PENDULUM
By A E Van Vogt
Table of Contents
PENDULUM 7
THE MALE CONDITION 38
LIVING WITH JANE 51
THE FIRST RULL 82
FOOTPRINT FARM 102
THE NON-ARISTOTELIAN DETECTIVE 114
THE HUMAN OPERATORS 123
THE LAUNCH OF APOLLO XVII 142
Pendulum
"All right, Hud, that's it. Stop!'*
Hudman had long ago formed the habit of translating all the English spoken at him into Frisian, silently, of course, under his breath, and then answering silently in Frisian and finally translating the Frisian aloud into English. As a consequence of this procedure, he was known as "that slow Dutchman!"
He did the translation automatically as he stopped. Or rather, as he pressed the correct button on the controls there on the deck of the gently tossing vessel—those controls which telegraphed the stop message 2Vz miles down to the massive equipment they had been setting up on the sea bottom for a week. The Frisian words that he undertoned were, "Gooet, Hud, dot iss it. Stoppya!"
He grew aware of a tingling in the fingers that touched the button, started to pull away, then let his hand freeze as another set of words boomed in his mind: "Booska, Hud, manu fa coor. Yat!"
"Glub!" said a startled Hudman aloud, in English.
Afterwards, he would remember that moment and what followed, and would realize what a fantastic and incredible event it was.
There they were, a hundred men on a ship in a calm, tropical sea. As far as vision could range was a seemingly endless, restless, glittering ocean, reflecting the brilliance of an early afternoon sun.
It was stiflingly hot; yet there was a relieving wetness—not humidity, but a spray—that came up to cool them whenever a large wave slapped hard against their low-lying vessel.
They were remote from the great world of humankind, do-
7
8 A. E. van vogt
ing their strange work in water over two miles deep, and suddenly—
He must have made an unusual movement, in some way reacted violently, for his companion on deck said, "Hey, Hud, what'sa matter?"
Hudman remained where he was, vaguely conscious that he was not well, but making no decisions at all. There was an enormous confusion in his brain; pictures, sounds, voices, people, tumbling past his awareness in bits and pieces and flashes. An eye, a ringer, a word, a window, a white cloth, a pair of blue pants, a woman's blonde hair done up in a bun exactly on top of the center of her head, a city in the distance, the glint of a stream—these were among the images that stayed with him long enough to be recognizable. The impression was that thousands, if not millions, of such flitted by his mind's eye.
Through and beyond that interior madness, Hudman was aware of the chunky Italian climbing off the observer's chair, and striding over to where he sat at the controls of the winch, swaying. And where, abruptly, without having any personal control, he started to fall.
"Hey, watch it!" said Stuponi in an alarmed voice.
As the man grabbed him roughly and held him, his leather jacket pressed against the reeling Hudman's cheek. And one of the things that was good about that was that the jacket was wet and cool from sea spray. And another thing that was good was that the arms were strong.
What the man's voice said was only partly good. "How ya comin'? How ya comin'? Just tell me when you're okay, and 111 let go. Hey, you gotta heart attack or sumpin'?"
The final question penetrated what seemed like billions of mental images and voices, and brought a spasm of fear. "Good Lord!" he thought, and for the first time in years he did not translate from the Frisian. "Good God, is it possible? Is this what a heart attack is like?"
He was dimly conscious, then, of being half carried and half dragged over to where the helicopter rested in its holding chains and launch gear. And now one of the men had come out and down from the bridge and was helping to hold him. And somebody else's voice was yelling in the strange echoing way that voices sounded from a distance in sea air, saying, "We'd better fly him to the island and get him medical help."
PENDULUM 9
For a long time after that, he lay on the floor of the helicopter with a pillow under his head. Sputoni sat in a seat beside him, and in his ears was the roar of the driving engines and of the rotor. And in his mind, the realization that he was beginning to feel better. The inner voices seemed to be receding into a remoter background, still there but no longer dominating.
With that increasing separation from the source of confusion, gradually he was again. A kind of normalcy returned then. And stayed.
Once more, he was in a mental condition of being able to decide things for himself, though there seemed to be nothing to decide.
Since he had had that particular obsession from his earliest teens, he thought about it. Soberly. Somehow, it had never previously occurred to him that hi a personal physical crisis, a human being really had no choice . . . In what happened back there on the ship, I didn't have a single say. It was all automatic.
Because he hated automaticity, he tried now, as he lay there, to think of a purpose he might have. After many minutes, all he had come up with was Wait! Wait and find out what was wrong.
