Dragons island, p.19
Dragon's Island, page 19
“That’s going to take some doing! ” Nan spoke from the compartment door behind them, and she was pale with strain when Dane turned to see her. “It seems we were a little too slow about taking off.”
Dane went toward her uneasily. “What’s wrong?”
“Operation Survival seems to be moving about two hours ahead of the time-table we had set up for it,” she told him. “Vic has been searching with the radar, and he just picked up a flight of aircraft coming in from Australia. Maybe a hundred miles behind us.”
“Have they discovered us?”
“They surely have,” she said. “But all our company planes are up now, scattering. I hope they won’t know which one to follow. Vic’s trying to slip out of radar range beyond the mountains, and that means we’ll be climbing right away.”
She swung urgently to Messenger, but he didn’t wait for her to speak.
“I’m all right,” he gasped. “I don’t need my pulse counted, and I don’t want to go to bed. Dane and I have been having a most enjoyable talk. I was just about to tell him how I made him.”
“Later.” Her gentle voice was also firm. “Later—if we get away!”
Twenty-Four
Dane helped Messenger out of the chair, and Nan went with him back to his room. Left alone in the lounge, Dane turned apprehensively to the windows. The night was still dark outside, and even the stars were hidden by a high overcast, so that the plane seemed to hang in its own black universe.
Yet he could see the broad wing above the windows, because it was filmed with a dark fire of danger. He had the feeling of peril nearer and more deadly than the threat of those hostile aircraft lost in the night behind—a feeling that puzzled and frightened him.
He turned from the windows, frowning over the riddle of that danger-sense. He felt sure now that it was neither any sinister influence of Nan’s nor any effect of the virus of forgetfulness, but instead some useful new capacity of his own.
He wanted to ask the girl about it, but she hadn’t come back from Messenger’s room. He glanced uneasily around the lounge, as he stood waiting for her, and he saw that eerie glow again. It shone through the compartment door, as if the metal had been transparent to it.
That hueless illumination gave him a sense of the narrow passage beyond the bulkhead. It showed him the empty bunks in the crew’s quarters, and the unoccupied galley, and the navigator’s vacant desk. It even let him see Van Doon, alone in the cockpit.
Yet it wasn’t any sort of vision. There were no shadows upon shadows, as an X-ray would show. For one strange instant, he simply had a grasp of those things in their places. And then the feeling was gone, a thing so fleeting that it seemed almost a trick of his troubled imagination.
It left him curiously sure, however, that Van Doon was alone. Although he had seen no other crewmen when he came aboard, he had supposed they were busy at their places. That instant of perception left him panic-stricken.
He ought to like Van Doon, he tried to tell himself. If they were both mutants, they ought to stand together against their human hunters. Even if Nan were the only woman of their race, they ought to rise above any rivalry for her. He ought to be ashamed of his distrust—and he began to wonder if that sensation had been a product of his own jealousy.
Impulsively, he opened the compartment door. He was trying to hope that the steward would be busy in the galley, and the relief crew asleep, but everything looked just as he had seemed to sense it.
He started through the doorway, and danger struck him like a cold wind. It made a frosty glitter around him in the dark, and it smothered him with a dusty deadliness in the air. For a moment it paralyzed him, and then he stumbled doggedly up the narrow steps to the cockpit.
Van Doon was really alone, a black silhouette against the lighted instruments. Dane paused uneasily behind him. The automatic pilot was flying the plane, but Van Doon looked busy enough. Headphones were clamped against his ears, and he was leaning to adjust something beside the greenish glow of the radar scope. He swung to face Dane, and snapped impatiently:
“What do you want?”
“I can’t see anything outside,” Dane said apologetically. “But we seem to be in danger. I was wondering how close it is, and what I can do about it.”
“You can’t do anything.” Van Doon spoke curtly, swinging to watch the radar scope again. “You might as well relax.”
“That’s hard to do,” Dane said. “Are their planes after us?”
“They’re coming from all directions.”
Van Doon nodded toward the greenish pips scattered across the scope, and bent again to do something with the knobs beside it. He said nothing else, and after a moment Dane returned to the lounge, feeling more deeply agitated than before.
He went to the windows, but all he could see was darkness and the black fire of danger shining on the wing. He sat down to wait for Nan, intending to ask her about that danger-sense, but she didn’t come out of Messenger’s room. Waiting became intolerable, and he went back to knock hopefully.
Nan opened the door and shook her head reprovingly.
“Please!” Her tone was hushed and urgent. “Don’t disturb Mr. Messenger.”
“Then may I talk to you?” He lowered his own voice. “I still don’t know much about what’s going on, but I’ve a feeling of things gone wrong.” He glanced at her sharply. “I don’t trust Van Doon.”
“Vic’s all right.” She smiled faintly. “The trouble you feel is real enough, but he’ll fly us out of it if anybody can.”
“I don’t like him,” Dane insisted. “And if this feeling is any sort of real perception—”
He stopped when he heard Messenger’s struggle for breath beyond the door, and saw that Nan was no longer listening to him.
