The Short Life Part 9

Phil sat with his face averted, his hands clenched between his knees.

"The instinct to survive," he said in a m.u.f.fled voice. "I can't blame you for what you did, but it was cruel! What a d.a.m.nable trick to play on the parents!"

"Believe me, I know what you feel but there was no other way."

"No other!" He swung around, his face mottled and his breathing heavy.

"Whatever you are, you made a Machiavellian puppet-master out of a lousy, flea-bitten mongrel! Was it beyond _those_ powers to heal Timmy's mind?"

"I am not a psychopathic criminal."

"Do you imply that healing Timmy would involve repeating the swindle you worked on Homer?"

"No. I could have by-pa.s.sed the simple neural block that was leaving Timmy helpless, and so have given him what to you would have seemed his normal intelligence. In addition, I could have completed the work that nature left incomplete in all of you, and so have released his full, enormous capabilities. I could have done all this--can still do it--and still leave Timmy's ego untouched, to develop in its own way, among its own kind, knowing nothing of me for what I am."

"But you haven't done so. Why? Why!"

"I dared not."

"Danger? From a small boy?"

"Deadly danger--danger of infection that might threaten every intelligent race in the galaxy and even spread across the great gulfs of s.p.a.ce beyond--"

"All this from poor little Timmy?"

"From what he might thereby become."

"I'm licked." Phil threw out his hands angrily. "I try to get a straight answer and all I get is implications. You tell me an outrageous story, and I believe you. You tell me you've neatly arranged to break the hearts of two of my best friends, and I respect your good intentions in doing so. Why? I love you like a brother, but I'm ready to take a rock and crush your skull in for a monster. I mean it! I could kill Homer with a single kick! I could--"

"I know, and I'm afraid of that hysterical impulse. I know the nature of the struggle going on in your mind better than you do, but only you can fight for control. I must wait for the outcome. When you have control of yourself--"

"You're so b.l.o.o.d.y sane and smug you with your secondhand suit and hand-me-down knowledge!" He jumped up in a fury and turned his back on Timmy, addressing himself directly to Homer whose patient, pain-filled eyes held undeniable understanding. "Look at you! The telepathic genius with personal immortality--at a price only you could stomach! Too bad you got caught short and had to live in a cur! Tough, isn't it, having to wait for a mere moron to get control of himself! _You_ know all the answers--why don't _you_ control the situation?"

"Because the hand-me-down knowledge is no longer backed by the mental capacity of a Challon."

Phil stiffened as Tim's answering voice sounded behind him, quiet and friendly. Against his will, he turned back to the boy and seated himself again on the log. The boy's eyes caught and held his.

"The morality and outlook of the Challon are my morality and outlook, whether I wish it so or not." Tim might have been making a pleasantly inconsequential remark about the weather for all the importance he seemed to attach to his statement, yet his eyes held the strained, tight-lipped face. "The insight and understanding bequeathed by the Challon are sufficient to keep Homer's mind sane under long stress, and of course--"

His soothing voice went on and on, and presently his lungs expelled a soft breath of relief as Phil relaxed a trifle, still breathing raggedly. Alert eyes watched him mop his damp forehead but the quiet words flowed in an unhurried stream, soothing, distracting, keeping the thread intact. At last the crises seemed behind them. "... So I can only wait for you to absorb the emotional impact of what I've told you. I had planned to prepare you, to break it gently if I could, but ... you understand?" The voice paused, then repeated gently and insistently, "You understand, don't you?"

"Uh ... yes. Homer--"

"He can't last much longer, and so of course I can't. I've landed one kick after another right smack in your emotional solar plexus and you're trying to catch your wind." Tim's hand casually struck a match for the cigarette Phil had put unlit in his mouth and the man leaned forward automatically, puffed, and automatically muttered a word of thanks. The quiet voice went on, taking an even more casual note. "What with trying to examine the implications of everything at once, you've stirred up a fine old Irish stew of fears, resentments and envies, all of them trying to reconcile the certain knowledge that I can be trusted and the essentially neurotic fear that I'm playing you for an almighty sucker.

"Remember, it has been even harder for me to reconcile myself to you human beings than it can possibly be for you to accept the existence of the Challon. The concept of telepathy is not a completely new or alien one to you, but the concept of a nontelepathic civilization was dismissed by the Challon ages ago as a simple contradiction of terms, a self-evident absurdity such as lifting oneself by one's bootstraps.