He waited.
They had been operating for a month in the vicinity (within 500 miles) of Tengu Island, so they had their own landing location at the airport of the principal city, Askara. Nothing fancy. Just a flat, roped-off area and a shed marked U.S. Government—Authorized Personnel Only.
The helicopter squatted down in its noisy, but gentle, fashion. Whereupon, Sputoni went over to the adjoining shed and commandeered a jeep. They were presently driving along the main street of Askara to the office of the officially designated M.D., a Dr. Kyet.
Hudman, at first, sat stolidly beside the Italian. But presently his brows knitted. He wiggled in his seat. He looked around and up and away, showing awareness of his surroundings.
All by itself, that street scene was worth a couple, or three, or four, blinking glances. It was quite narrow, as if its builders had begrudged space for people. There seemed to be room only for the shops, and for a two-way highway which
10 A. e.vanvogt
the prospective customers, if any, shared with the automobile traffic.
Some very special customer types were on that street. After his first look, Hudman wet his lips, puzzled. After his fourth look made its visual survey, he sat up bolt straight. He said, "Hey, Spute, look at all those guys and women in the blue pants and that funny white shirt."
"Yeah," nodded Sputoni, "I been noticin' 'em. Must be a visiting warship in the harbor."
Hudman said, "Oh!" Then he said, "Oh, of course.** Naturally, he thought, who else? He did notice that the way you could tell the girls from the boys was that they had blonde hair done up in a bun on the top of the center of the head. And that was somehow familiar, as if he had seen it before.
The explanation was good enough. And so for the first time since his heart attack—as he now accepted it to have been—he translated again into Frisian. The internal return of normalcy was that complete.
Sputoni accompanied him into the waiting room of the doctor's office. But he didn't sit down. Instead, he stood, looking ill at ease, shifting from foot to foot and parting his lips as if he intended to say something, and then didn't say it. Hudman grinned knowingly up at the chunky little guy, and said finally, "Hey, Spute, while I'm here in good hands, why don't you slip over to Little Italy, have a snort, and talk Italian to the barkeep?"
"Yeah—hey, you gotta good thought.". The thick face looked sheepish, but relieved. Sputorii headed for the door. Hudman called after him, "Be back in, say, an hour." "Yeah, sure—"
Dr. Kyet turned out to be a handsome, brown-skinned, native islander. He spoke accentless American. After having his brown-skinned nurse make the stereotyped tests, he came in with a little chart in his hand and said, "If that was a heart attack, there's no sign of it here. So it wasn't. You've got as good a ticker as I've seen in the last year."
"Dat iss gooet. Doe bist bedaanked!" said an almost overwhelmed Hudman under his breath. And, a moment later, translated aloud, "That's great. Thanks."
It was still 20 minutes before Sputoni was due back. Hudman, bouncy now, decided not to wait. Moments later,
11
smiling, relieved, ebullient, he stepped outside briskly—squarely, so to speak, into the center of a group of the blue-trousered men he had noticed on the way over.
Hudman apologized. "Excuse me, gentlemen, I shouldn't have barged out like—"
He stopped. They were looking at him. All of them. At him. And they all had purple eyes—bright, large, slightly protruding—and whitish-gray faces. Also (it hit him instantly) there was a peculiar smell.
Hudman didn't actually connect the smell right away with the people. After all, this was exotic Askara. And just in the nicking of his gaze, there, not too far away, was an overturned garbage can, its gooey contents spilled on the combination sidewalk-road. Swarms of insects attested to the special overripe attractiveness of the yellowish puddle it made. Also, beyond that, a dog was in the act of defecating. And, beyond that, standing beside an electric-light post, one of the blue-trousered types was relieving himself. -t~
That was about as far as Hudman's perception had time to take him into colorful Askara's main street. The very next instant one of the blue-trousered men near him stepped closer, reached forward with a tiny, gleaming, pencillike object, and touched his hand.
... He was walking with the group. Not thinking about it Not asking himself the sequence of logic that made what he was doing seem like an act of free will.
He still noticed things. Noticed, for example, how odd, really, was the white shirt that these people wore ... For Pete's sake, he thought, it's a big, wide scarf folded in the middle, with a frilled hole at the fold for the neck. The two bottom ends were, respectively, tucked into the front and the back of the blue pants. In between, on either side, whitish-gray skin was visible,
He was led by the young men into a cocktail lounge. Hudman noticed over the entrance the sign: HAGLE-STEIN'S BAR—Stop and Wet Your Whistle, Friend. And still he had no resisting thought. Moments later, he was guided to a corner table where a large man in the same type of dress—blue pants and white shawl shirt—sat watching his approach with a pair of large, purple eyes.
