against all the theory, objected Uvain, But
(02:55):
there seems to be. His voice trailed off absently, it
returned after some thought. I've tried to sort it out,
just as if I were one of them. The recurrence
of their er names of antiquity, as they call them,
seem to recur and recur. Their planet, too, now called Venus,
(03:15):
was called Astarte last time, and before that it was
Ishtar other way around. No matter, the names are still
being used, and, according to their belief, merely parallel names
culled out of local pagan religious beliefs. The Chief nodded,
that's only part of the parallelism. The big thing is
(03:35):
the way they follow the same pattern, savage agrarian urban
right on up the ladder, according to the rules of
civic science, but squabbling and battling all the way right
on up and out into space. Hell Huvain warfare and
conflict I can both understand and cope with, but not
the Terran flavor. They don't come out bent on conquest
(03:56):
or stellar colonialism. They come out with their little price
fight still going on, and each side lines up its
volume of influence and pits one against the other until
the whole section of that spiral arm is glittering like
a sputtering spark along a train of black powder. I wish,
he said, savagely, that we could cut off that arm
(04:17):
and fling it deep into extra galactic space. Huvain shook
his head, and leave the problem for our children to solve.
They'll have one to solve. I think in another twenty
thousand years, the Terrans will be right back doing business
at the same old stand unless we can solve it
once and for all. Right now, Huvain looked around as
(04:39):
if he were seeking another door to the chief's office. How,
he asked sarcastically. The first time we greeted them, and
they took both are welcome and us for everything they
could before we pulled the rug out from under them.
The second time we boxed them off, and they broke
out after converting the isolation screen into an offensive weapon.
The third time, we try to avoid them, and they
(05:01):
ran wild, exploiting less ambitious races. The fourth time, we
missed the boat and they were chewing at our back
door before we knew about them. Containing them was almost
a nova job. The fifth time we went in and
tried to understand them, they traded us two for one.
Two things they didn't want. For one they did Uvean's
lips curled, and I'm not sure that they didn't trade
(05:23):
us the other way around. Two they needed for one
they declared useless. Sixth that was the last time, and
they just came out shooting as if the whole galaxy
automatically objected this time. Who knows. Houvain sat down again
and put his hands between his knees. They don't operate
like people. Sensible folks settle their own problems, then look
(05:47):
for more Tara. One half the globe is against the
other half of the globe, fighting one another tooth and nail.
They still find time to invent and cross space to
other planets and continue their fight on unknown Tis territory.
Maybe we'd better just admit that we don't know the solution.
Then we can claub or Terra back to the swamp,
(06:07):
juggle the place into another ice age, put the details
down in history, and hope that our remote progeny will
be smarter than we like. Maybe we're smarter than our
remote ancestors, jeered Huvain got a better idea. Maybe has
anybody taken a couple of them and analyzed them? It's inhumane,
(06:28):
I agree, But get me a healthy, well balanced specimen
of somewhat better than average education and training can do,
can do? But how are you going to keep him?
I don't intend to study him like i'd study a
bug under a microscope. This one won't get away. Make
it in fourteen vers eates, Huvain, make it in ten
(06:49):
plus or minus arratite or two so long. The beast
at Cape Canaveral stood three hundred and fifteen feet tall,
dwarfing her creators into microscopic proportions. Swarming up and down
the gantry, bug sized humans crawled in and out of
check ports with instrument checks, hauling hoses, cables lines. Some
(07:10):
thousand feet away, a puff bomb of red smoke billowed out,
and a habit flattened voice announced at the mark X
minus fifteen minutes, Mark x minus fifteen minutes Jerry Markham said,
that's me. He looked up at the lofty porthole and
almost lost his balance over backwards sighting it. He was
(07:31):
a healthy specimen, about twenty four and full of life.
He had spent the day going through two routines that
were sometimes simultaneous and at other times serially, one restating
his instructions letter by letter, including the various alternatives and
contingencies that involved his making decisions if the conditions on
venus were according to this theory or that the other.
(07:53):
A rigorous medical checkup neither of them showed that Jerry
Markham had spent the previous night in activities not recommended
by his superiors, but nothing that would bounce him if
they knew. He could hardly be broken for living it up.
At a party, he shook hands with the boss and
stepped into the elevator. It was not his idea of
a proper send off. There should be bands playing and
(08:15):
girls throwing paper tape flowers and a few drinks. Sadly
should send him off with a proud smooch of lipstick
and a tearful promise to wait. Instead, it was all
very military and strict and serious, which is why he'd
whooped it up the night before, he had his good
night and good bye with Sally Foreman, and now eighteen
hours later he was fit and rearing for a return match.
(08:39):
Jerry's mind was by no means concerned with this next
half hour, which would be the most perilous part of
his flight. Tomorrow would take care of itself. The possibility
that thirty minutes from now he might be dead in
a flaming pyre did not cross his mind. The chance
that an hour from now he could be told that
his bird was off course, and his fate starvation if
it obtained an untry to orbit, or abrupt destruction if
(09:02):
it didn't orbit at all, nothing bothered him. He sat there,
chanting the countdown with the official timer and braced himself
when the call came zero fire. Inwardly, Jerry Markm's mind said,
we're off, and he began to look forward to his
landing on Venus, not the problems of landing, but what
he would find there when he soared down through the clouds.
