Pebble in the Sky

4. The Royal Road

Arbin was uneasy in Chica. He felt surrounded. Somewhere in Chica, one of the largest cities on Earth-they said it had fifty thousand human beings in it-somewhere there were officials of the great outer Empire.
To be sure, he had never seen a man of the Galaxy: yet here, in Chica, his neck was continually twisting in fear that he might. If pinned down, he could not have explained how he would identify an Outsider from an Earthman, even if he were to see one, but it was in his very marrow to feel that there was, somehow, a difference.
He looked back over his shoulder as he entered the Institute. His biwheel was parked in an open area, with a six-hour coupon holding a spot open for it. Was the extravagance itself suspicious?...Everything frightened him now. The air was full of eyes and ears.
If only the strange man would remember to remain hidden in the bottom of the rear compartment. He had nodded violently-but had he understood? He was suddenly impatient with himself. Why had he let Grew talk him into this madness?
And then somehow the door was open in front of him and a voice had broken in on his thoughts.
It said, "What do you want?"
It sounded impatient; perhaps it had already asked him that same thing several times.
He answered hoarsely, words choking out of his throat like dry powder, "Is this where a man can apply for the Synapsifier?"
The receptionist looked up sharply and said, "Sign here."
Arbin put his hands behind his back and repeated huskily, "Where do I see about the Synapsifier?" Grew had told him the name, but the word came out queerly, like so much gibberish.
But the receptionist said, with iron in her voice, "I can't do anything for you unless you sign the register as a visitor. It's in the rules."
Without a word, Arbin turned to go. The young woman behind the desk pressed her lips together and kicked the signal bar at the side of her chair violently.
Arbin was fighting desperately for a lack of notoriety and failing miserably in his own mind. This girl was looking hard at him. She'd remember him a thousand years later. He had a wild desire to run, run back to the car, back to the farm...
Someone in a white lab coat was coming rapidly out of another room, and the receptionist was pointing to him. "Volunteer for the Synapsifier, Miss Shekt," she was saying. "He won't give his name."
Arbin looked up. It was still another girl, young. He looked disturbed. " Are you in charge of the machine, miss?"
"No, not at all." She smiled in a very friendly fashion, and Arbin felt anxiety ebb slightly.
"I can take you to him, though," she went on. Then, eagerly, "Do you really want to volunteer for the Synapsifier?"
"I just want to see the man in charge," Arbin said woodenly.
"All right." She seemed not at all disturbed by the rebuff. She slipped back through the door from which she had come. There was a short wait. Then, finally, there was the beckon of a finger...
He followed her, heart pounding, into a small anteroom. She said gently, "If you will wait about half an hour or less. Dr. Shekt will be with you. He is very busy just now...If you would like some book films and a viewer to pass the time. I'll bring them to you."
But Arbin shook his head. The four walls of the small room closed about him, and held him rigid, it seemed. Was he trapped? Were the Ancients coming for him?
It was the longest wait in Arbin's life.
Lord Ennius, Procurator of Earth, had experienced no comparable difficulties in seeing Dr. Shekt, though he had experienced an almost comparable excitement. In his fourth year as Procurator, a visit to Chica was still an event. As the direct representative of the remote Emperor, his social standing was, legalistically, upon a par with viceroys of huge Galactic sectors that sprawled their gleaming volumes across hundreds of cubic parsecs of space, but, actually, his post was little short of exile.
Trapped as he was in the sterile emptiness of the Himalayas, among the equally sterile quarrels of a population that hated him and the Empire he represented, even a trip to Chica was escape.
To be sure, his escapes were short ones. They had to be short, since here at Chica it was necessary to wear lead-impregnated clothes at all times, even while sleeping, and, what was worse, to dose oneself continually with metaboline.
He spoke bitterly of that to Shekt.
