Gordon R. Dickson - In The Bone.pdf - Gordon Dickson - margozap

IN THE BONE

Gordon R. Dickson

Personally, his name was Harry Brennan.

Officially, he was the John Paul Jones , which consisted of four billion dollars’ worth of irresistible

equipment – the latest and best of human science – designed to spread its four thousand-odd

components out through some fifteen cubic metres of space under ordinary conditions – designed also to

stretch across light-years under extraordinary conditions (such as sending an emergency

message-component home) or to clump into a single magnetic unit in order to shift through space and

explore the galaxy. Both officially and personally – but most of all personally – he represents a case in

point.

The case is one having to do with the relative importance of the made thing and its maker.

It was, as we know, the armoured horseman who dominated the early wars of the Middle Ages in

Europe. But, knowing this, it is still wise to remember that it was not the iron shell that made the

combination of man and metal terrible to the enemy – but rather the essentially naked man inside the shell.

Later, French knights depending on their armour went down before the cloth-yard shafts of unarmoured

footmen with bows, at Crécy and Poitiers.

And what holds true for armour holds true for the latest developments of our science as well. It is not the

spacecraft or the laser on which we will find ourselves depending when a time of ultimate decision comes,

but the naked men within and behind these things. When that time comes, those who rank the made thing

before its maker will die as the French knights died at Crécy and Poitiers. This is a law of nature as wide

as the universe, which Harry Brennan, totally unsuspecting, was to discover once more for us, in his

personal capacity.

Personally, he was in his mid-twenties, unremarkable except for two years of special training with the

John Paul Jones and his superb physical condition. He was five-eleven, a hundred and seventy-two

pounds, with a round, cheerful face under his brown crew-cut hair. I was Public Relations Director of the

Project that sent him out; and I was there with the rest to slap him on the back the day he left.

“Don’t get lost, now,” said someone. Harry grinned.

“The way you guys built this thing,” he answered, “if I got lost the galaxy would just have to shift itself

around to get me back on plot.”

There was an unconscious arrogance hidden in that answer, but no one marked it at the time. It was not

the hour of suspicions.

He climbed into the twelve-foot-tall control-suit that with his separate living tank were the main

components of the John Paul Jones and took off. Up in orbit, he spent some thirty-two hours testing to

make sure all the several thousand other component parts were responding properly. Then he left the

solar system.

He clumped together his components, made his first shift to orbit Procyon – and from there commenced

his exploration of the stars. In the next nine weeks, he accumulated literally amazing amounts of new

information about the nearby stars and their solar systems. And – this is an even better index of his

success – located four new worlds on which men could step with never a spacesuit or even a water

canteen to sustain them. Worlds so like Earth in gravity, atmosphere and even flora and fauna that they

could be colonised tomorrow.

Those were his first four worlds. On the fifth he encountered his fate – a fate for which he was

unconsciously ripe.

The fact was the medical men and psychologists had overlooked a factor – a factor having to do with

the effect of Harry’s official John Paul Jones self upon his entirely human personal self. And over nine

weeks this effect had changed Harry without his ever having suspected it.

You see, nothing seemed barred to him. He could cross light-years by touching a few buttons. He could

send a sensing element into the core of the hottest star, into the most poisonous planetary atmospheres or

crushing gravities, to look around as if he were down there in person. From orbit, he could crack open a

mountain, burn off a forest or vaporise a section of icecap in search of information just by tapping the

energy of a nearby sun. And so, subtly, the unconscious arrogance born during two years of training, that

should have been noted in him at take-off from Earth, emerged and took him over – until he felt that there

was nothing he could not do; that all things must give way to him; that he was, in effect, master of the

universe.

The day may come when a man like Harry Brennan may hold such a belief and be justified. But not yet.

On the fifth Earthlike world he discovered – World 1242 in his records – Harry encountered the proof

that his belief was unjustified.

The world was one which, from orbit, seemed to be the best of all the planets which he had discovered

were suitable for human settlement; and he was about to go down to its surface personally in the

control-suit, when his instruments picked out something already down there.

