Part 4

Once more Lucifer found himself backed toward a corner. Only this time he did not try to escape. The challenge intrigued him, in spite of his determination not to become involved with this nonsense. A controlled experiment was quite a different thing....

"I might have," he replied, with an effort to be casual. He plucked at his mustache. "But you must grant that a valid basis for experimentation cannot be improvised on the spur of the moment."

"Improvise at your leisure, Dr. Brill."

Nina was sent off to continue orientation work with Dr. Thame. Lucifer was given a small cubicle near Huth's office. It consisted of little more than a desk, a stool, three bare walls and a floor to ceiling window through which an orange rim of the planet's great sun was now shining mistily.

Lucifer scribbled notes, drew crude diagrams, tore them up and started all over again. Spots of color flushed his cheeks. Though he would not have made the admission, he hadn't enjoyed himself so much in fifteen years. He didn't even notice when a new squall rustled across the wet jungle, blotting out the sun and drumming against the window.

Huth came in with the attendant who brought lunch.

"How many children are there here now?" Lucifer asked crisply.

"I believe we have about thirty under the age of nine months."

"Do you have another nursery room, like the one we visited this morning?"

"We have three more in the Maternity Division."

Lucifer explained his immediate needs. Huth issued orders that three more babies be brought to the Maternity Division. Each was installed alone in a nursery. Two were placed in cribs, and soon fell asleep. The third, a boy of about eight months, refused to nap. He wasn't happy until allowed to crawl around the floor, exploring the strange wonders of the nursery. Lucifer made a quick procedural adjustment, and hoped the youngster would stay awake until feeding time.

He tried to tell himself, whenever he thought about it, that he was doing all this only to point up the absurdity of Huth's theories.

As feeding time neared, three bottles of heated formula were brought in warmers and placed at Lucifer's direction in rooms immediately adjacent to each of the nurseries. Two of the children were still asleep; the third had discovered a pack of disposable diapers and was systematically tearing it apart. Dr. Thame joined them to watch the experiment, and he brought Nina along. Her eyes sparkled with interest and understanding as she watched Lucifer's preparations. After one quick nod, he did not look her way again, and he stifled the thought that Nina would be watching the experiment with their own child in mind.

One of the babies stirred in its sleep, and whimpered a little.

"Normally," explained Dr. Thame, "a child of this age would awaken shortly and begin to cry."

The baby squirmed again, then turned toward the room in which one of the bottles had been placed. Its tiny lips worked in a sucking motion.

"How wonderful!" whispered Nina.

Lucifer picked up the bottle, moved slowly into the corridor.

The child appeared confused. Its eyes screwed up tightly, and its face reddened. Then it jerked its head toward the new position of the bottle and repeated the sucking motion.

Nina, who had followed Lucifer, squeezed his arm in excitement. He gave her the bottle, and she hurried into the nursery to reward the child. Its lips groped eagerly for the nipple.

By this time, the second child was stirring. Its reactions were much slower, and more uncertain, than those of the first baby, but they followed the same pattern.

Nina went on to the third child, which had been left playing on the floor of the nursery.

"Lucifer! Come quickly!" she called.

The child had crept over to the wall nearest the room in which its bottle had been placed. It was pawing, bewildered, at the rough surface.

Ducking below the window edge, Lucifer picked up the bottle and moved it to the other side of the room.

For a moment the child looked like it was about to cry. But it hitched around on its knees, sprawled flat, raised up again and crawled across the floor. When it was midway to the other side of the nursery, Lucifer switched the bottle back to its original position.

The child continued its forward progress for a few feet, faltered and stopped. Its red button of a nose wrinkled, and two big tears squeezed down its round cheeks.

Nina rushed into the nursery, picked up the youngster, cooed over it and thrust the nipple of the bottle between its anxious lips.

"My compliments, Dr. Brill," said Huth. "Does this begin to satisfy your laws of probability?"

