The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (11 page)

“Drivel,” sniffed Martha Jacques. “Science – ”

“ – is simply a parasitical, adjectival, and useless occupation devoted to the quantitative restatement of Art,” finished the smiling Jacques. “Science is functionally
sterile; it creates nothing; it says nothing new. The scientist can never be more than a humble camp-follower of the artist. There exists no scientific truism that hasn’t been anticipated by
creative art. The examples are endless. Uccello worked out mathematically the laws of perspective in the fifteenth century; but Kallicrates applied the same laws two thousand years before in
designing the columns of the Parthenon. The Curies thought they invented the idea of ‘half-life’ – of a thing vanishing in proportion to its residue. The Egyptians tuned their
lyre-strings to dampen according to the same formula. Napier thought he invented logarithms – entirely overlooking the fact that the Roman brass workers flared their trumpets to follow a
logarithmic curve.”

“You’re deliberately selecting isolated examples,” retorted Martha Jacques.

“Then suppose you name a few so-called scientific discoveries,” replied the man. “I’ll prove they were scooped by an artist, every time.”

“I certainly shall. How about Boyle’s gas law? I suppose you’ll say Praxiteles knew all along that gas pressure runs inversely proportional to its volume at a given
temperature?”

“I expected something more sophisticated. That one’s too easy. Boyle’s gas law, Hooke’s law of springs, Galileo’s law of pendulums, and a host of similar hogwash
simply state that compression, kinetic energy, or whatever name you give it, is inversely proportional to its reduced dimensions, and is proportional to the amount of its displacement in the total
system. Or, as the artist says, impact results from, and is proportional to, displacement of an object within its milieu. Could the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet enthral us if our minds
hadn’t been conditioned, held in check, and compressed in suspense by the preceding fourteen lines? Note how cleverly Donne’s famous poem builds up to its crash line, ‘It tolls
for thee!’ By blood, sweat, and genius, the Elizabethans lowered the entrophy of their creations in precisely the same manner and with precisely the same result as when Boyle compressed his
gases. And the method was long old when
they
were young. It was old when the Ming artists were painting the barest suggestions of landscapes on the disproportionate backgrounds of their
vases. The Shah Jahan was aware of it when he designed the long eye-restraining reflecting pool before the Taj Mahal. The Greek tragedians knew it. Sophocles’
Oedipus
is still
unparalleled in its suspensive pacing toward climax. Solomon’s imported Chaldean arthitects knew the effect to be gained by spacing the Holy of Holies at a distance from the temple pylae, and
the Cro-Magnard magicians with malice afore-thought painted their marvellous animal scenes only in the most inaccessible crannies of their limestone caves.”

Martha Jacques smiled coldly. “Drivel, drivel, drivel. But never mind. One of these days soon I’ll produce evidence you’ll be
forced
to admit art can’t
touch.”

“If you’re talking about Sciomnia, there’s
real
nonsense for you,” countered Jacques amiably. “Really, Martha, it’s a frightful waste of time to
reconcile biological theory with the unified field theory of Einstein, which itself merely reconciles the relativity and quantum theories, a futile gesture in the first place. Before Einstein
announced
his
unified theory in 1949, the professors handled the problem very neatly. They taught the quantum theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the relativity theory on Tuesdays,
Thursdays and Saturdays. On the Sabbath they rested in front of their television sets. What’s the good of Sciomnia, anyway?”

“It’s the final summation of all physical and biological knowledge,” retorted Martha Jacques. “And as such, Sciomnia represents the highest possible aim of human
endeavor. Man’s goal in life is to understand his environment, to analyze it to the last iota – to know what he controls. The first person to understand Sciomnia may well rule not only
this planet, but the whole galaxy – not that he’d want to, but he could. That person may not be me – but will certainly be a scientist, and not an irresponsible artist.”

“But Martha,” protested Jacques. “Where did you pick up such a weird philosophy? The highest aim of man is
not
to analyze, but to synthesize – to
create
. If
you ever solve all of the nineteen sub-equations of Sciomnia, you’ll be at a dead end. There’ll be nothing left to analyze. As Dr. Bell the psychogeneticist says, overspecialization, be
it mental, as in the human scientist, or dental, as in the sabre-tooth tiger, is just a synonym for extinction. But if we continue to create, we shall eventually discover how to transcend –
”

Grade coughed, and Martha Jacques cut in tersely: “Never mind what Dr. Bell says. Ruy, have you ever seen this woman before?”