It was a squat, metallic pyramid about the size of a four-plex apartment building; and it was radiating on

a number of interesting frequencies. Around its base there was mechanical movement and an area of

cleared ground. Further out, in the native forest, were treaded vehicles taking samples of the soil, rock

and vegetation.

Harry had been trained for all conceivable situations, including an encounter with other intelligent,

space-going life. Automatically, he struck a specific button, and immediately a small torpedo-shape

leaped away to shift through alternate space and back to Earth with the information so far obtained. And

a pale, thin beam reached up and out from the pyramid below. Harry’s emergency messenger component

ceased to exist.

Shaken, but not yet really worried, Harry struck back instantly with all the power his official self could

draw from the GO-type sun, nearby.

The power was funnelled by some action below, directly into the pyramid itself; and it vanished there as

indifferently as the single glance of a sunbeam upon a leaf.

Harry’s mind woke suddenly to some understanding of what he had encountered. He reached for the

controls to send the John Paul Jones shifting into the alternate universe and away.

His hands never touched the controls. From the pyramid below, a blue lance of light reached up to

paralyse him, select the control-suit from among the other components and send it tumbling to the

planetary surface below like a swatted insect.

But the suit had been designed to protect its occupant, whether he himself was operative or not. At

fifteen hundred feet, the drag chute broke free, looking like a silver cloth candle-snuffer in the sunlight;

and at five hundred feet the retro-rockets cut in. The suit tumbled to earth among some trees two

kilometres from the pyramid, with Harry inside bruised, but released from his paralysis.

From the pyramid, a jagged arm of something like white lightning lashed the ground as far as the suit, and

the suit’s outer surface glowed cherry-red. Inside, the temperature suddenly shot up fifty degrees;

instinctively Harry hit the panic button available to him inside the suit.

The suit split down the centre like an overcooked frankfurter and spat Harry out; he rolled among the

brush and fernlike ground cover, six or seven meters from the suit.

From the distant pyramid, the lightning lashed the suit, breaking it up. The headpiece rolled drunkenly

aside, turning the dark gape of its interior toward Harry like the hollow of an empty skull. In the dimness

of that hollow Harry saw the twinkle of his control buttons.

The lightning vanished. A yellow lightness filled the air about Harry and the dismembered suit. There was

a strange quivering to the yellowness; and Harry half-smelled, half-tasted the sudden flatbite of ozone. In

the headpiece a button clicked without being touched; and the suit speaker, still radio-connected with the

recording tank in orbit, spoke aloud in Harry’s voice.

“Orbit …” it said. “… into … going …”

These were, in reverse order, the last three words Harry had recorded before sighting the pyramid.

Now, swiftly gaining speed, the speaker began to recite backwards, word for word, everything Harry

had said to it in nine weeks. Faster it went, and faster until it mounted to a chatter, a gabble, and finally a

whine pushing against the upper limits of Harry’s auditory register.

Suddenly, it stopped.

The little clearing about Harry was full of silence. Only the odd and distant creaking of something that

might have been a rubbing branch or an alien insect came to Harry’s ears. Then the speaker spoke once

more.

“Animal …” it said flatly in Harry’s calm, recorded voice and went on to pick further words from the

recordings, “… beast. You … were an animal … wrapped in … made clothing. I have stripped you

back to … animal again. Live, beast …”

Then the yellowness went out of the air and the taste of ozone with it. The headpiece of the

dismembered suit grinned, empty as old bones in the sunlight. Harry scrambled to his feet and ran wildly

away through the trees and brush. He ran in panic and utter fear, his lungs gasping, his feet pounding the

alien earth, until the earth, the trees, the sky itself swam about him from exhaustion; and he fell tumbling to

earth and away into the dark haven of unconsciousness.

When he woke, it was night, and he could not quite remember where he was or why. His thoughts

seemed numb and unimportant. But he was cold, so he blundered about until he found the standing

half-trunk of a lightning-blasted tree and crept into the burned hollow of its interior, raking frill-edged,

alien leaves about him out of some half-forgotten instinct, until his own body-warmth in the leaves formed

a cocoon of comfort about him; and he slept.