"Metaboline," he said, holding up the vermilion pill for inspection, "is perhaps a true symbol of all that your planet means to me, my friend. Its function is to heighten all metabolic processes while I sit here immersed in the radioactive cloud that surrounds me and which you are not even aware of."
He swallowed it. "There' Now my heart will beat more quickly; my breath will pump a race of its own accord; and my liver will boil away in those chemical syntheses that, medical men tell me, make it the most important factory in the body. And for that I pay with a siege of headaches and lassitude afterward."
Dr. Shekt listened with some amusement. He gave a strong impression of being nearsighted, did Shekt, not because he wore glasses or was in any way afflicted, but merely because long habit had given him the unconscious trick of peering closely at things, of weighing all facts anxiously before saying anything. He was tall and in his late middle age, his thin figure slightly stooped.
But he was well read in much of Galactic culture, and he was relatively free of the trick of universal hostility and suspicion that made the average Earthman so repulsive even to so cosmopolitan a man of the Empire as Ennius.
Shekt said, "I'm sure you don't need the pill. Metaboline is just one of your superstitions, and you know it. If I were to substitute sugar pills without your knowledge, you'd be none the worse. What's more, you would even psychosomaticize yourself into similar headaches afterward."
"You say that in the comfort of your own environment. Do you deny that your basal metabolism is higher than mine?"
"Of course I don't, but what of it? I know that it is a superstition of the Empire, Ennius, that we men of Earth are different from other human beings, but that's not really so in the essentials. Or are you coming here as a missionary of the anti-Terrestrians?"
Ennius groaned. "By the life of the Emperor, your comrades of Earth are themselves the best such missionaries. Living here, as they do, cooped up on their deadly planet, festering in their own anger, they're nothing but a standing ulcer in the Galaxy.
"I'm serious, Shekt. What planet bas so much ritual in its daily life and adheres to it with such masochistic fury? Not a day passes but I receive delegations from one or another of your ruling bodies for the death penalty for some poor devil whose only crime has been to invade a forbidden area, to evade the Sixty, or perhaps merely to eat more than his share of food."
"Ah, but you always grant the death penalty. Your idealistic distaste seems to stop short at resisting."
"The Stars are my witness that I struggle to deny the death. But what can one do? The Emperor will have it that all the subdivisions of the Empire are to remain undisturbed in their local customs-and that is right and wise, since it removes popular support from the fools who would otherwise kick up rebellion on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays. Besides, were I to remain obdurate when your Councils and Senates and Chambers insist on the death, such a shrieking would arise and such a wild howling and such denunciation of the Empire and all its works that I would sooner sleep in the midst of a legion of devils for twenty years than face such an Earth for ten minutes."
Shekt sighed and rubbed the thin hair back upon his skull. "To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know. Yet we are no different from you of the outer worlds, merely more unfortunate. We are crowded here on a world all but dead, immersed within a wall of radiation that imprisons us, surrounded by a huge Galaxy that rejects us. What can we do against the feeling of frustration that bums us? Would you, Procurator, be willing that we send our surplus population abroad?"
Ennius shrugged. "Would I care? It is the outside populations themselves that would. They don't care to fall victim to Terrestrial diseases."
"Terrestrial diseases!" Shekt scowled. "It is a nonsensical notion that should be eradicated. We are not carriers of death. Are you dead for having been among us?"
"To be sure," smiled Ennius, "I do everything to prevent undue contact."
"It is because you yourself fear the propaganda created, after all, only by the stupidity of your own bigots."
"Why, Shekt, no scientific basis at all to the theory that Earthmen are themselves radioactive?"
"Yes, certainly they are. How could they avoid it? So are you. So is everyone on every one of the hundred million planets of the Empire. We are more so, I grant you, but scarcely enough to harm anyone."
"But the average man of the Galaxy believes the opposite, I am afraid, and is not desirous of finding out by experiment. Besides-"
"Besides, you're going to say, we're different. We're not human beings, because we mutate more rapidly, due to atomic radiation, and have therefore changed in many ways... Also not proven."