The youths paused at the table, and so did Hudman. Since it was the corner, he half turned, and so he saw his captors
12 A. E. van voot
(which is how he thought of them later) each make a gesture with his hand. Sort of turning the palm smartly. A salute? Hudman wondered.
The big man responded in kind. Then, looking at Hudman, spoke slowly in English: "S-s-i-i-t-t!" He pointed at the empty space across the table. \
The gesture, and the word, in a vague way implied a command. And that triggered in Hudman first, a pause, and then a remote wonder about what he was doing here, for Pete's sake! The seated older man seemed to realize the problem for, after a hesitation of his own, he said, "Uh, pul-1-l-ee-ee-se."
It was visibly the right approach to the deep, timeless source of resistance inside Hudman. Without another thought, he sat down in the indicated chair. Simultaneously, the man's hand gestured at the youths, and they departed.
Absently, Hudman noticed that they paused just outside the door, and waited there. For sqme reason, that seemed perfectly satisfactory, so he faced forward as the big man said, "I'm having time—," he paused and cocked his head as if listening, then, "—hard time with English. But I have an interest question. What you doing out there on the water? I . . . not seem to get clear picture from your head. What you put down in the deep sea that stir my tomb?"
Hudman started to echo "Tomb?" Abruptly, he realized that the other man had a problem with the English language, so he said, tentatively, "The water is 21A miles deep."
"Hmmm." The purple eyes were thoughtful. "The earth crust really been pushed there. I wonder how long it take?"
"We're in the tropics," Hudman explained in a baffled voice. "That means the water on the surface is warm, and the water on the bottom, except for currents here and there, lies cold and unmoving. It's like a desert. No movement. No life. Forever."
The man nodded, and spoke another of his enigmatic sentences: "I sense we there, not forever, but very long time."
"The surface of the tropical sea is hot," Hudman continued doggedly, "so we put in piping and set up a pumping system for bringing the hot surface water down there. Once that process starts—and we had just started it—convection begins. The warmed water roils upward, stirring bottom nutrients. Life stirs."
"We stirred," the man agreed.
PENDULUM 13
"You're not the kind of life I mean," Hudman said in a severe tone. "The sea life cycle, where there was none before, starts. Tiny sea life, which brings larger life to eat it, which brings large fish. And where there's food, breeding can start, and go on as long as the roiling continues. We're putting down a pump system every 50 miles." He finished, "In a few years, fishing fleets will find in those waters enough edible fish to feed a few billion more people."
"Good!" nodded the heavyset man. "There lot of us. We need all food we can get." He paused, frowning. "The big problem . . ." he seemed to be thinking out loud, for his eyes pointed off to one side, "where we put everybody?"
In Hudman, at that point, came the Big Pause. Even a child can only listen to a limited number of sentences spoken at cross purposes, and he was a man who had noticed each apparently meaningless statement uttered by the other man.
It was full stop. And at least half a dozen double takes. A feeling of—for Pete's sake! Then, from pursed lips, tentatively, "How many of you are there?"
Unexpectedly, tears welled into the purple eyes. "It seem wrong," the older man sobbed. "Thirty billion people, and not even you have power to bring more than fraction here."
"How do you mean, me?" Again, the feeling of being at cross purposes.
The tears were still spurting. "Doubt we can rescue more than eight," wept the man. "As catalyst, you pretty good, but you only one person."
"Eight billion?" said Hudman, faintly.
A measurable number of seconds passed by, at least 11 or 12. Across the table, the tears stopped spilling. Hudman involuntarily braced himself for what was, after another long moment, not clear. He was beginning to feel blank again.
Here was madness, and he was the mild-mannered type who did not attack aberration in others by direct confrontation. Unless* of course, it was aimed at him.
The chunky man was recovering rapidly. A smile suddenly brightened the gray-skinned face. "My friend," said this changed being, "I want thank you for rescue us. We been wait a long time. My name Lluuan."
Hudman went through his Frisian ritual, ending with, "Thanks for what, for Pete's sake!"
"Who is Pete?" asked Lluuan, sounding genuinely puzzled.
14 a.e.vanvogt
Having spoken, he made a decisive gesture with his left shoulder, pushing it forward. Simultaneously, he straightened in his chair. He said, "First things have to be first. L...
widez2