The Star Virus

V

The planet Kelever was the sixth orbital of a white, intense sun that baked its four innermost worlds beyond any possibility of life. Kelever itself lay in a position that in most solar systems would have been occupied by a gas giant, and indeed long ago it might have been a gas giant. Its atmosphere still possessed an unpleasantly pervasive ammonia-like tang.

Most of the time the surface was gloomy, roofed with cloud and drenched with rain. The Stond put down at a spaceground on the edge of a city five million strong. On the way down Rodrone had noted that the planet was industrially well-developed, busy transport belts conveying endless streams of goods and materials across its broad surface.

While the ship’s computer argued with the ground controller over landing fees, Rodrone stared out over the rain-washed expanse, dotted with the humped shapes of spaceships. One worrying thought that had occurred to him was whether the Streall would be able to track him down here, too. But the possibility was slight. The Merchant Houses maintained no regular information service, and the Stond was just one ship among thousands.

Beyond the spaceground the city bulked gray and enormous, and thoroughly uninviting. It was strange that five million people consented to live in such a place, he thought. “Do you have an address for this man Sinnt?” he asked Redace. “Or do we have to go hunting for a needle in a haystack?”

“Unfortunately… no address,” Redace answered. “But I can guarantee to find our man in a fairly short period of time. Kelever is a scientist’s world, you see. They form clubs, societies. Some of them, I’m afraid are… well, a bit kookie. But there are a few silks among the rags, and Sinnt is one of them. He should be well known; we only have to ask around in the right quarters.”

“Sounds like a rave,” Clave commented sardonically. “Wild Science Rites on the Rain Planet. But supposing this character tells us to go and stuff our lens? It’s a long journey just for a brush-off.”

Redace regarded him quizzically. “My dear fellow, have you no idea what impels we scientific types? Sinnt will be forced to make an investigation of the lens, even if only because if he doesn’t he knows we’ll pass it on to one of the other kooks. He’s much too jealous of his reputation to risk that.”

“One of the other kooks?” Clave echoed in dismay. “I thought you said this guy was the silk among the rags?”

Rodrone ignored the exchange. Clave, of course, was not deeply interested in the lens and was only along for the ride, like all the others except Redace.

At length the shipboard computer finished its haggling with the ground computer and they were free to go into the city. To guard against the unlikely event that Jal-Dee might be trying to trace him through the Stond, Rodrone decided to take the lens with them, where they could lose themselves if need be in the endless drabness of Kelever’s main town.

He, Clave and Redace took a runabout and soon were driving through wet streets thronged with traffic. Many of the streets were roofed, but even those leaked and incessant rivers ran along the gutters.

The favorite color on Kelever seemed to be red; but there was not very much even of that. Dull red neon outlined the low entrances lining the buildings on either side, burning sullenly in the gray atmosphere. Many of the entrances seemed to lead to underground cellars, for the city appeared to be as extensive underground as it was above, possibly obeying an unconscious urge to burrow away from the dismal, ammonia-laden atmosphere.

Kell, as the city was called, was one of the many pockets of relative isolation scattered through the Hub. It had decayed into a certain staidness in its fashions. Tradition would count for more than was normally the case elsewhere, and the flamboyant Redace stood out like the visitor from another planet that he was.

Far from being abashed by his noticeable uniqueness, however, the pirate thrived on it. In a matter of minutes he had found them a hotel where they could leave the lens in a Guaranteed Safe Room.

“And now, dear colleagues,” he said, turning to them with a flourish, “we will proceed to the most enjoyable part of our mission: to search the dens of this place for Mard Sinnt!”

In the next few hours they learned what he had meant when trying to describe the “science clubs” with which Kell abounded. Some of the neon-outlined entrances on the streets gave access to such clubs, though the latter were more in the nature of drinking places with a particular kind of clientele. They plunged into a dim half-world of smoke-filled rooms and bizarre talk. Redace and Clave drank heavily, and seemed to be developing a close comradeship. But Rodrone drank little and said little. To the others, he seemed to be sulking.

Diagrams and microphotographs adorned the walls of many of the places they visited. Much of their content was semi-mystical nonsense or downright crankiness, but there were also what seemed to Rodrone many interesting ideas that he had not encountered elsewhere.

