Nova 1 Read online

A panic of immense heartbeat,

  Dante scanned round and stamped his foot,

  And hoofed the trembling flints

  And named a Ring of Hell.

  With parchment clenched in tremorous fist,

  He inked out battlements of grime

  And arcs of grinding coggeries which, struck,

  Snowed down a dreadful cereal of rust

  Long years before such iron soots were dreamt

  Or made, or flown,

  Long long before such avenues of steel in sky were sought.

  So, in a guise like Piranesi lost amidst-among

  His terrible proud Prisons,

  The Poet sketched a vaster, higher, darker Pent-up Place

  A living demon-clouded sulphur-spread of Deep.

  From tenement to tenement of clapboard dinge

  He rinsed a sky with coal-sack burning,

  Hung clouds with charcoal flags

  Of nightgowns flapping like strange bats

  Shocked down from melancholy steam-purged locomotive caves.

  Then through it all put scream of metal flesh,

  Great dinosaur machines charged forth by night,

  All stomaching of insucked souls Pent up in windowed cells.

  Delivered into concrete river-shallow streets,

  Men fled themselves from spindrift shade

  Of blown black chimney sifts and blinds of smoking ghosts.

  And on the brows of all pale citizens therein

  Stamped looks of purest terror,

  Club-foot panic and despair,

  A rank, a raveling dismay that spread in floods

  To drain off in a lake long since gone sour

  With discharged outpouring of slime.

  So drawn, so put to parchment, so laid down

  In raw detail, this Ring of Hell (No mind what Number!)

  Was Dantes greatest Inventory counting-up

  Of Souls in dread Purgation.

  He stood a moment longer in the dust.

  He let the frightened drumpound heart of buffalo tread P

  lease to excite his blood.

  Then, desecration-proud, happy at the great Black Toy

  He’d printed, builded, wound, and set to run In fouled self circlings,

  Old Dante hoisted up his heels,

  Left low the continental lake-shore cloven-stamped,

  And hied him home to Florence and his bed,

  And laid him down still dreaming with a smile,

  And in his sleep spoke centuries before its birth

  The Name of this Abyss, the Pit, the Ring of Hell

  He had machinery-made:

  CHICAGO!

  Then slept,

  And forgot his child.

  THE HIGHER THINGS

  by J. R. Pierce

  Under the alias of J. J. Coupling, John R. Pierce is the well-known author of too few, yet exceedingly good, science fiction stories. Perhaps because, as Dr. Pierce, he is slightly busy as Executive Director, Research Communications Sciences Division of Bell Telephone Laboratories. In both personas he is a student of science fiction, and an admirer of the late, great, Stanley G. Weinbaum. This story is a tribute to that author, another tale from the saga of that scientific genius, Haskel van Manderpootz. It can be read—and enjoyed—without any knowledge of the earlier stories. But the hard-core readers will, I know, experience a particular extra thrill when they meet, for one last time, the indefatigable van Manderpootz. . . .

  I hadn’t seen Haskel van Manderpootz in years. In fact, I hadn’t intended to see him at all. When I arrived at Nixon spaceport on Long Island by rocket from Tibet, I was sure that I had coded the shuttle pod for the Malcolm Hilton on Manhattan, but when I stepped out the sign said university of new york, stony brook campus.

  My eidetic memory plays tricks like that. I’ll never forget a bitter night my astral body spent on the top of Mount Everest. My guru had sent me to commune with a chela in Nepal. I had remembered the sutra perfectly, but it had been the wrong one.

  I have learned to accept the tricks of my memory. It is all I can do, anyway. And as much good as bad comes of it. It was really lucky that I once arrived in San Trattorio on the day my cousin Dixon Wells was late for his execution. I was able to convince the Minister of Justice that Dixon had arrived during the riot and assassination only because he had meant to attend a dedication six hours earlier.

  Something, I thought, had sent me to Stony Brook. What could it be but van Manderpootz? I stepped into the nearest Picture-phone® booth and dialed his home number. Inevitably, I got his office.