(09:26):
Determined to hold up through the high g even though
nobody watched, he went on and on and up and up.
His radio voiced the progress tinely. Shock followed roaring pressure,
release followed shock. Orientation was lost. Only logic and intellect
told him where he was in which way he was going.
(09:46):
Then he was free, free to eat and drink and read,
and to smoke one cigarette every three hours, and in
essence behave in about the same way as a prisoner
confined in solitary. The similarity did not bo Jerry Markham,
for this was an honor, not punishment. Huvain collected him
(10:06):
with the ease of a fisherman landing a netted crab easily, painlessly, shockingly,
for the crab doesn't exactly take to the net with docility.
Huvain collected the whole shebang, man and machinery, then opened
the spacecraft with the same attitude as a man peeling
the lid from a can of sardines. He could have
breached the airlock, but he wanted the Terran to understand
(10:28):
the power behind the act. Jerry Markham came out blinking,
very mildly, wondering about the air It was good. Without
considering the rather high probability that nobody spoke the language,
he blurted, what gives. He was not very much surprised
when one of them in uniform said curtly, this way
and make it snappy. Tarran. No, he was not surprised.
(10:52):
He was too stunned to permit anything as simple as surprise.
And through the shock and the stun his months of
training came through. Jerry Markham worried. His first worry, how
was he going to get the word back home? Confinement
in the metal cell of his top stage hadn't bothered him.
The concept of landing on a planet that couldn't come
closer to home than some twenty seven million miles was
(11:15):
mere peanuts. Isolation for a year was no more than
a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded
manyfold sally, so she might not wait. But there were others.
He'd envisioned himself fighting them off with the club after
his successful return. Hell had swarmed him before his take off,
starting with the moment his number came up as a
(11:36):
possible candidate. No, the meeting with competence in space did
not shock him greatly. What bothered him was his lack
of control over the situation. Had he seen them and
passed on about his business. He recounted the incident as
it was his desire to tell some one about it
was cut off. As he sat alone and helpless, it
(11:58):
occurred to him that he did not mind find so
much the dying, if that was to be his lot.
What mattered was the unmarked grave. The mourning did not
move him. The physical concept of grave and its fill
of moldering organic substances was nothing. It was a mere symbol.
So long as people knew how and where. It made
little difference to Jerry Markham whether he was planted in
(12:21):
a deridium casket guaranteed to preserve the dead flesh for
a thousand years, or whether he went out in a bright,
swift flame that glinted in its tongues of the color
traces of incandescent elements of human organic chemistry, So long
as people knew where and how. Vague, vague, mass volumized
(12:41):
concept granite tomb was one idea. Here was a place point,
a spread fingered hand in a waving sweep across the
sky that encompasses the planet the ecliptic, and say it
is there, and another place is identified. Lost on Venus
is no more than a phrase from Taraha or Times Square.
Venus is a tiny point in the sky, smaller to
(13:04):
the vision than the granite of Grant's tomb. Imagination breeds irritation.
Would they call it pilot error or equipment on reliability?
Dying he could face goofing would be a disgrace that
he would have to meet in fact or in symbol.
Hardware crack up was a matter of the laws of probability,
not only his duty demanded that he report his essence.
(13:26):
Cried out for a voice, to let them know, anybody,
just the chance to tell one other human soul. Chilin asked,
who are you? Your name and rank? He said, sullenly,
go to hell. We have ways and means, he said,
use em. If we said that we mean you no harm.
(13:49):
If we asked, what could we do to prove it?
What would be your reply? Take me back and let
me go? Who are you? Will you identify yourself? No,
stubborn Tarran, I know my rights. We are not at war.
I'll tell you nothing. Why did you capture me? We'll
ask the questions, Tarran, You'll get no answers, he sneered
(14:13):
at them angrily. Torture me and then wonder whether my
screamings tell the truth. Dope me and wonder whether what
I truly believe is fact or fantasy? Please, said Chilan,
We only want to understand your kind, to know what
makes you tick? Then why didn't you ask? We've tried
and we get no answers. Taran, The universe is a
(14:34):
vastness beyond comprehension. Co Operate and give us what we
want to know, and a piece of it is yours. Nuts, Tarran,
you have friends who doesn't Why can't we be your friends?
Angrily resentfully, your way isn't friendly enough to convince me.
Chialin shook his head. Take him away, he directed in
(14:57):
his own tongue. Where and how shall we keep Hi
to the place we have prepared and keep him safe?
Huveain asked safe? Who knows what is safe? One bribe
his guards, one seduced her guards, One dug his way out,
scratched by scratch, disappeared, dyed, dead, gone, mingled off with
(15:18):
the myriad of worlds? Did one get home? Perhaps to
start their legend of the gods in the sky, the
legend that never dies through the rise and fall of
culture from Savagery two two to Element one O nine.
Chilan looked at Jerry Markham, the Terran looked back defiantly,
as if he were guessed instead of captive. Co operate,
(15:40):
breathed Chilan, I'll tell you nothing. Force me. I can't
stop that. Chilan shook his head sorrowfully, Extracting what you
know would be less than the play of a child.
He said, No, Tarran, we can know what you know
in the turn of a dial. What we need is
that which you do not know? Laugh or is that
(16:00):
a sneer? No matter what you know is worthless. Your
problems and your ambitions, both racial and personal, are minor.
