Ossian's Ride (26 page)

“I don’t know that I ought to gratify your morbid curiosity. But you may take it that we knew all about you several days before you left London.”

“It wouldn’t have been Parsonage by any chance?”

“Oh, no, not Papa Percy. He’s a regular fire-eater, the poor old fellow. I had a lot of trouble with him, until I managed to place a very capable girl in his office, one whom you were kind enough to take out to dinner, I believe.”

I moaned out loud.

“Are you feeling all right?” asked Mary Ann.

“Hands off! Or you’ll get ...” began Fanny.

“In heaven’s name, will you two stop it. Cat and dog, always cat and dog,” exclaimed the green-eyed Harriet.

“Now I wonder which is the cat,” answered Mary Ann, displaying a full set of teeth.

“Ladies!” exclaimed Hertzbrun.

“You should say ‘fair ladies,’” I remarked absently.

“Of course he should,” nodded Mary Ann. “Why don’t you say ‘fair ladies,’ Homer?”

“When the wind blows never ask it to stop. Just let it blow itself out,” groaned Fanny.

“How did you find out about the petrol bombs?”

“Oh, after we got our first report, from one of our men—a Seamus Colquhoun if you’re interested—we sent in our experts. I think they pieced together what had happened pretty well. Incidentally, why did you use two bombs? Wouldn’t one have been sufficient?”

“I used two because I’m an ugly customer.”

“Which is rather what we thought. Well, as I was saying, I became very interested in you at this stage, particularly when you got away from our frontier patrol in the Boggeragh Mountains. I still can’t see how the devil you managed to do that, or how you split the skull of a man several stones heavier than yourself.”

Mitchell began to laugh.

“Look at him, Homer! Sitting there as large as life, imagining himself to be a placid, docile, law-abiding young man.” Then he went on with a rush, plainly to stop the irrepressible Mary Ann. “Of course I expected you’d be caught trying to get into Kerry. We put out special alerts to all our patrols. I was flabbergasted when you did get in, and to Inishvickillane of all places.”

“Couldn’t you have kept a watch on me at Kilkee? Then you must have known that I’d try from the sea.”

“We expected you to try from the sea. But we never contemplated either that you’d come in on such a wild night, or that you’d be mad enough to risk this part of the coast.”

He paused for a drink. “When you appeared out of the sea, and told such a convincing story with the aplomb of a bishop, I realized that you were probably my man.”

“So you promptly arranged to have me killed on the cliffs of Inishtooskert?”

“I must admit that we were a little at cross-purposes over that business. But it was no serious matter.”

“No serious matter!”

“Of course not. If you hadn’t had the determination to get down that damned cliff, you certainly wouldn’t have been our man.”

“And if I’d ended by falling into the sea?”

“Well, even more certainly you wouldn’t have been our man, would you now, my dear fellow?”

“Didn’t I overhear you say something just now about
me
being ruthless?”

“I said you were more ruthless than we are, which I think is true. Look, Sherwood, answer me fair. If you’d tried to kill somebody on those cliffs, would you have given ’em the slightest chance of getting away safely?”

“I’d never try to kill anyone in that way.”

“No, you’d feed ’em boron, I suppose—it was boron wasn’t it?”

“I never heard anything about boron,” said Hertzbrun.

“Oh, it was just another example of Sherwood’s methods. He threatened to feed a boron porridge to one of our doctors—a Dr. Fiddlesticks, or some such name. Then having quite terrified the poor little fellow, he proceeded to cuff him soundly.”

“Well, Arthur, I must say I certainly question the wisdom of handing things over to such a bloodthirsty young devil as Sherwood seems to be. Boron and neutrons, eh? A very nasty idea, I must say.”

“No, I think you’re wrong, Homer. Our policy needs to be more aggressive. Sherwood is just the man to put a real edge on the weapons we’ve been forging. Look, Sherwood, do you mind if I ask you a straight question?”

“No, no, ask anything. How many pints of my blood did you say you wanted?”

“There’s no need to take umbrage, man. What really surprises me is why it took so long—almost a year—for you to get back to Inishvickillane. You see this was a point of some importance to me, because I’d made the decision to carry on until you got back here. I’ve been getting quite impatient. In fact I even had to come out and look you up myself, in Ballinskelligs, if I remember rightly.”

“I hope I behaved to your satisfaction on that occasion?”

“Entirely so, but really you should have recognized me, you know!”

Then, just as I thought I must burst apart, Fanny laughed and took my arm. “In case you may not have noticed it, he’s pulling your leg. You’ll have to get used to this appalling madhouse. Let’s go for a walk by the sea.”

The tide was down, so that we could walk the sand by the margin of the sea.

“Don’t be misled by Mary Ann. She’s really very clever.”

“I wasn’t misled at all. Was it she who solved the aging problem?”

“You don’t miss much, do you? I suppose it was fairly obvious from Arthur. But how did you guess it was Mary Ann?”

“Oh, just bits and fragments of talk, and a good deal of intuition. But that was a very ingenious piece of rough-housing. Did they think it all up while we were driving from Caragh?”

“Most of it, I expect. But you took it very well.”

“I took it stupidly. I just didn’t seem to have a single decent card to play.”

“Well, it wasn’t entirely nonsense. Arthur is very tired, and it has been a long struggle. It’s a hard struggle for everybody.”

“Why is it so hard?”

“It’s hard for Arthur because he’s got all the donkey work to do. It’s hard for Mary Ann to take anything very seriously. And it’s hard for me because I get depressed.”

The night was beautifully clear. At last the moment had come to ask the first of the questions that were thundering in my head.

“Can we see it from here?” I said.

The girl pointed to the chain of stars lying between Delta and Omicron Herculis.