  A horrible shriek emerged from the speaker before I could focus my eyes on the screen. The image was frightening. A battered and bloodied young woman, crumpled in a comer of the room, shuddered once convulsively and then lay still. A heavy, brutish, sinister figure rose from bending over her and approached the camera tube, so that his frenzied, maniacal features filled the screen. It was van Manderpootz.

  “Office hours two to four, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” he roared. “When would you like to see me?”

  Could this be the van Manderpootz I knew? I wondered. Assertive, egotistical, yes. But a sadistic, homicidal maniac? I just couldn’t believe it. I stared into his eyes. His face glared silently from the screen. So, I thought, and sat and waited.

  About five minutes later an impatient voice said. “All right, what do you want?” The madman on the screen still stared at me, lips unmoving. It was, as I had about decided, a tri-di recording.

  “It’s me,” I said, “Jimmy Wells.”

  The voice became genial.

  “Good, good, Jimmy,” it said. “I hope you don’t mind my little recording.”

  “It startled me,” I replied. “Can I come up to your office?”

  “No, no, Jimmy,” van Manderpootz replied. “Nobody goes to my office any more. That’s what the recordings are for. The machine has a half-dozen in it. Nobody signs up for courses. The faculty won’t speak to me. And so,” he said, “I get time to work on a little project at home. Come around and see—and you can tell me what has happened to your cousin Dixon,” he added.

  I got into a shuttle and coded for his home—of course I remembered the number. When I got out I was at the yacht club. I’ve always liked to watch boats, and I knew the address of the club. After visiting several other spots that nostalgia put between my fingers and the control buttons, I finally arrived at van Manderpootz’s home, an old wooden house set among cold, impersonal glassy twentieth-century buildings which van Manderpootz calls “late refrigerator.” I rang the front door bell, but there was no answer. Apparently the woman who cooks his meals, takes care of the kitchen and carefully avoids dusting his apparatus was out. As I heard a steady thumping somewhere within, I walked toward it.

  My path toward the thumping sounds took me through a room filled with what looked like abandoned hydroponic tanks, some of whose contents had met a smelly death. I then passed an elaborate apparatus which seemed to be a modification of a sub-junctivisor and which looked, as well as I can describe it, like a dentist’s chair complete with equipment and anesthetic mask. Finally, I came to the cellar stairs and, as the sounds were louder here, I went down to a large room in the basement.

  The sight there was puzzling. Looking from the bottom of the steps, I seemed to see a full-sized tennis court, a good deal larger than the basement could possibly be. Over it shone a soft blue sky. There was a queemess about all this, however, as if the scene were part real and part a painted backdrop. And there was van Manderpootz, furiously pounding a tennis ball over the net, where it was returned by a shadowy opponent.

  “Professor van Manderpootz!” I called.

  He turned. “Jimmy,” he said, and a fast return caught him on the side of the head. Calmly, he walked to the wall and touched a switch. The tennis court vanished, and I saw only the basement walls and ceiling, smooth and painted white. Somehow, the court and the opponent had been projected onto these optically. I wondered how the bal
l had been returned, but then, nothing is beyond van Manderpootz.

  What really starded me was the change in his appearance since I had last seen him. He had always been a powerful man, but his waist had been thick. That was gone now. He was cleanshaven. He looked physically hard, and yet, younger. But this was no more surprising than to find van Manderpootz practicing tennis.

  “How is Dixon?” van Manderpootz asked, as we shook hands.

  “Never on time,” I told him. “But he’s married now, to a South American heiress. He was late one night for a rendezvous, and her father caught him, with a priest.” Then I told him of Dixon’s other adventures in San Trattorio.

  “And how are you, Jimmy?” he asked.

  “Well enough,” I replied. “I’ve been in Tibet, and my guru sent me on a mission to Swaziland. But I seem to be on my way to Carmel,” I added. “And so I’m here.”

  “Good, good, Jimmy. Great things here. Soon I shall be married,” he said.

  “You, married?” I exclaimed in astonishment.

  “Soon, Jimmy,” he said. He walked over to a workbench in the comer and picked up a large autographed photograph of a rather pretty girl who held a tennis racket. It was inscribed, “To Mandy, from Joyce.”

  “Do you like her?” he asked proudly.

  “She’s very good-looking,” I told him. “When will the wedding be?”