We know them already. The pattern is repetitive, only some
of the names are changed. But why ah that we
must know? Why are you what you are? Seven times
in history Terra has come up from the mud seven
(16:22):
times along the same route seven times, a history of
ten thousand years, from savage to savant, from beasts to brilliance,
and always with the same will to do, to do,
what to die for? What to fight for? What? Chilan
waved Huvain to take the Terran away. Houvain said, he's
(16:44):
locked in air tight with guards who can be trusted.
Now what do we do with him? He will co
operate by force, know Houvain by depriving him of the
one thing that life cannot exist without food safety. Chilin
shook his head. More primitive than these, he lowered his voice.
(17:05):
He suffers now from being cut off from his kind.
Life starts complaining about the treatment it receives during the
miracle of birth and crying for its first breath of air.
Life departs, gasping for air, with someone listening for the
last words, the last message from the dying communication Huvain
is the primary drive of all life, from plant to
(17:28):
animal to man, and if such exists superman. Through communication,
life goes on. Communication is the prime requisite to procreation.
The firefly signals his mate by night. The human male
entices his woman with honeyed words, and is not the
gift of a jewel a crystalline, endearing statement of his
(17:48):
undying affection. Chilan dropped his flowery manner and went on
in a more casual Vein Houvain boil it down to
the least attractive form of simplification. No life stands alone,
and no viable life goes on without communication. I shall
shut off the terrans communication. Then he will go stark,
(18:09):
raving mad. No, for I shall offer him the alternative
cooperate or molder in utter blankness, Houvain shrugged. It seems
to me that any Terran locked in a duralim cell
so far from home, the distance means nothing is already
cut off from communication. Deeper, deeper, Houvain. The brain lies
(18:30):
prisoner within a cell of bone. Its contact with the
outside world lies along five channels of sensory communication. Everything
that the brain believes about the universe is the product
of sensory information carried inward by sight, touch, sound, taste,
and smell. From five basic bits of information. Knowledge of
(18:51):
the great truth is formed through logic and self argument.
Everything but oh now stop, I am not expressing my
own singular opinion. I believe a rather great proportion of
the things that I was taught, and I was taught
through the self same five sensory channel. Um, good, just plain, Um.
(19:12):
Now we shall shut off the Terrans channels of communication
until he consents. As an alternative. This Huvain hasn't been
tried before. It may bring us the final important bit
of information. Slowly the lights went out. Jerry Markham was
prepared for dark isolation. He could do nothing about it,
so he accepted it by the simple process of assuring
(19:34):
himself that things were going to get worse before they
got better. The darkness became absolute, utter complete. Not even
the dots and whorls and specks that are technically called
visual noise occurred. A level of mental alertness niggled at him.
For nearly twenty four years, it had been a busy,
little chunk of his mind. It was that section that
(19:57):
inspected the data for important program material and decided which
was trivial and which was worthy of the big boy's attention.
Now it was out of a job because there wasn't
even a faint background count of plateau noise to occupy
its attention. The silence grew vast. Brain said that the
solid walls were no more than ten feet from him.
(20:19):
Ears said that he was in the precise middle of
absolutely nowhere. Feeling said that the floor was under his feet.
Ears said that the upward pressure touched his soles. Deeper grew,
the deadening of his ears and orientation was lost. Feeling remained,
and he felt his heart beating in a hunting rhythm
because the sound feedback through the ear was gone, and
(20:41):
the hortator had lost his audible beat. Feeling died, and
he knew not whether he stood or sat or floated askew.
Feeling died, and with it went the delicate motor control
that directs the position of muscle and limb and enables
a man to place his little finger on the tip
of his nose with his eyes closed. Aside from the
(21:01):
presence of foreign matter, the taste of a clean mouth
is tasteless. The term is relative. Jerry Markham learned what
real tastelessness was. It was flat and blank and nothingness.
Chemists tell us that air is tasteless, colorless, and odorless.
But when sense is gone abruptly, one realizes that the
(21:22):
air does indeed have its aroma. In an unemployed body,
the primitive sensors of the mind had nothing to do, and,
like a man trained to busyness, loafing was their hardest task.
Gone was every sensory stimulus. His heart pumped from habit,
not controlled by the feedback of sound or feeling. He breathed,
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but he did not hear the inrush of air. Brain
told him to be careful of his mouth. The sharp
teeth could bite the dead tongue, and he could bleed
to death. Never feeling pain, or even the swift flow
of salty warmth habit trained nerves caused a false tickle
in his throat. He never knew whether he coughed or
whether he thought he coughed. The sense of time deserted
(22:04):
him when the metronome of heartbeat died. Determined brain compromised
by assuming that crude time could be kept by the
function of hunger, elimination, weariness. Logical brain pointed out that
he could starve to death and feel nothing. Elimination was
a sensory thing, no more. Weariness was of the body
that brought no information anyway, And what indeed was sleep?
(22:27):
Brain considered this question, Brain said, I am Jerry Markham.
But is it true that no brain can think of nothing?
Is it possible that sleep is the condition that obtains
when the body stops conveying reliable information to the brain
and then says to hell with everything and decides to
stop thinking. The brain called Jerry Markham did not stop thinking.