“The rose bush? Hmm.” He stepped over to Anna and looked squarely down at her face. She flushed and looked away. He circled her in slow, critical appraisal, like a prospective buyer
in a slave market of ancient Baghdad. “Hmm,” he repeated doubtfully.

Anna breathed faster; her cheeks were the hue of beets. But she couldn’t work up any sense of indignity. On the contrary, there was something illogically delicious about being visually
pawed and handled by this strange leering creature.

Then she jerked visibly. What hypnotic insanity was this? This man held her life in the palm of his hand. If he acknowledged her, the vindictive creature who passed as his wife would crush her
professionally. If he denied her, they’d know he was lying to save her – and the consequences might prove even less pleasant. And what difference would her ruin make to
him?
She
had sensed at once his monumental selfishness. And even if that conceit, that gorgeous self-love, urged him to preserve her for her hypothetical value in finishing up the Rose score, she
didn’t see how he was going to manage it.

“Do you recognize her, Mr. Jacques,” demanded Grade.

“I do,” came the solemn reply.

Anna stiffened.

Martha Jacques smiled thinly. “Who is she?”

“Miss Ethel Twinkham, my old spelling teacher. How are you, Miss Twinkham? What brings you out of retirement?”

“I’m not Miss Twinkham,” said Anna dryly. “My name is Anna van Tuyl. For your information, we met last night in the Via Rosa.”

“Oh! Of course!” He laughed happily. “I seem to remember now, quite indistinctly. And I want to apologize, Miss Twinkham. My behavior was execrable, I suppose. Anyway, if you
will just leave the bill for damages with Mrs. Jacques, her lawyer will take care of everything. You can even throw in ten per cent, for mental anguish.”

Anna felt like clapping her hands in glee. The whole Security office was no match for this fiend.

“You’re getting last night mixed up with the night before,” snapped Martha Jacques. “You met Miss van Tuyl last night. You were with her several hours. Don’t lie
about it.”

Again Ruy Jacques peered earnestly into Anna’s face. He finally shook his head. “Last night? Well, I can’t deny it. Guess you’ll have to pay up, Martha. Her face is
familiar, but I just can’t remember what I did to make her mad. The bucket of paint and the slumming dowager was
last
week, wasn’t it?”

Anna smiled. “You didn’t injure me. We simply danced together on the square, that’s all. I’m here at Mrs. Jacques’ request.” From the corner of her eye she
watched Martha Jacques and the colonel exchange questioning glances, as if to say, “Perhaps there is really nothing between them.”

But the scientist was not completely satisfied. She turned her eyes on her husband. “It’s a strange coincidence that you should come just at this time. Exactly why
are
you
here, if not to becloud the issue of this woman and your future psychiatrical treatment? Why don’t you answer? What is the matter with you?”

For Ruy Jacques stood there, swaying like a stricken satyr, his eyes coals of pain in a face of anguished flames. He contorted backward once, as though attempting to placate furious fangs
tearing at the hump on his back.

Anna leaped to catch him as he collapsed.

He lay cupped in her lap moaning voicelessly. Something in his hump, which lay against her left breast, seethed and raged like a genie locked in a bottle.

“Colonel Grade,” said the psychiatrist quietly, “you will order an ambulance. I must analyze this pain syndrome at the clinic immediately.”

Ruy Jacques was hers.

“Thanks awfully for coming, Matt,” said Anna warmly.

“Glad to, honey.” He looked down at the prone figure on the clinic cot. “How’s our friend?”

“Still unconscious, and under general analgesic. I called you in because I want to air some ideas about this man that scare me when I think about them alone.”

The psychogeneticist adjusted his spectacles with elaborate casualness. “Really? Then you think you’ve found what’s wrong with him? Why he can’t read or write?”

“Does it have to be something
wrong?
”

“What else would you call it? A . . .
gift
?”