  “Not until I can beat her at tennis,” van Manderpootz said. “You saw my little machine. Already I know more about the game than Tilden, Gonzales, and Kumanga did,” he told me. “But I don’t play so well yet. It must be something about the coordination.”

  What had happened to the great van Manderpootz? Marriage! Tennis! He who had discovered the psychon, invented the sub-junctivisor and had had a hand in most of the new physics of the early twenty-first century. Chasing after pretty girls! And wasting his talents in building tennis-playing machines! Something had made van Manderpootz into a man I scarcely recognized. I asked him about all this.

  “I was on the wrong track, Jimmy,” he said. “Physics—bah! The subjunctivisor—useful, yes. But Jimmy, what is the most wonderful thing in the world?”

  That was easy.

  “Van Manderpootz,” I said.

  “Of course, Jimmy,” he replied. “But there’s only one van Manderpootz. I meant, what is the most wonderful thing in the world besides van Manderpootz?”

  “Life,” I said. “The mysteries of the consciousness—”

  “You got it right the first time, Jimmy. Life is the most wonderful thing. Not my machines. Think, Jimmy. An ignorant peasant can grow things that even van Manderpootz can’t make in his laboratory. Machines, pooh!”

  And then I got the first part of the story. Van Manderpootz had wearied of mechanical contrivances. It had occurred to him that some of them make more trouble than they save. First, he pointed out, technology produces cheaply metal doors too massive for a man to open, and then it supplies electronic door openers. Or, he said, technology destroys old forms of amusement, and then it supplies in their place and at great expense, radio, television and the smellies. Farming becomes an unusual and therefore an unattractive mode of life, and so food is synthesized in tanks. In a peculiar moment of enlightenment, this had struck Haskel van Manderpootz as wrong. In a characteristic flurry of activity, he had abandoned physics for biology.

  “Genetic engineering?” I asked. “You’ve solved the genetic code?”

  “Why should I break my brains on the genetic code?” he asked. “Me, van Manderpootz? That’s for plodders like Morgan and Watson and Crick and Nierenberg and Mumbwasi. What I did, Jimmy, was to make a genetic visualizer and a genetic manipulator. I froze the chromosomes to absolute zero, and then with a projector, a sort of holographic process, you understand, I could visualize the whole plant. But I made it work backward, Jimmy, so that however I changed the image, the chromosomes changed too. Then, thaw the chromosomes, grow the plants, and there I was.”

  “But what would you make that way?” I asked.

  “Jimmy, Jimmy, haven’t you got imagination at all, just a little?” he asked. And then he told me.

  He had achieved self-sowing crops with weed-combating abilities inbred. He produced a fine, bushy growth which trained itself in the form of an armchair, and had only to be cut and dried to be of service (he still used one of these; it was remarkably comfortable, although a little asymmetrical). He had dwarf grass that needed no cutting, and which by a peculiar secretion digested and disposed of the leaves which fell on it in the fall. He was working on a biological house, complete with plumbing, when curiosity overcame him. In fact, it had looked as if he might put man well on the road to having nothing to do but enjoy his natural surroundings and contemplate his—inmost thoughts.

  Despite all of his certainty that he was about to change the face of the earth and the habits of the human race, van Manderpootz was impatient to know the result. So, with one last fling at the mechanical, he revised his subjunctivisor to give a telepathic view of the truly far future.

  “You understand,” he said, “that it isn’t really physical time-travel. It wasn’t a unique world I visited. It was sideways in time, just boring a little into the fourth dimension. It was a world of if. And I didn’t visit even that physically. I visited it telepathically. I could see and hear only what some person in it could see and hear. This caused me some puzzlement, as you shall see.”

  Anyway, this is the story:

  “At first, Jimmy, I went only a little way ahead, about fifty years. I began to realize how wise I had been to use the machine. People are such dolts. I had to go to remote and uncivilized regions to find any evidences of what I had done. But someone, a United Nations Commission, maybe, had introduced my weed-fighting crops into the jungle. Out-of-the-way places were beginning to blossom like a rose. The natives spent their time sitting in my bush chairs and gazing out over my self-tending lawns, or dancing their tribal dances in the new clearings. They were just beginning to get the bugs out of my self-growing house, you understand. But I was encouraged to see that curious travelers from civilization’ began to appreciate these conditions. A few resident Europeans had gone completely native—that is, they were years ahead of the times.