He also found evidence of latter-day sun worship. One reason why atomic science flourished here was that Kelever’s hot dense sun provided an excellent object for study in the field of nuclear physics. To the inhabitants hiding beneath their perpetual umbrellas of cloud, it had come to resemble the fount of all knowledge, showing itself clearly only in brief flashes when the clouds parted or from satellite research stations. The reverence many of the men he met that night held for their sun reminded him of the attitude of the ancient Egyptians towards Ra.

But their search for Mard Sinnt, the man Redace insisted should be consulted about the lens, was not at first successful. Although everyone had heard of him, no one knew where to find him. He did not frequent any of the well-known clubs and societies. He had not made known any new work lately. Some believed him to be dead.

Eventually they were directed to a back-street tavern on the other side of the city. Coming in out of downpouring rain, they found themselves in a low-ceilinged dive, the upper stories of the building supported by thick pillars of the local wood, jet black and immensely strong. Only old men were drinking there, and they looked on suspiciously at the entrance of younger faces.

The man they had been told to ask for sat alone in a corner, a saucer of syrupy fluid before him. It seemed to be the favorite beverage here; it could not be drunk directly, but was best lapped and slowly swallowed. Rodrone suspected that it also helped to relieve the bronchial troubles which must be rife in this humid, unhealthy atmosphere. “So you look for a man of science, do you?” the old man answered to their question, speaking laboriously. “You young fellows don’t know what science is all about.”

“Hmm. Well, you know, at least we have time to learn. You couldn’t say the same for your case.” Redace put this not-too-kind point in a tone of affable reasonableness.

“Young pups, always think you can do better than your fathers,” the other continued, ignoring him. “But you can’t. Your half-cocked notions are so much water down the drain. In our time it was different—no deduction, no philosophy, only induction. Hard empirical fact. That’s the only method. Stray from it and you might as well bury your head in a barrel of muck.” He lifted his saucer, sipped and swallowed painfully. “Pah! They think of energy as if it was something to worship. Bad, very bad… projection of subjective feelings. They seem to think the sun is a purposive intelligence. Yes, these youngsters even talk about deities.”

He uttered the last word in a tone of incredulous disgust, then went on to remark on the mental decadence of the younger generation. Fascinated, Rodrone prompted him further and began to piece the picture together. The men in the tavern represented an older generation of hard-liners who perhaps for the first time in centuries had tried to put physics back on a solid line of planned progress. They had stuck strictly, almost fanatically, to the experimental method and had ruthlessly thrown out any idea or theory that was not a suitable subject for demonstrable proof. But the generation they had reared had grown tired of their tough, colorless doctrine. They had begun to philosophize, and the insistence on fact had foundered in a morass of cults and cosmic speculation. Embittered and excluded, prevented even from pursuing their own brand of research, the elders now spent their time reminiscing and cursing their children.

For a moment Rodrone wondered whether this man, or one of his colleagues, might be a more suitable recruit than Sinnt for the investigation of the lens. But he rejected the idea. If the old man had once possessed the right qualities, he no longer did so. He lacked the necessary spark of creative imagination. His power was spent, his mind wandering in disappointment and endless recriminations.

Rodrone bought him another saucer of syrup. “But you knew Mard Sinnt.”

“Don’t speak that name to me,” the other said bleakly. “He is dead, gone, useless. Ten years I spent drawing up the plan for him to follow, and he rejected it.”

“Plan?”

He hesitated. “The plan for a lifetime’s research, already mapped out. If it had been followed, it might…” His fist clenched and unclenched. “One lifetime is not enough for some things.”

“So you do know him?” Clave was becoming exasperated.

“He is my nephew. His father entrusted him to me and charged me to see that he carried out the task. But he was more rebellious than a sea dragon.” He smiled, shaking his head. “The dragon that destroys itself, devouring its own body and drinking its own blood…”

He gave a deep sigh, then seemed to come out of his mood somewhat. With yellowed eyes he glanced sharply at the three.

“Why do you want him?”

Rodrone decided to be rash. “We have a Streall artifact. We need him to help us examine it.”

“Indeed? What kind of artifact?”

“A very sophisticated one. We know little about it yet.”