(22:50):
It lost its time since, but not completely. A period
of time passed. A whirlwind of thoughts and dreamlike actions
went on, and then calmness came for while dreams now
ponder the big question, does the brain dream the dream
as a sensory experience, or is a dream no more
than a sequence of assorted memories. Would a dying brain
(23:13):
expire in pleasure during a pleasant dream? Or is the
enjoyment of a pleasant dream only available to the after
awakened brain? What is man but his memories? In one
very odd manner, the brain of Jerry Markham retained its
intellectual orientation and realized that its physical orientation was uncontrollable
(23:33):
and undetectable, and therefore of no importance. Like the lighthouse
keeper who could not sleep when the diaphone did not
renee hraw for five seconds of each and every minute,
Jerry Markham's brain was filled with a mild concern about
the total lack of unimportant but habitual data. There was
no speckle of light to classify and ignore, no sesraus
(23:54):
of air molecules raining against the ear drum. Blankness replaced
the smell and taste, and their absence was as disturbing
as a pungence or a poison. And of course one
should feel something if it is no more than the
tonus of muscle against the mobile bones. Communication is the
prime drive of life, cut off from external Communication entirely.
(24:17):
Section A Bay six, Tier nine, Row thirteen hollered over
to box que line twenty three i'le f and wanted
to know what was going on. The gang on the
upper deck hailed the boiler room, and the crew in
the bleacher seats reported that the folks in charge of
CIC Communication Information Center were sitting on their hands because
(24:38):
they didn't have anything to do. One collection aboard brain
cells stirred. They hadn't been called upon since Jerry Markham
sent a d Ste Fidelis in memorized Latin some fifteen
years earlier, and so they started the clack like an
auditorium full of people impatient because the curtain had not
gone up on time. Bedlam broke loose. Bedlam is subject
(25:01):
to the laws of periodicity stochastic analysis, and with some
rather brilliant manipulation, it can be reduced to a Fourier series.
Fourier says that Maxwell is right and goes on to
define exactly when in a series of combined periodicities of
apparently random motion, all the little particles we moving in
the same direction. Stochastic analysis says that if the letter
(25:24):
U follows the letter Q in most cases words beginning
with Q will have a U for a second letter.
Jerry Markham began to think. Isolated and alone, prisoner in
the cell of bone, with absolutely nothing to distract him.
The brain, by common consent, pounded a gavel, held a conference,
appointed a chairman, and settled down to do the one
(25:46):
job that the brain was assembled to do. In unison
ten to the sixteenth, storage cells turned butter side up
at the single wave of a mental flag. He thought
of his father and his mother, of his sally. He
thought of his commanding officer, and of the fellows he
liked and disliked. The primitive urge to communicate was upon him,
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because he must first establish communication before he could rise
from the stony mineral stage to the exalted level of
a vegetable Bereft of his normal senses, undistracted by trivia
such as noise and pain, and the inestimable vastness of
information bits that must be considered and evaluated, his brain
caught upon his memory and provided the background details. The
(26:30):
measured tread of a company of marching soldiers can wreck
a bridge. The cadence of ten to the sixteenth brain
cells undivided by the distraction of incoming information broke down
a mental barrier as vividly as the living truth. Jerry
Markham envisioned himself sauntering down the sidewalk. The breeze was
on his face and the pavement was beneath his feet.
(26:52):
The air was laden with its myriad of smells, and
the flavor of a cigarette was on his tongue. His
eyes saw Sally running toward him. Her cry of greeting
was a welcome sound, and the pressure of her hug
was strong and physical as the taste of her lips real.
She hugged his arm and said, your folks are waiting.
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Jerry laughed. Let the general wait a bit longer, he said,
I've got a lot to tell him. Huvain said gone,
and the sound of his voice re echoed back and
forth across the empty cell. Gone, repeated Chilin, utterly incomprehensible,
but nonetheless a fact. But how isolated alone, imprisoned, cut
(27:36):
off from all communication, all communication. I'll get another specimen.
Chief Chilin shook his head. Seven times. We've slapped them
down seven times. We've watched their rise and wondered how
they did it. Seven times they would have surpassed us
if we hadn't blocked them. Let them rise, let them
run the universe. They're determined to do that anyway, And
(27:59):
now I think it's time for us to stop annoying
our betters. I'd hate to face them if they were angry,
but Chief he was cut off from all communication, obviously,
said sheilin not End of Instinct by George O. Smith
Instinct by George O. Smith. You can keep a good
man down if you've got enough head start, are alert
and persistent, so long as he limits himself to acting
like a good man. It was zero four seven dash
six three dash ten when he opened the door before
(00:21):
his superior could chew him for prepunctuality, Houvain said, as
the Chief looked up and open his mouth to start. Sorry,
but you should know Tara is at it again. Chealin's
jaw snapped shut. He passed a hand over his face
and asked, in a tone of pure exasperation, the same,
(00:41):
And as Houvain nodded, Chelan went on, why can't they
make a mistake and blow themselves out of our hair?
How far did they get this time? All the way
and out? Houvain sat down, shaking his head slowly. Not yet,
but they're over the hump, you know. Huvain's face brightened
(01:01):
ever so slightly. I can't be criticized for not counting them, Chief,
but I'll estimate that there must be at least a
couple of hundred atoms of one O nine already. And
you know that nobody could make one O nine if
they hadn't already evolved methods of measuring the properties of
individual atoms. So as soon as they find that their
(01:22):
boom sample doesn't behave like the standard mess out of
a bombardment chamber, they won't rest until they find out why.