"But believed."
"And as long as it is so believed, Procurator, and as long as we of Earth are treated as pariahs, you are going to find in us the characteristics to which you object. If you push us intolerably, is it to be wondered at that we push back? Hatina us as you do, can you complain that we hate in our turn? No, no, we are far more the offended than the offending."
Ennius was chagrined at the anger he had raised. Even the best of these Earthmen, he thought, have the same blind spot, the same feeling of Earth versus all the universe.
He said tactfully, "Shekt, forgive my boorishness, will you? Take my youth and boredom as excuse. You see before you a poor man, a young fellow of forty-and forty is the age of a babe in the professional civil service-who is grinding out his apprenticeship here on Earth. It may be years before the fools in the Bureau of the Outer Provinces remember me long enough to promote me to something less deadly. So we are both prisoners of Earth and both citizens of the great world of the mind in which there is distinction of neither planet nor physical characteristics. Give me your hand, then, and let us be friends."
The lines on Shekt's face smoothed out, or, more exactly, were replaced by others more indicative of good humor. He laughed outright. "The words are the words of a suppliant, but the tone is still that of the Imperial career diplomat. You are a poor actor, Procurator."
"Then counter me by being a good teacher, and tell me of this Synapsifier of yours."
Shekt started visibly and frowned. "What, you have heard of the instrument? You are then a physicist as well as an administrator?"
"All knowledge is my province. But seriously, Shekt, I would really like to know."
The physicist peered closely at the other and seemed doubtful. He rose and his gnarled hand lifted to his lip, which it pinched thoughtfully. "I scarcely know where to begin."
"Well, Stars above, if you are considering at which point in the mathematical theory you are to begin, I'll simplify your problem. Abandon them all. I know nothing of your functions and tensors and what not."
Shekt's eyes twinkled. "Well, then, to stick to descriptive matter only, it is simply a device intended to increase the learning capacity of a human being."
"Of a human being? Really! And does it work?"
"I wish we knew. Much more work is necessary. I'll give you the essentials, Procurator, and you can judge for yourself. The nervous system in man-and in animals-is composed of neuroprotein material. Such material consists of huge molecules in very precarious electrical balance. The slightest stimulus will upset one, which will right itself by upsetting the next, which will repeat the process, until the brain is reached. The brain itself is an immense grouping of similar molecules which are connected among themselves in all possible ways. Since there are something like ten to the twentieth power-that is, a one with twenty zeros after it-such neuroproteins in the brain, the number of possible combinations are of the order of factorial ten to the twentieth power. This is a number so large that if all the electrons and protons in the universe were made universes themselves, and all the electrons and protons in all of these new universes again made universes, then all the electrons and protons in all the universes so created would still be nothing in comparison...Do you follow me?"
"Not a word, thank the Stars. If I even attempted to, I should bark like a dog for sheer pain of the intellect."
"Hmp. Well, in any case, what we call nerve impulses are merely the progressive electronic unbalance that proceeds along the nerves to the brain and then from the brain back along the nerves. Do you get that?"
"Yes."
"Well, blessings on you for a genius, then. As long as this impulse continues along a nerve cell, it proceeds at a rapid rate, since the neuroproteins are practically in contact. However, nerve cells are limited in extent, and between each nerve cell and the next is a very thin partition of non-nervous tissue. In other words, two adjoining nerve cells do not actually connect with each other."
"Ah," said Ennius, "and the nervous impulse must jump the barrier."
"Exactly! The partition drops the strength of the impulse and slows the speed of its transmission according to the square of the width thereof. This holds for the brain as well. But imagine, now, if some means could be found to lower the dialectric constant of this partition between the cells."
"That what constant?"
"The insulating strength of the partition. That's all I mean. If that were decreased, the impulse would jump the gap more easily. You would think faster and learn faster."
"Well, then, I come back to my original question. Does it work?"
"I have tried the instrument on animals."