“You’re just upset.” She looked back at him, pale with anxiety. “But try not to worry over Vic. After all, he isn’t the one who tipped off Jones. Now I must be looking after Mr. Messenger. He wants to talk to you again, as soon as he feels strong enough.”
She closed the door, and Dane went unwillingly back to the lounge. Though Nan had not seemed resentful, he felt hurt by her reminder that he had tipped off Jones. He wanted to repair that blunder. Inactivity had become impossible, yet there was nothing he could do.
Pale daylight drew him back to the windows of the lounge. The plane was still climbing through broken clouds. Though the heated and pressurized cabin was still comfortable, he could see thin ice on the leading edge of the wing. He glimpsed dark peaks ahead, and above them a storm.
He waited uneasily for Van Doon to turn the plane, but it droned on toward those angry clouds. He felt the force of gusty winds, and saw a raindrop on the glass, and then gray mist blotted out everything. He turned and sat down, half-expecting the plane to strike some unseen cliff.
But no crash came. The rain soon stopped, and the air turned smooth again. Van Doon’s strategy had been good, he admitted reluctantly. The storm cloud would hide them, and perhaps even confuse radar search. Hopeful again, he went back to the windows.
Behind them, the rain cloud towered above the windward slope of the mountains. Below lay a vast ocean of lower clouds, shining under the cold light of the rising sun, washing the peaks and ridges of the foothills that lifted through it like ragged islands.
The plane was descending now. In a few minutes it sank into that sea of clouds, like a diving submarine. Dane sat down again, wondering when they would reach the refuge ahead. For a moment he felt almost safe—until he thought of Van Doon again, and saw the glow of danger still shining from the cockpit.
Nan came back at last from Messenger’s room, and he rose anxiously to meet her. Her face looked gaunt with weariness, but she nodded when she saw the question in his eyes.
“You may talk to him now,7’ she said. “But not too long.” She hurried on past him, toward the cockpit. “I must see Vic, about our course.”
Messenger’s door was open. He lay in his bed in the narrow room, propped on pillows under his head and shoulders. The mottled color of his bloated body looked alarming to Dane, but his small eyes seemed to have all their old sharpness.
“Come on in,” he called feebly. “If you want to know how I made you.”
“I do.” Dane came quickly to the side of his bed. “And I’m anxious to ask you about something else—a feeling of danger, that I don’t understand. A shock, sometimes. Or a glow or an odor or a taste. Can you explain that?”
“ESP,” the sick man whispered. “You’ll understand it better when you know more about genetic engineering.”
Dane’s knees felt weak with his eagerness. He sat down heavily in the chair beside the bed. His heart was pounding.
“I’ve been looking for a way to direct mutations, ever since my father first told me about you,” he whispered huskily. “I had decided it was impossible, until I began seeing the things you had made. How do you do it?”
“It isn’t easy.” Messenger’s careful voice was so faint that he had to strain to hear, and agonizingly slow. “I worked for years to untangle the structure of the genes with electron microscopes, but they don’t reveal enough. I tried every physical agency that causes mutations. Temperature. Pressure. Radiations. Chemicals. Ultrasonic vibration. None of them offered any promise of the fine control you need to move the atoms in one gene and leave the next one unchanged. I was ready to give up, when Madge helped me perfect a finer tool.”
“Huh?” Dane blinked. “What other tool is possible?”
The maker’s eyes had closed. He lay motionless for a long time, not even breathing. His blotched flesh seemed bloodless. At last, however, he inhaled again, and looked keenly back at Dane.
“The mind,” he whispered. “The mind alone—that is the finest tool. Delicate and quick enough to grasp a single gene and rearrange its atoms in any way you like, with no danger of disturbing anything else in the living cell where you must work.”
“The mind alone?” Dane stared at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“My wife was psychic, as people used to put it,” he explained laboriously. “Like your own mother. Before we married, she had been a research parapsychologist. She saw my problem, and helped me solve it.
“With psychokinesis?”
“Call it that, if you want.” Messenger nodded feebly. “That’s a word. I don’t know quite what it means to you or to anybody else. What Madge and I discovered is a fact. A process that works—though it may not fit the word, exactly.”
“Yes?”
Messenger heaved himself a little higher against the pillows. “Madge had worked with Rhine at Duke University,” he went on. “She had already got her great idea, though she hadn’t done much with it. That was to link mind and time.”
“How’s that?”
“The mind works in time,” Messenger said. “The flow of consciousness shows a time-factor, and nearly every datum of parapsychology points the same way. With that for a start, Madge had come up with a new explanation of the electrical brain waves recorded by the electroencephalograph.”
He had to gasp for air, as if exhausted by that word.
“Those waves are rapid pulsations of voltage in the brain tissue,” he continued. “Her idea was that the voltage changes are caused by the rhythmic vibration of atoms of electrons in the plane of time.”
Dane leaned nearer, not quite sure what he had heard.
“In time—not space.” The faint voice was difficult to hear, but Dane had a sense of the vigorous mind behind it, striving robustly to reach him. “You can see that the electrical effect of such a vibrating particle would fall to zero as it swings away in time, and then increase again as it returns.