They'll find out, and then it will be one O nine,
one O nine, one o nine until we're forced to
clobber them again. Bitterly, Chilin looked up. I don't think
I need the lecture. I admire their tenacity, I admire
(01:45):
their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity, attitude of
acting as if the great Creator had concocted the whole
glorious universe for their own playground. Yes, said the chief wearily, singly,
they aren't bad traits boiled down into the self esteem
of a single race. I don't admire them anymore. I'm
(02:07):
simply scared. Yeah, well, we've got time, not much. What's
their space potential this time? Still scragged on the mass, inertia, relativity, barrier,
tail burners, er chemical reaction engines, manned and unmanned orbital flights,
half a dozen landings on their sister planet. No, said
(02:30):
Uvain as he saw the Chief's puzzlement. I don't mean
number two, the one they call Venus this time. I
mean their co orbital companion, the moon. They still call
it that. The Chief looked up, wonderingly. Do you suppose,
he asked solemnly, that there is really something called a
racial memory. It's against all the theory, objected Uvain, But
(02:55):
there seems to be. His voice trailed off absently, it
returned after some thought. I've tried to sort it out,
just as if I were one of them. The recurrence
of their er names of antiquity, as they call them,
seem to recur and recur. Their planet, too, now called Venus,
(03:15):
was called Astarte last time, and before that it was
Ishtar other way around. No matter, the names are still
being used, and, according to their belief, merely parallel names
culled out of local pagan religious beliefs. The Chief nodded,
that's only part of the parallelism. The big thing is
(03:35):
the way they follow the same pattern, savage agrarian urban
right on up the ladder, according to the rules of
civic science, but squabbling and battling all the way right
on up and out into space. Hell Huvain warfare and
conflict I can both understand and cope with, but not
the Terran flavor. They don't come out bent on conquest
(03:56):
or stellar colonialism. They come out with their little price
fight still going on, and each side lines up its
volume of influence and pits one against the other until
the whole section of that spiral arm is glittering like
a sputtering spark along a train of black powder. I wish,
he said, savagely, that we could cut off that arm
(04:17):
and fling it deep into extra galactic space. Huvain shook
his head, and leave the problem for our children to solve.
They'll have one to solve. I think in another twenty
thousand years, the Terrans will be right back doing business
at the same old stand unless we can solve it
once and for all. Right now, Huvain looked around as
(04:39):
if he were seeking another door to the chief's office. How,
he asked sarcastically. The first time we greeted them, and
they took both are welcome and us for everything they
could before we pulled the rug out from under them.
The second time we boxed them off, and they broke
out after converting the isolation screen into an offensive weapon.
The third time, we try to avoid them, and they
(05:01):
ran wild, exploiting less ambitious races. The fourth time, we
missed the boat and they were chewing at our back
door before we knew about them. Containing them was almost
a nova job. The fifth time we went in and
tried to understand them, they traded us two for one.
Two things they didn't want. For one they did Uvean's
lips curled, and I'm not sure that they didn't trade
(05:23):
us the other way around. Two they needed for one
they declared useless. Sixth that was the last time, and
they just came out shooting as if the whole galaxy
automatically objected this time. Who knows. Houvain sat down again
and put his hands between his knees. They don't operate
like people. Sensible folks settle their own problems, then look
(05:47):
for more Tara. One half the globe is against the
other half of the globe, fighting one another tooth and nail.
They still find time to invent and cross space to
other planets and continue their fight on unknown Tis territory.
Maybe we'd better just admit that we don't know the solution.
Then we can claub or Terra back to the swamp,
(06:07):
juggle the place into another ice age, put the details
down in history, and hope that our remote progeny will
be smarter than we like. Maybe we're smarter than our
remote ancestors, jeered Huvain got a better idea. Maybe has
anybody taken a couple of them and analyzed them? It's inhumane,
(06:28):
I agree, But get me a healthy, well balanced specimen
of somewhat better than average education and training can do,
can do? But how are you going to keep him?
I don't intend to study him like i'd study a
bug under a microscope. This one won't get away. Make
it in fourteen vers eates, Huvain, make it in ten
(06:49):
plus or minus arratite or two so long. The beast
at Cape Canaveral stood three hundred and fifteen feet tall,
dwarfing her creators into microscopic proportions. Swarming up and down
the gantry, bug sized humans crawled in and out of
check ports with instrument checks, hauling hoses, cables lines. Some
(07:10):
thousand feet away, a puff bomb of red smoke billowed out,
and a habit flattened voice announced at the mark X
minus fifteen minutes, Mark x minus fifteen minutes Jerry Markham said,
that's me. He looked up at the lofty porthole and
almost lost his balance over backwards sighting it. He was
(07:31):
a healthy specimen, about twenty four and full of life.
He had spent the day going through two routines that
were sometimes simultaneous and at other times serially, one restating
his instructions letter by letter, including the various alternatives and
contingencies that involved his making decisions if the conditions on
venus were according to this theory or that the other.
(07:53):
A rigorous medical checkup neither of them showed that Jerry
Markham had spent the previous night in activities not recommended
by his superiors, but nothing that would bounce him if
they knew. He could hardly be broken for living it up.