Lucifer was determined not to show his excitement. He shrugged. "Five thousand more tests might prove something--providing you counterposed 5,000 tests on children whose ancestry was psi negative."

"We're not interested in psi negative children, Dr. Brill."

Lucifer faced him squarely.

"Just what are you interested in? I think we are entitled to an explanation."

Huth hesitated, then nodded.

"Perhaps you are."

* * * * *

When they were settled in Huth's office, he stood by the window and folded his huge, bronzed arms.

"My home planet," he began, "is also in the system of Capella. We are an old race, but neither decadent nor degenerative. Our physical sciences--as you can judge from your presence here--are at least 500 orbits beyond the outermost probings of science on Earth."

He paced across to the door, and back to the window again.

"But in our obsession and fascination with the ever new horizons of physical science, we neglected that which was potentially of far greater significance. We ignored the possibilities of psionic evolution--we ignored them until it was almost too late!"

"Too late," breathed Nina. "Is that why your mind feels like a machine?"

Huth inclined his massive head in her direction.

"That could be why, Mrs. Brill. What society--or our bodies--neglect will eventually die. It is true even of psi, Dr. Brill."

"Can you be specific?" Lucifer challenged.

"I can. If you had taken your eyes out of the laboratory long enough to look at your world as it is and has been, you would have learned that psi manifestations were quite customary on Earth during the 13th and 14th centuries. But your industrial age did not have much room for psionics. With Daniel Dunglas Home went the last of your great psi talents!"

"Our card tests have discovered many psi positives," Lucifer interjected heatedly. "You ought to know--you have many of them here now!"

"Psi positives with thwarted, arrested or frustrated talents," replied Huth. "Psi positives who wanted to be 'normal', because that is what society demanded.... Psi positives who were ashamed of their talent and quite willing to have it overlooked! Yes, we have them here ... and, what is more important, we have their less inhibited children!"

"Your logic escapes me."

"It wouldn't if you had emerged from your cubicle and looked around you among the physical sciences. Some of your more venturesome geneticists believe that man will soon be the master of his heredity and that the next five million years of evolution on Earth will be the controlled evolution of the human mind. That could mean controlled evolution toward psi, Dr. Brill--if Earth science can ever escape the terrible drag of orthodoxy and if the unorthodox can ever learn to avoid the trap of its own dogma."

Nina had been watching Huth with the unblinking intensity that was so characteristic of her in moments of total concentration.

"So we are your nursery!" she exclaimed. "We produce the plants that will bring life back to your own soil!"

Huth came close to one of his rare smiles. "You have admirably reduced the milleniums and mathematics of evolution to a single sentence!" He turned to Lucifer. "Is this a laboratory big enough to challenge you?"

Lucifer took refuge in a question of his own. "What about your _Goolies_?"

From the shadow on Huth's face, and the faint gasp from Nina's parted lips, Lucifer knew he had made a mistake.

"Where did you learn that name?" Huth asked him coldly.

Lucifer was not a good liar, but he tried. "I--I don't really know. Perhaps--from one of your nurses or drivers...."

"We will accept that explanation, for the moment. Later, I trust you will volunteer another."

Huth's emphasis on "volunteer" was almost imperceptible, yet it had the effect of two pieces of steel striking together.

"You have already met one of these--_Goolies_. Let us go and meet some more."

Nina put out her hand. "Is this necessary?"

Huth regarded her thoughtfully.

"Yes, I believe it is. If we are going to work together, you should know everything."

"And if we're not?" Lucifer snapped. Huth shrugged. "Then it won't make any difference, I assure you."

Outside, the wet moss of the courtyard was springy underfoot. Lucifer flinched with the remembered horror of trying to breath through that moss and water.

Nina took his hand. Her fingers were strong and warm.

A tall attendant let them into the building. Lucifer looked down a long, sterile-white corridor, flanked by small, seemingly transparent doors.

"The doors are transparent only from this side, and then only when subjected to the proper wave frequency to make them so," Huth explained.