"It seemed so obvious that a civilized society could not develop without the capacity for intelligent cooperation, and intelligent cooperation of any real complexity was impossible without adequate communication. What means of communication could adequately replace the direct linking of mind and mind? Failing any answers short of fantasy, the proposition always remained a sort of cla.s.sroom joke with us. In fact, several cla.s.sic satires exist on the subject and one of the least successful--because it seemed too ridiculous--suggested an elaborately coded system of vocalizing. We have a very elementary spoken language and a more complex code of inscriptions for essential records, but neither the written nor the spoken system could possibly be called an adequate means of communication.

"I realize now that one of the satires was not the rather frightening effort that it seemed to be, but a brilliant scientific prediction of the probable development and history of a race of highly intelligent nontelepaths. The composer of the epic pointed out that where the culture and character of the Challon neither permitted nor desired concealment of any sort, a race that lacked adequate communication would have no choice but to live as disharmonious groups of strangers, never truly knowing either their fellows or themselves. He postulated what you now call traumatic experiences which, unrecognized and, therefore, untreated, would fester in secrecy from childhood onward until they manifested as compulsive drives or inhibitive complexes. He invented deranged emotions which you describe as 'guilt' and 'shame' and he showed how they would cause buried memories to erupt in changed form, lead to cankerous misunderstandings, cause unhealthy repressions, and foster frustrations.

"But his master-stroke--and this was pure genius, for it was almost inconceivable--was when he traced the development of his 'nontelepathic civilization' to the point where he predicted criminals, criminal and moral codes of unbelievable complexity, and a great mult.i.tude of harmful and illogical taboos, local customs, and regional superst.i.tions.

It was a superb achievement of creative imagination and scientific deduction--but not even its creator thought it was more than an exercise in fantasy and perhaps not in the best of taste. The basic a.s.sumption was simply too absurd for serious consideration."

"Yeah. I guess we were as indigestible to you as you are to me. Maybe I'm getting over it. Sorry ... uh ... Homer."

"Call me Tim. I don't think of myself as Homer and my Challon identification is a mental-verbal linkage. Even 'Challon' is a compromise simplification."

"I guess it would be. Those cracks I made--"

"Forget them. To what you call the hag-ridden moron jittering out of sight in your mind, so many things equate to a threat to survival.

And so many survival reactions outlast their usefulness, becoming essentially antisocial and antisurvival. For a telepathic race there are no false fronts or motives or impulses. In a nontelepathic society, nothing but false faces are ever seen."

"It's beginning to get home to me ... what about that night near the swamp?"

"My poor Challonari. The shockwave of 'my' death left it alert but bewildered. It could not recognize nontelepathic intelligences and tried to turn them aside like the first one. Their deaths are on my head--or on the organic dust that eight years ago was a Challon. The Challonari was confused by the contradictions of my present ident.i.ty, subtly altered as it has been by Homer's channeling mind, and went insane when faced with a basic conflict of duties. It was like ... losing a simple child."

"So we return to Timmy."

"And to you."

"Me? I'm going downhill fast. Let's have it before I hit rock-bottom and _really_ get around to reacting. And let's have a few straight answers.

You could have by-pa.s.sed the first block that makes Timmy an idiot.

O. K., why didn't you?"

"I would have lost control of him at once, of course. For one thing, as an ordinary child his mind would be closed to me just as yours is and I would be a voiceless animal with no protector, my existence likely to end at the bottom of a river in a weighted sack."

"No dice. Remember, I know you too well to believe you'd place your own interests first, much as I hate to admit it."

"As Homer I might, survival being a basic drive. As the Challon-Homer, however, I needed a better reason than simple self-preservation. I have that better reason. It lies in you, in Timmy, and in all your kind.

Perhaps you'll see the connection when I tell you that although the Challon are the most intelligent race yet known to exist, h.o.m.o sapiens is _at present_ not far behind them. Only more efficient communication and the great strides that it makes possible has advanced the Challon culture and science so disproportionately far beyond your own."

"So the Challon are a bit brighter and a lot more advanced than we are.

O. K., they seem like a good bunch ... or are they? Come to think of it, I saw them from your viewpoint which was predisposed to favor them."

Another thought struck him and he fell silent for a moment. "You say we are almost their equal _at present_. What happens--if this inhibited potential you speak of--is released--if Man is made whole?"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The answer came quietly.

"You would have no equal in the known universe."

Phil's face grew thoughtful, sober, while the Challon-Homer watched through Tim's eyes the progress of a calculated gamble.