At a party, he shook hands with the boss and
stepped into the elevator. It was not his idea of
a proper send off. There should be bands playing and
(08:15):
girls throwing paper tape flowers and a few drinks. Sadly
should send him off with a proud smooch of lipstick
and a tearful promise to wait. Instead, it was all
very military and strict and serious, which is why he'd
whooped it up the night before, he had his good
night and good bye with Sally Foreman, and now eighteen
hours later he was fit and rearing for a return match.
(08:39):
Jerry's mind was by no means concerned with this next
half hour, which would be the most perilous part of
his flight. Tomorrow would take care of itself. The possibility
that thirty minutes from now he might be dead in
a flaming pyre did not cross his mind. The chance
that an hour from now he could be told that
his bird was off course, and his fate starvation if
it obtained an untry to orbit, or abrupt destruction if
(09:02):
it didn't orbit at all, nothing bothered him. He sat there,
chanting the countdown with the official timer and braced himself
when the call came zero fire. Inwardly, Jerry Markm's mind said,
we're off, and he began to look forward to his
landing on Venus, not the problems of landing, but what
he would find there when he soared down through the clouds.
(09:26):
Determined to hold up through the high g even though
nobody watched, he went on and on and up and up.
His radio voiced the progress tinely. Shock followed roaring pressure,
release followed shock. Orientation was lost. Only logic and intellect
told him where he was in which way he was going.
(09:46):
Then he was free, free to eat and drink and read,
and to smoke one cigarette every three hours, and in
essence behave in about the same way as a prisoner
confined in solitary. The similarity did not bo Jerry Markham,
for this was an honor, not punishment. Huvain collected him
(10:06):
with the ease of a fisherman landing a netted crab easily, painlessly, shockingly,
for the crab doesn't exactly take to the net with docility.
Huvain collected the whole shebang, man and machinery, then opened
the spacecraft with the same attitude as a man peeling
the lid from a can of sardines. He could have
breached the airlock, but he wanted the Terran to understand
(10:28):
the power behind the act. Jerry Markham came out blinking,
very mildly, wondering about the air It was good. Without
considering the rather high probability that nobody spoke the language,
he blurted, what gives. He was not very much surprised
when one of them in uniform said curtly, this way
and make it snappy. Tarran. No, he was not surprised.
(10:52):
He was too stunned to permit anything as simple as surprise.
And through the shock and the stun his months of
training came through. Jerry Markham worried. His first worry, how
was he going to get the word back home? Confinement
in the metal cell of his top stage hadn't bothered him.
The concept of landing on a planet that couldn't come
closer to home than some twenty seven million miles was
(11:15):
mere peanuts. Isolation for a year was no more than
a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded
manyfold sally, so she might not wait. But there were others.
He'd envisioned himself fighting them off with the club after
his successful return. Hell had swarmed him before his take off,
starting with the moment his number came up as a
(11:36):
possible candidate. No, the meeting with competence in space did
not shock him greatly. What bothered him was his lack
of control over the situation. Had he seen them and
passed on about his business. He recounted the incident as
it was his desire to tell some one about it
was cut off. As he sat alone and helpless, it
(11:58):
occurred to him that he did not mind find so
much the dying, if that was to be his lot.
What mattered was the unmarked grave. The mourning did not
move him. The physical concept of grave and its fill
of moldering organic substances was nothing. It was a mere symbol.
So long as people knew how and where. It made
little difference to Jerry Markham whether he was planted in
(12:21):
a deridium casket guaranteed to preserve the dead flesh for
a thousand years, or whether he went out in a bright,
swift flame that glinted in its tongues of the color
traces of incandescent elements of human organic chemistry, So long
as people knew where and how. Vague, vague, mass volumized
(12:41):
concept granite tomb was one idea. Here was a place point,
a spread fingered hand in a waving sweep across the
sky that encompasses the planet the ecliptic, and say it
is there, and another place is identified. Lost on Venus
is no more than a phrase from Taraha or Times Square.
Venus is a tiny point in the sky, smaller to
(13:04):
the vision than the granite of Grant's tomb. Imagination breeds irritation.
Would they call it pilot error or equipment on reliability?
Dying he could face goofing would be a disgrace that
he would have to meet in fact or in symbol.
Hardware crack up was a matter of the laws of probability,
not only his duty demanded that he report his essence.
(13:26):
Cried out for a voice, to let them know, anybody,
just the chance to tell one other human soul. Chilin asked,
who are you? Your name and rank? He said, sullenly,
go to hell. We have ways and means, he said,
use em. If we said that we mean you no harm.
(13:49):
If we asked, what could we do to prove it?
What would be your reply? Take me back and let
me go? Who are you? Will you identify yourself? No,
stubborn Tarran, I know my rights. We are not at war.
I'll tell you nothing. Why did you capture me? We'll
ask the questions, Tarran, You'll get no answers, he sneered
(14:13):
at them angrily. Torture me and then wonder whether my
screamings tell the truth. Dope me and wonder whether what
I truly believe is fact or fantasy? Please, said Chilan,
We only want to understand your kind, to know what
makes you tick? Then why didn't you ask? We've tried
and we get no answers. Taran, The universe is a
(14:34):
vastness beyond comprehension. Co Operate and give us what we
want to know, and a piece of it is yours. Nuts, Tarran,
you have friends who doesn't Why can't we be your friends?
Angrily resentfully, your way isn't friendly enough to convince me.