  “Well, Jimmy, I sampled the world ahead a lot of places and for about a hundred and fifty years before I saw any substantial progress. The exploration took a lot of my time. Human nature is so inflexible. It organizes what it has learned to deal with, but it can’t change. Finally, though, about a.d. 2165, in Great Britain of all places, I found some attempt at a civilization along the new lines. And, Jimmy, the great van Manderpootz had some unpleasant surprises in store for himself. That was on the mental side, mostly.

  “I had thought of freeing man for contemplation, for the creation of philosophy and art and mathematics. By this time, man had become pretty nearly free. Oh, there were some gaps to be filled with human labor—some digging and carrying, so to speak. But how had man used his leisure? How, Jimmy?

  “I suppose that you may have been puzzled that men—in the here and now, I mean, and not in the time I’m talking about— write such endless numbers of books and make so many smellies, each just a little different from the others. The point is, people don’t want to read the same book over and over again. They want something almost the same, which will excite the same sensations, but just enough different so that it will seem new. The names are changed from book to book, and the contents are reshuffled a bit, but the books are really the same, and that’s the way people want them.

  “Well, here in the future, in Britain, can you imagine what I found? Picture if you can, Jimmy, the prettiest self-growing house you can think of, set in the middle of a sloping lawn of beautiful green self-tending grass. Out beyond are rolling fields, separated into irregular patches by self-pruning hedges. A path winds down beyond the nearest hedge to the house’s own self-tending field, which grows I don’t know what good things to eat. And here is the family, a man, his wife and a
child of about twelve. What are they doing, Jimmy? They are reading dog-eared mystery stories.

  “Well, I looked in on this house at various hours for several days, and, when the family wasn’t eating, or wandering down to gather food, the scene was always the same. They were reading mystery stories. As far as I could see, they never came into contact with anyone else. This puzzled me, for I wondered where the new mystery stories were coming from. I saw none delivered, and, as well as I could examine the house through the eyes of its occupants, I couldn’t find any others in it. So far I had looked at things externally, using the eyes and ears of the three people. Now, however, I, the great van Manderpootz, Jimmy, examined their worthless thoughts carefully. And, you know, they weren’t thinking of anything but the words of the stories they were reading. Not of anything. Not even of other mystery stories!

  “It took me quite a while to get to the bottom of this. I picked the wife (she was nearest the end of her book) and followed her through the reading of it. It was very dull, Jimmy, but rather sexy. Anyway, she followed that tale with a completely lax mind and with perfect contentment, right to the end. Then she performed some mental gymnastics that I couldn’t follow, and to my surprise, mine, van Manderpootz’s, Jimmy, she forgot about the contents of the book entirely, and remembered only that she liked it. So she turned back to the first page, and started through her favorite book again.

  “No wonder they didn’t need any more books, Jimmy. And what can you say against it? I suppose her book wasn’t any worse than any other she would have liked. But it didn’t please me. I imagine that in that place and that year, some people in Britain may have been re-reading over and over again just their favorite paragraph from their favorite book. Maybe some were walking dazedly in the street repeating their favorite sentence endlessly and finding it ever fresh and completely satisfactory. Perhaps they just muttered their favorite word. I don’t know, Jimmy; I didn’t wait to find out. I went ahead.

  “America in the year 2300 was different. At first I thought it was better; now I don’t know. Anyway, there was more activity. People worked in groups, doing what labor was needed. Some of it looked like very unnecessary or uncomfortable labor to me. They dug ditches, and they moved heavy stones by hand in relandscaping the parks and grounds and in planting new buildings in the cities. Yes, Jimmy, they had grown whole cities, and there was an organized life of drudgery in bringing in food and in all the accounting to keep it going. The people worked hard to do this without machines, but they looked healthy and happy. Here, I missed leisure, even the misused leisure which I had found among the readers and forgetters of Britain. Sure, I thought, the Americans must tire of these never-ending routine tasks. How wrong I was, Jimmy!