From then on began a period in which nothing was very clear. It was as if his mind had huddled itself

away somehow like a wounded animal and refused to think. There was no past or future, only the

endless now. If now was warm, it had always been warm; if dark – it had always been dark. He learned

to smell water from a distance and go to it when he was thirsty. He put small things in his mouth to taste

them. If they tasted good he ate them. If he got sick afterwards, he did not eat them again.

Gradually, blindly, the world about him began to take on a certain order. He came to know where there

were plants with portions he could eat, where there were small creatures he could catch and pull apart

and eat and where there was water.

He did not know how lucky he was in the sheer chance of finding flora and fauna on an alien world that

was edible – let alone nourishing. He did not realise that he had come down on a plateau in the tropical

highlands, with little variation in day and night temperature and no large native predators which might have

attacked him.

None of this he knew. Now would it have made any difference to him if he had, for the intellectual centre

of his brain had gone on vacation, so to speak, and refused to be called back. He was, in fact, a victim of

severe psychological shock. The shock of someone who had come to feel himself absolute master of a

universe and who then, in a few short seconds, had been cast down from that high estate by something or

someone inconceivably greater, into the state of a beast of the field.

But still, he could not be a true beast of the field, in spite of the fact that his intellectual processes had

momentarily abdicated. His perceptive abilities still worked. His eyes could not help noting, even if

incuriously, the progressive drying of the vegetation, the day-by-day shifting in the points of setting and

rising of the sun. Slowly, instinctively, the eternal moment that held him stretched and lengthened until he

began to perceive divisions within it – a difference between now and was , between now and will be .

III

The day came at last when he saw himself.

A hundred times he had crouched by the water to drink and, lowering his lips to its surface, seen colour

and shape rising to meet him. The hundredth and something time, he checked, a few inches above the

liquid plane, staring at what he saw.

For several long seconds it made no sense to him. Then, at first slowly, then with a rush like pain

flooding back on someone rousing from the anaesthesia of unconsciousness, he recognised what he saw.

Those were eyes at which he stared, sunken and dark-circled under a dirty tangle of hair. That was a

nose jutting between gaunt and sunken cheeks above a mouth, and there was a chin naked only because

once an ultrafine laser had burned out the thousand and one roots of the beard that grew on it. That was

a man he saw – himself .

He jerked back like someone who has come face-to-face with the devil. But he returned eventually,

because he was thirsty, to drink and see himself again. And so, gradually, he got used to the sight of

himself.

So it was that memory started to return to him. But it did not come back quickly or all at once. It

returned instead by jerks and sudden, partial revelations – until finally the whole memory of what had

happened was back in his conscious mind again.

But he was really not a man again.

He was still essentially what the operator of the pyramid had broken him down into. He was still an

animal. Only the memory and imaginings of a man had returned to live like a prisoner in a body that went

on reacting and surviving in the bestial way it had come to regard as natural.

But his animal peace was broken. For his imprisoned mind worked now. With the control-suit broken

up – he had returned to the spot of its destruction many times, to gaze beastlike at the rusting parts – his

mind knew he was a prisoner, alone on this alien world until he died. To know that was not so bad, but

remembering this much meant remembering also the existence of the someone or something that had

made him a prisoner here.

The whoever it was who was in the pyramid.

That the pyramid might have been an automated, mechanical device never entered his mind for a

moment. There had been a personal, directed, living viciousness behind the announcement that had

condemned him to live as a beast. No, in that blank-walled, metallic structure, whose treaded mechanical

servants still prospected through the woods, there was something alive – something that could treat the

awesome power of a solar tap as a human treated the attack of a mosquito – but something living . Some

being. Some Other, who lived in the pyramid, moving, breathing, eating and gloating – or worse yet,

entirely forgetful of what he had done to Harry Brennan.

Gordon R. Dickson - In The Bone.pdf

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