Chialin shook his head. Take him away, he directed in
(14:57):
his own tongue. Where and how shall we keep Hi
to the place we have prepared and keep him safe?
Huveain asked safe? Who knows what is safe? One bribe
his guards, one seduced her guards, One dug his way out,
scratched by scratch, disappeared, dyed, dead, gone, mingled off with
(15:18):
the myriad of worlds? Did one get home? Perhaps to
start their legend of the gods in the sky, the
legend that never dies through the rise and fall of
culture from Savagery two two to Element one O nine.
Chilan looked at Jerry Markham, the Terran looked back defiantly,
as if he were guessed instead of captive. Co operate,
(15:40):
breathed Chilan, I'll tell you nothing. Force me. I can't
stop that. Chilan shook his head sorrowfully, Extracting what you
know would be less than the play of a child.
He said, No, Tarran, we can know what you know
in the turn of a dial. What we need is
that which you do not know? Laugh or is that
(16:00):
a sneer? No matter what you know is worthless. Your
problems and your ambitions, both racial and personal, are minor.
We know them already. The pattern is repetitive, only some
of the names are changed. But why ah that we
must know? Why are you what you are? Seven times
in history Terra has come up from the mud seven
(16:22):
times along the same route seven times, a history of
ten thousand years, from savage to savant, from beasts to brilliance,
and always with the same will to do, to do,
what to die for? What to fight for? What? Chilan
waved Huvain to take the Terran away. Houvain said, he's
(16:44):
locked in air tight with guards who can be trusted.
Now what do we do with him? He will co
operate by force, know Houvain by depriving him of the
one thing that life cannot exist without food safety. Chilin
shook his head. More primitive than these, he lowered his voice.
(17:05):
He suffers now from being cut off from his kind.
Life starts complaining about the treatment it receives during the
miracle of birth and crying for its first breath of air.
Life departs, gasping for air, with someone listening for the
last words, the last message from the dying communication Huvain
is the primary drive of all life, from plant to
(17:28):
animal to man, and if such exists superman. Through communication,
life goes on. Communication is the prime requisite to procreation.
The firefly signals his mate by night. The human male
entices his woman with honeyed words, and is not the
gift of a jewel a crystalline, endearing statement of his
(17:48):
undying affection. Chilan dropped his flowery manner and went on
in a more casual Vein Houvain boil it down to
the least attractive form of simplification. No life stands alone,
and no viable life goes on without communication. I shall
shut off the terrans communication. Then he will go stark,
(18:09):
raving mad. No, for I shall offer him the alternative
cooperate or molder in utter blankness, Houvain shrugged. It seems
to me that any Terran locked in a duralim cell
so far from home, the distance means nothing is already
cut off from communication. Deeper, deeper, Houvain. The brain lies
(18:30):
prisoner within a cell of bone. Its contact with the
outside world lies along five channels of sensory communication. Everything
that the brain believes about the universe is the product
of sensory information carried inward by sight, touch, sound, taste,
and smell. From five basic bits of information. Knowledge of
(18:51):
the great truth is formed through logic and self argument.
Everything but oh now stop, I am not expressing my
own singular opinion. I believe a rather great proportion of
the things that I was taught, and I was taught
through the self same five sensory channel. Um, good, just plain, Um.
(19:12):
Now we shall shut off the Terrans channels of communication
until he consents. As an alternative. This Huvain hasn't been
tried before. It may bring us the final important bit
of information. Slowly the lights went out. Jerry Markham was
prepared for dark isolation. He could do nothing about it,
so he accepted it by the simple process of assuring
(19:34):
himself that things were going to get worse before they
got better. The darkness became absolute, utter complete. Not even
the dots and whorls and specks that are technically called
visual noise occurred. A level of mental alertness niggled at him.
For nearly twenty four years, it had been a busy,
little chunk of his mind. It was that section that
(19:57):
inspected the data for important program material and decided which
was trivial and which was worthy of the big boy's attention.
Now it was out of a job because there wasn't
even a faint background count of plateau noise to occupy
its attention. The silence grew vast. Brain said that the
solid walls were no more than ten feet from him.
(20:19):
Ears said that he was in the precise middle of
absolutely nowhere. Feeling said that the floor was under his feet.
Ears said that the upward pressure touched his soles. Deeper grew,
the deadening of his ears and orientation was lost. Feeling remained,
and he felt his heart beating in a hunting rhythm
because the sound feedback through the ear was gone, and
(20:41):
the hortator had lost his audible beat. Feeling died, and
he knew not whether he stood or sat or floated askew.
Feeling died, and with it went the delicate motor control
that directs the position of muscle and limb and enables
a man to place his little finger on the tip
of his nose with his eyes closed. Aside from the
(21:01):
presence of foreign matter, the taste of a clean mouth
is tasteless. The term is relative. Jerry Markham learned what
real tastelessness was. It was flat and blank and nothingness.
Chemists tell us that air is tasteless, colorless, and odorless.
But when sense is gone abruptly, one realizes that the
(21:22):
air does indeed have its aroma. In an unemployed body,
the primitive sensors of the mind had nothing to do, and,
like a man trained to busyness, loafing was their hardest task.