She studied him narrowly. “I might – and you might – if he got something in return for his loss. That would depend on whether there was a net gain, wouldn’t it? And
don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Let’s get out in the open. You’ve known the Jacques – both of them – for years. You had me put on his
case because you think he and I might find in the mind and body of the other a mutual solution to our identical aberrations. Well?”

Bell tapped imperturbably at his cigar. “As you say, the question is, whether he got enough in return – enough to compensate for his lost skills.”

She gave him a baffled look. “All right, then, I’ll do the talking. Ruy Jacques opened Grade’s private door, when Grade alone knew the combination. And when he got in the room
with us, he knew what we had been talking about. It was just as though it had all been written out for him, somehow. You’d have thought the lock combination had been pasted on the door, and
that he’d looked over a transcript of our conversation.”

“Only, he can’t read,” observed Bell.

“You mean, he can’t read . . .
writing
?”

“What else is there?”

“Possibly some sort of thought residuum . . . in
things
. Perhaps some message in the metal of Grade’s door, and in certain objects in the room.” She watched him closely.
“I see you aren’t surprised. You’ve known this all along.”

“I admit nothing. You, on the other hand, must admit that your theory of thought-reading is superficially fantastic.”

“So would writing be – to a Neanderthal cave dweller. But tell me, Matt, where do our thoughts go after we think them? What is the extra-cranial fate of those feeble, intricate
electric oscillations we pick up on the encephalograph? We know they can and do penetrate the skull, that they can pass through bone, like radio waves. Do they go on out into the universe forever?
Or do dense substances like Grade’s door eventually absorb them all? Do they set up their wispy patterns in metals, which then begin to vibrate in sympathy, like piano wires responding to a
noise?”

Bell drew heavily on his cigar. “Seriously, I don’t know. But I will say this: your theory is not inconsistent with certain psychogenetic predictions.”

“Such as?”

“Eventual telemusical communication of all thought. The encephalograph, you know, looks oddly like a musical sound track. Oh, we can’t expect to convert overnight to communication of
pure thought by pure music. Naturally, crude transitional forms will intervene. But
any
type of direct idea transmission that involves the sending and receiving of rhythm and modulation as
such is a cut higher than communication in a verbal medium, and may be a rudimentary step upward toward true musical communion, just as dawn man presaged true words with allusive, onomatapoeic
monosyllables.”

“There’s your answer, then,” said Anna. “Why should Ruy Jacques trouble to read, when every bit of metal around him is an open book?” She continued speculatively.
“You might look at it this way. Our ancestors forgot how to swing through the trees when they learned how to walk erect. Their history is recapitulated in our very young. Almost immediately
after birth, a human infant can hang by his hands, apelike. And then, after a week or so, he forgets what no human infant ever really needed to know. So now Ruy forgets how to read. A great pity.
Perhaps. But if the world were peopled with Ruys, they wouldn’t need to know how, for after the first few years of infancy, they’d learn to use their metal-empathic sense. They might
even say, ‘It’s all very nice to be able to read and write and swing about in trees when you’re
quite
young, but after all, one matures.’

She pressed a button on the desk slide viewer that sat on a table by the artist’s bed. “This is a radiographic slide of Ruy’s cerebral hemispheres as viewed from above,
probably old stuff to you. It shows that the ‘horns’ are not mere localized growths in the prefrontal area, but extend as slender tracts around the respective hemispheric peripheries to
the visuo-sensory area of the occipital lobes, where they turn and enter the cerebral interior, there to merge in an enlarged ball-like juncture at a point over the cerebellum where the pineal
‘eye’ is ordinarily found.”

“But the pineal is completely missing in the slide,” demurred Bell.

“That’s the question,” countered Anna. “Is the pineal absent – or, are the ‘horns’ actually the pineal, enormously enlarged and bifurcated? I’m
convinced that the latter is the fact. For reasons presently unknown to me, this heretofore small, obscure lobe has grown, bifurcated, and forced its destructive dual limbs not only through the
soft cerebral tissue concerned with the ability to read, but also has gone on to skirt half the cerebral circumference to the forehead, where even the hard frontal bone of the skull has softened
under its pressure.” She looked at Bell closely. “I infer that it’s just a question of time before I, too, forget how to read and write.”