"Like the rooms we live in!" Nina burst out.

Huth blinked, and assented, "Like the rooms you live in."

Before Lucifer could assimilate this bit of information, Huth had stopped before the first door.

Inside was a shrunken monstrosity of a creature. It had the torso of a grown woman, but its legs were bone thin, twisted and scarcely eighteen inches long. It was hairless; its face was one ovular blob of flesh, in which the eyes, mouth and nostrils were knife-edge slits. It seemed to be watching the rain-streaked window.

There were two beings in the next room, apparently male and female. Both were naked, and seated cross-legged on a thick mat. They were playing a complicated game with marked and colored blocks. The woman's body was covered with a fine, brown hair. Her breasts were tiny for the dimensions of her body. Her head was also small out of all proportion, as was the male's. Lucifer saw that though both were eyeless they were playing their game rapidly and skillfully. Their hands were lumps of flesh, with just rudimentary fingers.

"They are quite sentient," Huth observed. And he added with pride, "You would classify them as definite psi positives--altogether our most successful experiment of this type!"

As they neared the next door, it suddenly became opaque. Huth led them past it without comment. Nina winced, and her fingers tightened convulsively.

They were led quickly down the rest of the corridor. Some of the doors were opaque. Through others, they caught glimpses of more grotesquely distorted creatures, some asleep, some lurching or crawling about their rooms.

The corridor ended in a large multi-purpose type of room in which semi-human creatures of all shapes and sizes were milling about.

Huth opened the door. "Go on in," he said.

It took all of Lucifer's will to control his revulsion and trembling and step through that door. Nina followed. Her fingers rigid in his hand.

One of the creatures nearest them turned nimbly around on one leg and hopped closer. It reached out a long arm, touched Nina's forehead. A harsh, croaking sound came from its mouth. Nina's lips quivered, but she smiled and patted the leathery hand.

Others bounded and crept around them, jibbering, feeling their faces and hair, probing at their bodies with stumps of arms or with hands that seemed all fingers.

"All of these people show some traces of psi," Huth explained. Again there was quiet pride in his voice.

A wracking cry came from one corner of the room. A huge shape hurtled into the group around them, knocking others out of its way. Lucifer saw the wildly flopping head, then long arms reached for him and a crushing weight bore him to the floor. There was a choking odor of hot, oily flesh.

And then the weight was gone. Two attendants led the creature, still mouthing angry cries, out of the room.

Huth helped Lucifer to his feet. "You must forgive Tetla. He shows up well in some basic psi tests, but certain other faculties were lost in the manipulation of his chromosomes. We never quite know what he will do."

The other beings had fallen back in silence during the assault. Now they began to babble in wild disharmony, each gesticulating in its own way.

Lucifer's cheeks were grey, but his lips were compressed into a thin line under the stubble of his mustache. He took Nina's arm and strode out of the room. Huth followed, without comment.

Out in the corridor, Lucifer confronted him. A sweep of his arm encompassed the long corridor, the room they had just left.

"This--this is a monstrous inhumanity--a terrible perversion of science!"

His voice was flinty with rage. Deep within him, the conscience of his puritan ancestry was revolted.

Huth raised an admonishing hand. "Don't forget your scientific training, Dr. Brill. You can't impose the value judgements of one culture upon the framework of another."

"There must be certain principles basic to all cultures!"

"A true Aristotelian fallacy! Form is actual reality, matter is potential reality and the form is ever in the matter! Surely, Dr. Bill, you can rise above such ontology!"

"Can you justify what you have done to these people even from your own value judgement basis?"

"You treat justification as a valid entity, which leads you deeper into the morass of attempting to substantialize abstracta. We do not justify, we do! Let me clarify:

"With the future of our evolution in the balance, with the unbounded horizons of the universe that will be opened by psi, we have taken certain measures. Once we postulated the genetic characteristics of psi, there was no limit to possible methodology. You have seen only two of many methods we are exploring: One, of course, is the Earth project; the second is an attempt to induce psi mutations in the offspring of certain of our own people. Naturally, since the external results of such experiments are often unpleasant, we bring the newly born infants directly to our laboratory on Melus."