Gone was every sensory stimulus. His heart pumped from habit,
not controlled by the feedback of sound or feeling. He breathed,
(21:42):
but he did not hear the inrush of air. Brain
told him to be careful of his mouth. The sharp
teeth could bite the dead tongue, and he could bleed
to death. Never feeling pain, or even the swift flow
of salty warmth habit trained nerves caused a false tickle
in his throat. He never knew whether he coughed or
whether he thought he coughed. The sense of time deserted
(22:04):
him when the metronome of heartbeat died. Determined brain compromised
by assuming that crude time could be kept by the
function of hunger, elimination, weariness. Logical brain pointed out that
he could starve to death and feel nothing. Elimination was
a sensory thing, no more. Weariness was of the body
that brought no information anyway, And what indeed was sleep?
(22:27):
Brain considered this question, Brain said, I am Jerry Markham.
But is it true that no brain can think of nothing?
Is it possible that sleep is the condition that obtains
when the body stops conveying reliable information to the brain
and then says to hell with everything and decides to
stop thinking. The brain called Jerry Markham did not stop thinking.
(22:50):
It lost its time since, but not completely. A period
of time passed. A whirlwind of thoughts and dreamlike actions
went on, and then calmness came for while dreams now
ponder the big question, does the brain dream the dream
as a sensory experience, or is a dream no more
than a sequence of assorted memories. Would a dying brain
(23:13):
expire in pleasure during a pleasant dream? Or is the
enjoyment of a pleasant dream only available to the after
awakened brain? What is man but his memories? In one
very odd manner, the brain of Jerry Markham retained its
intellectual orientation and realized that its physical orientation was uncontrollable
(23:33):
and undetectable, and therefore of no importance. Like the lighthouse
keeper who could not sleep when the diaphone did not
renee hraw for five seconds of each and every minute,
Jerry Markham's brain was filled with a mild concern about
the total lack of unimportant but habitual data. There was
no speckle of light to classify and ignore, no sesraus
(23:54):
of air molecules raining against the ear drum. Blankness replaced
the smell and taste, and their absence was as disturbing
as a pungence or a poison. And of course one
should feel something if it is no more than the
tonus of muscle against the mobile bones. Communication is the
prime drive of life, cut off from external Communication entirely.
(24:17):
Section A Bay six, Tier nine, Row thirteen hollered over
to box que line twenty three i'le f and wanted
to know what was going on. The gang on the
upper deck hailed the boiler room, and the crew in
the bleacher seats reported that the folks in charge of
CIC Communication Information Center were sitting on their hands because
(24:38):
they didn't have anything to do. One collection aboard brain
cells stirred. They hadn't been called upon since Jerry Markham
sent a d Ste Fidelis in memorized Latin some fifteen
years earlier, and so they started the clack like an
auditorium full of people impatient because the curtain had not
gone up on time. Bedlam broke loose. Bedlam is subject
(25:01):
to the laws of periodicity stochastic analysis, and with some
rather brilliant manipulation, it can be reduced to a Fourier series.
Fourier says that Maxwell is right and goes on to
define exactly when in a series of combined periodicities of
apparently random motion, all the little particles we moving in
the same direction. Stochastic analysis says that if the letter
(25:24):
U follows the letter Q in most cases words beginning
with Q will have a U for a second letter.
Jerry Markham began to think. Isolated and alone, prisoner in
the cell of bone, with absolutely nothing to distract him.
The brain, by common consent, pounded a gavel, held a conference,
appointed a chairman, and settled down to do the one
(25:46):
job that the brain was assembled to do. In unison
ten to the sixteenth, storage cells turned butter side up
at the single wave of a mental flag. He thought
of his father and his mother, of his sally. He
thought of his commanding officer, and of the fellows he
liked and disliked. The primitive urge to communicate was upon him,
(26:07):
because he must first establish communication before he could rise
from the stony mineral stage to the exalted level of
a vegetable Bereft of his normal senses, undistracted by trivia
such as noise and pain, and the inestimable vastness of
information bits that must be considered and evaluated, his brain
caught upon his memory and provided the background details. The
(26:30):
measured tread of a company of marching soldiers can wreck
a bridge. The cadence of ten to the sixteenth brain
cells undivided by the distraction of incoming information broke down
a mental barrier as vividly as the living truth. Jerry
Markham envisioned himself sauntering down the sidewalk. The breeze was
on his face and the pavement was beneath his feet.
(26:52):
The air was laden with its myriad of smells, and
the flavor of a cigarette was on his tongue. His
eyes saw Sally running toward him. Her cry of greeting
was a welcome sound, and the pressure of her hug
was strong and physical as the taste of her lips real.
She hugged his arm and said, your folks are waiting.
(27:13):
Jerry laughed. Let the general wait a bit longer, he said,
I've got a lot to tell him. Huvain said gone,
and the sound of his voice re echoed back and
forth across the empty cell. Gone, repeated Chilin, utterly incomprehensible,
but nonetheless a fact. But how isolated alone, imprisoned, cut
(27:36):
off from all communication, all communication. I'll get another specimen.
Chief Chilin shook his head. Seven times. We've slapped them
down seven times. We've watched their rise and wondered how
they did it. Seven times they would have surpassed us
if we hadn't blocked them. Let them rise, let them
run the universe. They're determined to do that anyway, And
(27:59):
now I think it's time for us to stop annoying
our betters. I'd hate to face them if they were angry,
but Chief he was cut off from all communication, obviously,
said sheilin not End of Instinct by George O. Smith
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