“Hmmm… The Streall do have some interesting gimmicks. Perhaps we could…” His eyebrows rose speculatively.

“If you want to know more about it, ask Sinnt,” Redace said harshly. “If we ever find him, of course.”

“Well, I suppose young Mard has ability, given to him by his father and myself. Wasted, of course, utterly wasted.” Shipping his syrup, he laid the saucer down again and waited expectantly.

With bad grace, Rodrone ordered more drinks.

The night was well advanced by the time they left the tavern and drove to a run-down district on the south quarter of the city.

The house of Mard Sinnt was old and decrepit, fronted with Kelever’s black wood which, however, had begun to rot and looked like rusted iron. The building had an indeterminate number of stories, perhaps four or five, and gave the appearance of being endlessly ramified within.

Rodrone climbed stone steps and placed his hand on an arrival signal plate. After some seconds a voice whispered from a speaker in the door.

“Who is it?”

He was aware of a television eye scanning the three of them. “You don’t know us,” he answered. “We have something of interest to Mard Sinnt.”

“Who sent you?”

Redace stepped forward. “Your fame has traveled far and wide, honorable one. At any rate, it has traveled as far as Cantilever City, that’s on what they call the Broken Planet—nothing but cliffs and chasms and other vertigo-inducing phenomena. A chap there by the name of Diron Mactire told me of you, and since we are looking for an expert, you naturally came to mind.”

“I never heard of the Broken Planet, but I know Diron Mactire. Follow the lights.”

The door swung open. Within, the passageway was gloomy, almost dark. Along the walls arrow-shaped lights began to stream away, leading them along the corridor and down a long flight of stairs.

Mard Sinnt, sitting at a large table strewn with papers, rose to meet them as they entered a long corridor-like room. At first they could see very little except the papers and books on the table, which were illuminated by a reddish lamp. Sinnt himself was no more than a humped shadow in a strange, purple darkness.

“You prefer normal light, perhaps?” the figure said in a hollow voice. An arm moved, and lights sprang to life.

Now they could see Sinnt clearly. He was not young, as the old man in the tavern had led them to believe, but approaching fifty. He was short, and slightly bowed, but his shoulders were broad and looked strong.

The face was startling, horrifying. Its expression was sharp and alert, but it was the expression that might be seen on a statue: there was no life in it. And the eyes were blind, completely blank and unpupiled, just like the dead eyes of a statue.

This last puzzled Rodrone for a second. Blindness was usually remediable, if the eyes were useless, either by eye transplants or the fitting of artificial eyes which looked only slightly different from the real thing. But Sinnt had chosen to fill his eye sockets with steel balls. His sight came from a camera apparatus fixed to his right shoulder. As Rodrone stepped forward to meet him, the camera turned to keep him in view, its two lenses glowing slightly. He noted the cable that joined Sinnt’s skull two inches behind his ear, connected no doubt directly to the optic nerve.

The reason why Sinnt had chosen this arrangement to restore his sight became clear to them a short time later. Rodrone shook him by the hand, trying to ignore the creepy feeling he got from looking a man in the face and being looked at in return from a point some inches to the left. “We had some trouble finding you,” he said. “Eventually we were helped by a relative of yours. Verard.”

Sinnt gave a croaking laugh. “Uncle Verard! Poor old fool! He told you I was lost in limbo, I suppose? Wasting my substance in useless speculation?”

“Something like that.”

Sinnt nodded, an unexpectedly live gesture from his eyeless head. “Sometimes I feel sorry for that clique of old drivelers. You should visit their data library sometime. They maintain it like a holy shrine—thousands upon thousands of completely unrelatable facts.”

“Facts are what science is about,” Redace said thoughtfully, stroking his chin.

“True, but they think the universe is constructed logically, brick by brick. They don’t realize how immensely mysterious and basically irrational it all is.” He invited them to be seated. “Well, you’re not here to discuss metaphysics. What’s it all about?”

Briefly Rodrone explained about his find and what conclusions they had been able to draw. Sinnt listened without interruption until he had finished.

“Yes… well you were right to come to me. Atomics is my field, and if it is an atomic device, as you think, I may be able to find out something. Let’s have a look at it, then. Where is it?”

“We have it in a Safe Room.”

“Bring it here, I don’t go traveling these days.”