"And with what result?"
"Why, that most die very quickly of denaturation of brain protein-coagulation, in other words, like hard-boiling an egg."
Ennius winced. "There is something ineffably cruel about the cold-bloodedness of science. What about those that didn't die?"
"Not conclusive, since they're not human beings. The burden of the evidence seems to be favorable, for them...But I need humans. You see, it is a matter of the natural electronic properties of the individual brain. Each brain gives rise to microcurrents of a certain type. None are exactly duplicates. They're like fingerprints, or the blood-vessel patterns of the retina. If anything, they're even more individual. The treatment, I believe, must take that into account, and, if I am right, there will be no more denaturation...But I have no human beings on whom to experiment. I ask for volunteers, but-" He spread his hands.
"I certainly don't blame them, old man," said Ennius. "But seriously, should the instrument be perfected, what do you intend doing with it?"
The physicist shrugged. "That's not for me to say. It would be up to the Grand Council, of course."
"You would not consider making the invention available to the Empire?"
"I? I have no objections at all. But only the Grand Council has jurisdiction over-"
"Oh," said Ennius with impatience, "the devil with your Grand Council. I have had dealings with them before. Would you be willing to talk to them at the proper time?"
"Why, what influence could I possible have?"
"You might tell them that if Earth could produce a Synapsifier that would be applicable to human beings in complete safety, and if the device were made available to the Galaxy, then some of the restrictions on emigration to other planets might be broken down."
"What," said Shekt sarcastically, "and risk epidemics and our differentness and our non-humanity?"
"You might," said Ennius quietly, "even be removed en masse to another planet. Consider it." The door opened at this point and a young lady brushed her way in past the book-film cabinet. She destroyed the musty atmosphere of the cloistered study with an automatic breath of spring. At the sight of a stranger she reddened slightly and turned.
"Come in, Pola," called Shekt hastily. "My Lord," he said to Ennius, "I believe you have never met my daughter. Pola this is Lord Ennius, Procurator of Earth."
The Procurator was on his feet with an easy gallantry that negated her first wild attempt at a curtsy.
"My dear Miss Shekt," he said, "you are an ornament I did not believe Earth capable of producing. You would, indeed, be an ornament on any world I can think of."
He took Pola's hand, which was quickly and somewhat bashfully extended to meet his gesture. For a moment Ennius made as if to kiss it, in the courtly fashion of the past generation, but the intention, if such it was, never came to fruition. Half lifted, the hand was released-a trace too quickly, perhaps.
Pola, with the slightest of frowns, said, "I'm overwhelmed at your kindness, my Lord, to a simple girl of Earth. You are brave and gallant to dare infection as you do."
Shekt cleared his throat and interrupted. "My daughter, Procurator, is completing her studies at the University of Chica and is obtaining some needed field credits by spending two days a week in my laboratory as a technician. A competent girl, and though I say it with the pride of a father, she may someday sit in my place."
"Father," said Pola gently, "I have some important information for you." She hesitated.
"Shall I leave?" said Ennius quietly.
"No, no," said Shekt. "What is it, Pola?"
The girl said, "We have a volunteer, Father."
Shekt stared, almost stupidly. "For the Synapsifier?"
"So he says."
"Well," said Ennius, "I bring you good fortune, I see."
"So it would seem. " Shekt turned to his daughter. "Tell him to wait. Take him to Room C, and I'll be with him soon."
He turned to Ennius after Pola left. "Will you excuse me, Procurator?"
"Certainly. How long does the operation take?"
"It's a matter of hours, I'm afraid. Do you wish to watch?"
"I can imagine nothing more gruesome, my dear Shekt. I'll be in the State House till tomorrow. Will you tell me the result?"
Shekt seemed relieved. "Yes, certainly."
"Good...And think over what I said about your Synapsifier. Your new royal road to knowledge."
Ennius left, less at ease than when he had arrived; his knowledge no greater, his fears much increased.