Nina's eyes were still wide with horror.

"How do you do this thing?"

"Really, Mrs. Brill, it's nothing to be so shocked about. As a matter of fact, it's only a further step in what your own experimenters do by exposing Drosophilae to X-rays and plants to colchicine. We are endeavoring by many methods not only to mutate a gene by re-arranging the atoms in its molecules, but also to increase the quota of chromosomes in certain cells. The difficulty, as yet, is to single out the right string of chromosomes or to hit the right gene and influence it toward the desired psi mutation. We are still groping in the dark, simply increasing the chances that one or another gene, at random, will psi mutate."

As Huth spoke, he had been leading them toward a side exit. A vehicle was waiting. Huth put his hand on Lucifer's shoulder.

"We did not bring you to Melus, Dr. Brill, merely to reproduce your own psi characteristics. We feel that your background will enable you to make many notable contributions, once you become oriented. Already you have justified this feeling. Your people will do things for you and Mrs. Brill that they would not willingly do for us."

"I want nothing more to do with this project."

"I am sure you will recognize your present reaction as purely emotional, and come quickly to realize that here you have the answer to a true scientist's dream--a laboratory on the scale of life itself! For twenty years you have taken timid steps around the periphery of your science. Now you are at the heart of it!"

* * * * *

What should he think?

What should he believe?

What should he do?

Lucifer walked slowly around the small clearing behind their quarters. He stared, for the most part unseeingly, through the force field and into the shadows of the forest.

His shoulder brushed the invisible barricade, and the shock broke the rhythm of his stride.

What should he believe?

This question bubbled most frequently to the roiled surface of his thoughts. With belief would come the mental framework, the pattern for action. It was disturbing and confusing that credo should be so important to a scientific mind. Couldn't facts take form without credo? Did facts shape the framework, or were they molded to conform to it? Einstein made truth relative to its own framework, but which came first--the framework or the truth? And if the answer was framework, could there be truth? Perhaps the childhood riddle of the chicken and the egg could have cosmic implications. A vagrant phrase from a long-ago literature class came back to prod him now: To an egg the chicken is merely the means of producing another egg. Samuel Butler.

A shaft of sunlight speared down through the whispering canopy of branches high above him. It kindled to life a spot of riotous color in the perpetual shadow world at the base of the great trees. Blossoms of delicate blue, petals flecked with orange and gold. Leaves so green they brought an ache of loneliness for a forgotten spring morning of youth.

What should he believe?

With sudden percipience, Lucifer knew that he had moved in the shadows for a long time. The riotous dreams of youth, the exciting sense of being a pioneer among pioneers, had become like a bit of stop-motion film. It preserved the form, without the life or action. A dream cannot be framed and kept behind glass. It cannot be static. To remain, it must change.

Parapsychology had been the high road. The glorious adventure. It had made the son of a New England minister an explorer on a new frontier. But does a frontier of science have purpose other than to lead to an infinite succession of new frontiers? Had he remained too long on one frontier?

The unorthodox becomes the orthodox. The theory crustifies into the dogma. The method becomes methodology. Was this forever to be the entrapment of science? There were an infinite number of exploratory possibilities on this frontier of today; and, for all their challenge, they could be a soporific. The frontier itself was finite. But what about the next frontier? And the next? And the next?

Huth could be right, in this at least: Perhaps parapsychology had been too long exploring the unknown of its present frontier. Some must remain behind to develop and consolidate. But others must keep moving on!

To look forever beyond the next horizon! There was the challenge. There was the dream forever bright.