Clave and Redace left to fetch the lens. Rodrone was alone with the bizarre scientist.

They sat facing one another, Sinnt staring unblinkingly from his shoulder camera. Rodrone knew he was being coldly, calmly appraised. For his own part, he found that it cost him a slight effort to be at ease with the man. It was hard to get used to the fact that he almost never turned his head; if he wished to shift his gaze, only the camera swiveled.

There was a strained silence for some seconds. Then, suddenly, Sinnt spoke in an unnatural voice.

“I had not ruled out the possibility that you were a Streall robot.”

The question was so unexpected that Rodrone laughed. “But why?”

“The Streall are normally very jealous of their artifacts. Your own story testifies to that. But your story could be an ingenious cover. Who knows that you are not a Streall tool, sent to take rather than to give?”

Completely mystified by these remarks, Rodrone asked, “To take what? Have you got something belonging to them too?”

Sinnt did not answer and for nearly a minute neither spoke. Then, to break the silence, Rodrone said, “And do you still consider me to be a robot?”

“No. I have given you a searching internal examination. I am satisfied that you are a human being and that you have not been tampered with. The Streall experience certain difficulties in understanding the human body, which are hard to mask. I would take the condition of your nervous system to be conclusive proof of your normality. In particular, they have never succeeded in following the complicated connections between the neocortex, the rear cortex, and the pineal gland, which is what makes man what he is and is unique to him.”

Rodrone remembered his own experience of the Streall’s off-beam attempts to control human nervous systems. But this thought was pushed aside by his amazement of Sinnt’s claim. While he had been sitting here the scientist had examined his body in every detail, even down to the functioning of his brain. This unparalleled feat explained why Sinnt had foregone the use of more normally aesthetic eyes. He was not content to limit his vision to the visible spectrum. His shoulder camera must be sensitive to all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation from radio waves to high-frequency gamma rays, and no doubt was capable of receiving images from many other kinds of radiation as well. It would be able to function as an electron microscope, of course, and probably it had some sensitivity to the host of subtle, ghostlike radiations given off by atoms, but whose ultimate nature was completely unknown.

Sinnt had adapted himself to the needs of his research. Rodrone had noticed that the luminosity and color of his eye lenses seemed to vary slightly, but he had taken this to be due to the waxing and waning of his attention. Instead, it betokened his constant switching to alternative modes of vision.

But Rodrone was also surprised by the other’s interesting and informative remarks concerning man’s nature. How did he come to know so much about it, and furthermore how did he know so much about the Streall? There was something offbeat and odd about the way Sinnt launched into a conversation.

“Perhaps it is you who are the Streall robot,” he suggested.

“No such luck.” Sinnt broke into his creaking laughter. “Tell me,” he continued calmly, “have you never thought how extraordinary it is that there should be only two star-faring races in the galaxy?”

Indeed, Rodrone had exercised his mind with his question often. Other life there was in plenty, and numerous other species with intelligence—of a kind. But it was intelligence without the spark, the fire, that had enabled man— and presumably the Streall—to reverse his natural subservience to the environment. Thousands of civilizations in the Hub had risen to high levels, but always slowly and painfully, imbued with a passive acceptance of their limitations. It amazed Rodrone that nowhere—with the one exception—was man’s technological explosion repeated. True, there were a few who had succeeded in traveling to nearby moons and planets in huge, clumsy rockets; but where this happened it was invariably as the final triumph of a dying race. And Rodrone had always felt sympathetically for the occasional species which, on the last verge of extinction, had wonderingly discovered atomic energy much too late to save itself.

“You seem to think you know the answer,” he said somewhat sullenly to Sinnt.

“I know the answer, but I don’t know the reason. Man’s brain is constructed differently from that of any other intelligent species. That’s why he is so abnormally quick to discover, to invent, and to spread through the universe. In general the sentient brain conforms to a basic pattern throughout the galaxy. It is a logical, predictable pattern. Only man is the maverick, the sport, the freak that has broken nature’s rule. I say ‘rule,’ but for man’s presence, one would probably call it a law.”

“And you attribute it to the cortical connections?”

“Yes.”

This idea was new to Rodrone. He was pleased and intrigued by it. “But what about the Streall? They equal us in everything. They must also have these illogical ‘connections.’”