“It doesn’t seem very much,” she whispered, “just a faint thing that you’d scarcely notice without a telescope.”

I gazed up at the sky. So this was where it had come from, this bolt of knowledge, this bolt that was going to turn our little human world head over heels. Small wonder I hadn’t thought of it before.

“What was the trouble? Increasing heat?”

“Yes, we were slowly cooked alive as our star became brighter and brighter. As generation followed generation, we adapted ourselves as best we could. We lived in vast refrigerators, but in the end nothing could keep out the fierce blast. The rocks became fluid with a liquid fire—it was like the sea tonight when we got out of the car. That’s why I was so upset. What is beautiful here was extermination for us. Our planet was wiped clean. An evolution that had taken a thousand million years to develop suddenly ceased to exist.”

Once again I slipped an arm around her. This time she laughed. “You wouldn’t be doing that if you knew what I once looked like. Not at all like a human.”

Now I saw the point more clearly. It would be futile to send a physical body hurtling across space. The essential thing was to send the information, the bolt of information. This would be much easier to do in any case.

“So you changed your body—the chemical part of you, but the electronic side is the same. In computer language, your old brain program was written onto a human brain.”

“It was rather like taking a program from a very large computer and attempting to write it into a small computer, like trying to pour a large volume of precious liquid into a tiny vessel—great quantities spilled and wasted. Imagine trying to compress your own degree of perception into the brain of a dog. Everything becomes dim and vague, like a clear landscape suddenly enshrouded in mist.

“After all, we were beings of somewhere between the third and fourth orders.”

“Sorry, I don’t understand third and fourth orders,” I said.

“Oh, just a rough measure of intelligence. We could handle problems needing somewhere between a thousand million and ten thousand million units of information. Now I’m reduced maybe to around a hundred million.”

“Divide units of information by a million and take the logarithm to base ten, eh?”

Fanny very quickly stamped hard on my toes. “Stop talking like a child.”

“You’ve got a lot of power in that darned leg of yours. How did you come by it? I mean were you assembled from raw materials—water, ordinary carbon and nitrogen and so forth?”

“I’m pretty sure not. To construct a human directly from inorganic materials is a problem of the fourth order, and this I think would have been too difficult. It would be much simpler to get the bodies produced in the ordinary way and then to write the information on the brain. I’d guess this to be no more than a third-order problem, if as much as that. But you’d do better to ask Dickey. You haven’t really met him yet, but it’s much more in his line. You see, the three of us are pretty complementary to each other—Mary Ann and Dickey got the chemical and biological knowledge, while I got the physical. Obviously it’s better like this than if we’d all been the same.”

“So in the early chemical days of I.C.E. it was the others who supplied the main drive, while now you’re responsible for all the new physical development.”

“You may say that if you wish.”

“So if I were to dump you in the water my job as an agent would really be finished, wouldn’t it? Remember what you said about me being a dangerous fellow.”

I just managed to get my other foot out of the way in time.

“You don’t like being laughed at, do you?—as bad as the others.”

“I don’t like being taken for a fool.”

“Stop being so appallingly human,” I said.

She laughed loud and clear above the noise of the sea.

As we walked slowly arm in arm the thoughts chased themselves in my head. Before the moment of extinction arrived, a dying race had somehow managed to transfer a little of its experience and knowledge to another planet. So much was clear. But how had it been done?

The transmission of information from a planet moving around one star to a planet moving around a quite different star was clearly not out of the question. It probably wasn’t very much beyond our own present-day techniques. This girl Fanny was manifestly an ordinary human on whose brain the information from another race had somehow been written.

A baby isn’t born with a knowledge of physics and mathematics. This conies to be impressed on the brain as the baby grows up: from reading books, from listening to the words of one’s teachers—and of course from observing the world around us. In some way I still didn’t understand, this normal process had been replaced by a more powerful method, a method controlled by an alien race. The motive of this race was clear—to pass on some memory of itself, to avoid a complete oblivion.

The waves were falling gently on the sand. We stopped for a moment to watch.

“It’s very beautiful here. You know, I don’t think we had much idea about beauty—there wasn’t much of it in our world, I suppose; just a blazing, glaring slag heap.”

She kicked a stone into the water. “We weren’t angry, just resigned to passing on what we could. But now in some queer way I seem less resigned. What’s the point of it all? It’ll be just the same here. The earth is already halfway along exactly the same road to extinction. The sun will get inexorably brighter as the years roll by, just as our start did, and life on earth will just as surely come to an end.”

“I suppose that some reasonably sensible game is being played, all right, if only we were clever enough to see it,” I said.

“But how clever? It’s the lack of detailed balancing that really astonishes me—the universe has an enormous effect on us, but we seem to have no reverse effect on the universe.”

“I think we might have if only we knew enough.”

“To see the complete logical design?”

“To see a logical design better than the actual one. Then I think that something might happen.”

“Which may well be true. But we know nothing of the level of intelligence that would be needed,” Fanny said.

“Except that humans fall far short of it. Your race fell short, perhaps by a little, perhaps by a lot. It may come at what you would call the fourth order, or at the tenth order, or at the millionth order.”

“And I suppose that if a species doesn’t get far enough ahead it’s simply wiped out, as we were wiped out.”

“You weren’t wiped out. What you’ve now got in your head survived. It may save humanity a century, or a millennium. It gives us a push onward down a long road. In our turn we may get nowhere. We may have to end by passing what scraps of information we can to some other creature. But maybe in the end someone will succeed where all the rest have failed.”

“All right, Mr. Fisherman, I understand the lesson. It’s only when I’m depressed that I become stupid.”

We made our way up from the strand. It is a narrow path up the cliffs, but somehow we managed to climb the path, together.