Lucifer thought of his crude experiment with the psi positive children, and he admitted now what he had denied at the time: Not for a decade had he been so excited by any experiment; it had brought back the wonder of the moment when an aimless undergraduate had first come upon the Rhine card tests. Lord, that was more than twenty years ago! For twenty years he had been walking in Rhine's shadow. And his personal, private dreams had never lived to see sunlight.

When would science learn to use genius without being smothered by it? Freud and Einstein had left a vision to their sciences, not a citadel. They had tried to cast a light, not a shadow. Rhine had brought psi into his laboratory to demonstrate its scientific validity. Now, the physicist, the biochemist, the mathematician and, yes, the geneticist--all of them, must take this validity into their own laboratories. The parapsychologist must become the physical scientist; the physical scientist must become the parapsychologist. Only from the total crucible of science could psi emerge in a useful form.

But what of Huth, and Mendel's Planet?

However it had been brought together, whatever one thought of it, this living laboratory was now a fact. Psi was being mated to psi; children were being born, children with a psi potential that could be trained into a power of unknown magnitude. Huth had described it well: A laboratory on the scale of life itself!

Huth knew his semantics, all right. The barbs of his words got under the skin, hooked and held fast. How pallid an Earth laboratory would seem after Mendel's Planet. The symbol cards seemed to have lost their meaning.

A dozen projects clamored to reach the surface of Lucifer's thinking. Each cried out its siren challenge; each demanded experimentation. How much there was to do here on Mendel's Planet!

Now, Nina was at his side, and she said gently, "It's raining again, Lucifer. Won't you come in?"

The rain had returned, and the big, splashing drops hadn't fallen into his thoughts. But they were coursing in streams down his cheeks, dripping from his eyebrows. He brushed them away, and stared at the forest. The shadows had merged. The flowering beauty was like a mirage that had never been, and never could be. There was only the wash of the rain on the forest roof, the drip-drop-drip on the molding carpet of dead leaves.

* * * * *

Albert Fetzer came back that night. The click in the visagraph, the deeper blackness of the walls, the silent opening of the casement window--these were the now recognizable signs of his coming.

Lucifer hadn't been able to sleep. Nina had already gone to bed, after pressing her lips to his cheek in a swift gesture that left him more unsettled than ever.

When he realized that Fetzer was coming, Lucifer sat up on the couch and drew the sheet around his shoulders. In a moment the stocky figure squeezed through the window.

"Hi, there," Fetzer called softly. "You awake, Dr. Brill?"

"I haven't slept."

"How'd things go today?"

How had things gone?

"I'm not sure," Lucifer evaded.

"You got it all figured out?"

"Well--not exactly."

Lucifer was stunned at his own reluctance to discuss matters with Fetzer. Anything less than total frankness was a new facet of himself. It was one he didn't like. But how could he share his indecision?

"We had an organization meeting after I left here last night," Fetzer said. "All the section leaders made it this time. We're set to pull the plug any time you say?"

"Pull.... Oh, I hadn't realized.... What do you think you can do?"

"Plenty. We've learned to short-circuit the force fields in a hurry, and we can spring over a thousand men inside of two minutes. Within five minutes more, we'd be able to hit Center and the landing field."

Lucifer felt himself withdrawing even more. He could see the whole psi project swept away in turmoil. Then he thought of Huth's men, so towering in their stature, so well organized, so completely equipped by a fantastically advanced technology. The revolt would be brutally crushed.

"You can't do it!" he told Fetzer.

"Huh?" The stocky figure tensed. "Spell it out, Doc."

"You wouldn't have a chance!"

"We've got a few tricks. There's a lot of vets in this bunch."

"It would be suicide."

Fetzer hunched closer to the couch.

"Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But a man can't always stop to think of things like that. You do what you got to do."

The words triggered a release, and Lucifer started to talk.

With an eloquence that would have astounded his graduate students at Western University, Lucifer drew a word picture of the psi project and the theory behind it. As he talked, Nina came in quietly and sat on the couch beside him, drawing up her knees inside her short gown.