“The Streall? Not a bit of it. Their brains are pretty much like the others.”

“Then I’d say your theory breaks down, unless you have yet another explanation for their superiority.”

Sinnt grimaced, an extraordinarily ugly spectacle. “They’ve been around for a long time. They did it all slowly. If you think about it, they must find us pretty bewildering. A million years ago we couldn’t even add two and two, yet suddenly we jump up and challenge them.”

“I’m not challenging anybody,” Rodrone said. “Furthermore it seems to me that your last answer is a pure evasion. There must be some evolutionary principle at work here.”

He would have continued further, but a sharp whistling tone sounded. Sinnt pressed a lever under the edge of the table, at which the faces of Clave and Redace appeared on a small screen.

The scientist pressed another lever to admit them. “I only mention these matters,” he said casually, turning his shoulder apparatus towards Rodrone, “because the, er, lens your friends are bringing seems in some roundabout way to relate to them. At any rate, I have an idea that it may give us a new angle on this, er, evolutionary principle, as you call it.” He spoke haltingly, as though hedging around something he did not wish to speak about.

“So you think my theory that the lens is a galactic observing instrument is wrong?”

“Oh, not necessarily. I think your theory is a very good one. But in view of the Streall’s desperate attempts to recover it—using tactics reminiscent of a political power struggle—it is more than likely that it will be able to tell us something fundamental about the confrontation of the two races.”

At that moment Clave and Redace entered pulling the lens on a small trolley. Swiveling and bowing, Sinnt’s camera turned to look at it. Then he rose, beckoned, and stiffly led them through a sliding panel and down a short, light-less corridor. Lights sprang into being to illuminate a large, cavern-like space.

This, Rodrone guessed, must be his main laboratory. The floor space was strewn with a maze of radiation baffles arranged around banks and humps of apparatus. Many of the pieces he recognized; and from the look of it, Sinnt possessed every item of equipment he had ever heard of, and many he had not.

Sinnt gestured irritably, telling them where to place the lens. The lenses on his shoulder glowed and flashed in changing colors. “Remarkable,” he murmured. “Quite an entertainment.”

“At one time we thought the lighted part in the center represented a map of the galaxy,” Rodrone informed him, “but it doesn’t check out.”

“Indeed?” Sinnt stroked his chin, then stepped to a nearby computer and pulled out an extensible cord. With a slight shudder Rodrone watched him lift a lock of his hair and plug the end of the cord into a tiny silver socket embedded in his skull, after which he returned to the lens, trailing the cord behind him.

For a full minute he stood stock-still, a frown of concentration on his face. His unseeing eyes stared straight ahead, but the compact camera, with rapt attention, was trained on the lens.

“Your surmise was not as wrong as you think,” he said finally, speaking slowly and wonderingly. “As closely as I can compute, then atom for atom, the doped light-producing region does match the stars of the galaxy—but the galaxy as it existed roughly a trillion years ago. Not surprisingly, you failed to recognize it, the formation having changed considerably since then.”

Rodrone and Redace glanced unbelievingly at one another. They had spent weeks in comparing a galactic map with an estimated distribution of the “dope” content of the lens. Sinnt, in a breathtaking feat, had carried out a vast range of such comparisons in only a minute. There was no point in even admiring such an ability, springing as it did from a technique of linking a brain with a computer. Briefly Rodrone wondered what it would be like to think that way, what godlike feeling it might bring.

“So what do you infer?” he asked huskily.

“As yet, nothing. But we have much work to do. My son will help us.”

He turned, murmured into a communicator unit. Shortly, a door opened and a young boy entered. Rodrone judged him to be about twelve years old. His head was a mass of dark curls. Unlike his father, he had alert, shining blue eyes; nevertheless, a twin to his father’s camera squatted incongruously large on his right shoulder, and the lenses glowed with life. Further, a freshly shaved bald patch showed where a computer input socket had been surgically implanted into his skull.

Sinnt must have noticed their expression of distaste. “It is a duty to instruct one’s children. To put them on the right path,” he said sternly.

“Isn’t that the mistake your father made?” Clave asked softly.

The scientist refused to answer, but he smiled scornfully. It was the first time they had seen him smile, and it was to be the last.