Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) 📖

lesser scale⁠—for example when you read an exciting story. And psychotics, especially hysterics, can produce some of the damnedest physiological symptoms you ever saw.”

“I begin to understand,” she whispered.

“Rage or fear brings abnormal strength and fast reaction. But the psychotic can do more than that. He can show physical symptoms like burns, stigmata or⁠—if female⁠—false pregnancy. Sometimes he becomes wholly insensitive in some part of his body via a nerve bloc. Bleeding can start or stop without apparent cause. He can go into a coma or he can stay awake for days without getting sleepy. He can⁠—”

“Read minds?” It was a defiance.

“Not that I know of.” Simon chuckled. “But human sense organs are amazingly good. It only takes three or four quanta to stimulate the visual purple⁠—a little more actually because of absorption by the eyeball itself. There have been hysterics who could hear a watch ticking twenty feet away that the normal person could not hear at one foot. And so on.

“There are excellent reasons why the threshold of perception is relatively high in ordinary people⁠—the stimuli of usual conditions would be blinding and deafening, unendurable, if there weren’t a defense.” He grimaced. “I know!”

“But the telepathy?” Elena persisted.

“It’s been done before,” he said. “Some apparent cases of mindreading in the last century were shown to be due to extremely acute hearing. Most people sub-vocalize their surface thoughts. With a little practice a person who can hear those vibrations can learn to interpret them. That’s all.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “If you want to hide your thoughts from me just break that habit, Elena.”

She looked at him with an emotion he could not quite recognize. “I see,” she breathed. “And your memory must be perfect too, if you can pull any datum out of the subconscious. And you can⁠—do everything, can’t you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m only a test case. They’ve learned a great deal by observing me but the only thing that makes me unusual is that I have conscious control of certain normally subconscious and involuntary functions. Not all of them by a long shot. And I don’t use that control any more than necessary.

“There are sound biological reasons why man’s mind is so divided and plenty of penalties attached to a case like mine. It’ll take me a couple of months to get back in shape after this bout. I’m due for a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown and while it won’t last long it won’t be much fun while it does last.”

The appeal rose in his eyes as he watched Elena. “All right,” he said. “Now you have the story. What are you going to do about it?”

For the first time she gave him a real smile. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Don’t worry, Simon.”

“Will you come hold my hand while I’m recuperating?” he asked anxiously.

“I’m holding it now, you fool,” Elena answered.

Dalgetty chuckled happily. Then he went to sleep.

Snowball

It did not come out of some government laboratory employing a thousand bright young technicians whose lives had been checked back to the crib; it was the work of one man and one woman. This is not the reversal of history you might think, for the truth is that all the really basic advances have been made by one or a few men, from the first to steal fire out of a volcano to E=mc2. Later, the bright young technicians get hold of it, and we have transoceanic airplanes and nuclear bombs; but the idea is always born in loneliness.

Simon Arch was thirty-two years old. He came from upstate Massachusetts, the son of a small-town doctor, and his childhood and adolescence were normal enough aside from tinkering with mathematics and explosive mixtures. In spite of shyness and an overly large vocabulary, he was popular, especially since he was a good basketball player. After high school, he spent a couple of tedious years in the tail-end of World War II clerking for the Army, somehow never getting overseas; weak eyes may have had something to do with that. In his spare time he read a great deal, and after the war he entered M.I.T. with a major in physics. Everybody and his dog was studying physics then, but Arch was better than average, and went on through a series of graduate assistantships to a Ph. D. He married one of his students and patented an electronic valve. Its value was limited to certain special applications, but the royalties provided a small independent income and he realized his ambition: to work for himself.

He and Elizabeth built a house in Westfield, which lies some fifty miles north of Boston and has a small college⁠—otherwise it is only a shopping center for the local farmers. The house had a walled garden and a separate laboratory building. Equipment for the lab was expensive enough to make the Arches postpone children; indeed, after its requirements were met, they had little enough to live on, but they made sarcastic remarks about the installment-buying rat race and kept out of it. Besides, they had hopes for their latest project: there might be real money in that.

Colin Culquhoun, professor of physics at Westfield, was Arch’s closest friend⁠—a huge, red-haired, boisterous man with radical opinions on politics which were always good for an argument. Arch, tall and slim and dark, with horn-rimmed glasses over black eyes and a boyishly smooth face, labelled himself a reactionary.

“Dielectrics, eh?” rumbled Culquhoun one sunny May afternoon. “So that’s your latest kick, laddie. What about it?”

“I have some ideas on the theory of dielectric polarization,” said Arch. “It’s still not too well understood, you know.”

“Yeh?” Culquhoun turned as Elizabeth brought in a tray of dewed glasses. “Thank’ee kindly.” One hairy hand engulfed a goblet and he drank noisily. “Ahhhh! Your taste in beer is as good as your taste in politics is moldy. Go on.”

Arch looked at the floor. “Maybe I shouldn’t,” he said, feeling his old nervousness rise within him. “You