“Enough such particles, vibrating in unison, would cause the voltage pulsations we find. The duration of one wave, Madge thought, determines the instant that is now. Each new wave, she thought, creates a new now and carries the consciousness on from the old, leaving it a part of the past.”
Messenger stopped to rest again, limp and almost lifeless on his pillows.
“A simple notion,” he toiled on at last. “But it seems to explain many things. The simplest living molecules—the viruses and genes—must be built around single particles vibrating in time. And fission must begin when another particle begins vibrating in unison.”
“An exciting idea!” Dane whispered breathlessly. “But —if mental energy can affect physical particles—don’t you have trouble about the conservation of energy?”
“That energy in time is still physical,” Messenger answered. “I’ve no time to write the equations, but mind is a function of the energy-flow, back and forth, between space and time. The oldest proof of that is the temperature drop that accompanies any massive psychophysical effect—when heat is drawn from the air to become the literal force of mind.
“The same sort of transfer is going on all the time, in every human brain and every living cell, although it’s usually harder to detect, because the amount of heat absorbed is exactly balanced, in the long run, by the new heat generated as the vital energy is spent.”
Dane nodded, in awed comprehension.
“So you did prove her theory?”
“A little of it—though the vibration in time is far more rapid than she first thought, and the brain waves seem to be due to a sort of ebb and flow between the spatial and temporal states of energy. Most of the theory is still debatable, as useful theories generally are. But it has served us pretty well.”
Messenger closed his eyes to rest again, and it seemed a long time to Dane before he resumed: “That energy of life obeys its own special laws. Its dual nature gives it a limited independence from both space and time. Though it usually comes from the transformation of heat in our own nerve cells, a receptive brain can sometimes draw it from another—that is telepathy.
“Or a trained and gifted mind can absorb it from any sort of objects at nearly any distance—that is the basis of direct extrasensory perception.
“Usually, we spend it to operate our own nervous systems, but it can be spent on distant objects—that’s psychokinesis, if you wish to use the word. A difficult trick, for Homo sapiens!”
The maker lay back to rest again, watching Dane with a look of speculation in his faded eyes. He smiled at last wistfully.
“It ought to be easier for you,” he whispered. “But it’s so hard for us that Madge had given up proving her theory, before I met her. Even after we tackled it together, it took us years to learn how to apply that actual force of mind to a few atoms in one molecule at a time. And that’s all we could ever do.”
Dane had been listening too desperately to breathe. He straightened when Messenger paused, and they both gasped for air. He nodded slowly.
“So that’s the way you made us?”
“It wasn’t quite that simple.” Messenger gave him a wry little grin. “There’s only a brief critical time, you see, when the genes can be rearranged to make a successful human mutation. That is just after the moment of conception, when the fertilized ovum is ready to begin development.”
“I can see that.” Dane nodded quickly. “With all the millions of divers male gametes competing to reach the egg cell, you couldn’t know the combination of available genes until one of them has entered it. And soon afterwards, the cleavage of the fertilized cell would form more genes than you could change.”
“Exactly,” Messenger panted. “The act of mutation must be completed before the cell division begins. But that crucial time is far too short for all the work that must be done to shape such a complex being as you or Nan. It takes days, or even weeks, to chart all the significant genes involved and discover what traits they carry and work out all the changes to be made.”
“But you did it.” Wonder quickened Dane’s low voice. “How?”
“With training, we were able to focus our new perceptions on a living germ cell,” the old man whispered laboriously. “That selected cell could remain undisturbed in the mother’s body, because we didn’t have to be near it in space. And we were able at last to get around that problem of time, when we learned how to look a little way into the future.”
“Prevision?” Dane stiffened with astonishment.
“That follows logically enough from the temporal factor we had already found in life and mind,” Messenger insisted patiently. “You and Nan should be better at it, when you grow up, but Madge and I could never see more than just one cell, as it would be no longer than a few weeks ahead.
“In that limited time, we had to complete all our studies of the genetic possibilities of the cell we had chosen, and plan the gene-shifts that would remove all the old hereditary faults and replace them with the gifts of the new race. When the crucial instant came, we had to be ready for the few hours of concentrated effort that would make the coming child Homo excellens.”
“So you could plan the work ahead?” Dane nodded, frowning. “But you had to wait for the crucial moment, before you did it?”
“Right,” Messenger murmured feebly. “We could see that little way into the future, but we could never reach into it, not even to move one atom. Perhaps we had run into some undiscovered natural law.”
“Anyhow, there’s something else I’d like to know.” An awed wonder caught Dane’s voice, so that it was a moment before he could go on. “What—just what are the new gifts you gave Nan and me, that makes us so different?”
“Can’t you wait?” The maker grinned. “For your own safety, I made you to seem as much as possible like members of the old race during your early years, but your differences ought to be showing up quite rapidly from now on. Don’t you want to be surprised?”
Anxiously, Dane shook his head.
“All right, if you really want to know.” Messenger nodded ponderously. “Physically, you’re stronger than man. You’re immune to nearly all diseases. You can expect a normal lifespan many times as long as man’s. And you’ll stay youthful and vigorous, with no reason to fear the senile decay that has overtaken me.
