SEVENTEEN

The fathers, Thors Provoni thought. Yes, that’s what they are, our friends from Frolix 8. As if I managed to contact the Urvater, the primordial Father who built the eidos kosmos. They are upset and anxious because something is going wrong on our world; they care; they have empathy; they know how desperate our need is and how we feel; they know what we need.

He wondered if all three of his messages had reached the 16th Avenue printing complex, where the Under Man radio and TV transmission and receiving facilities were housed. And if the establishment had intercepted them.

And if they had intercepted them, what, he asked himself, would they do?

A purge. Most likely. But not a certainty. Old Willis Gram – if he was still in power – was an astute man, and he knew whom to milk – and how – of valuable information. Being a telepath did that; Gram could pick the minds of anyone brought close to him. But it remained to be seen who was brought close to him. Radical militants, such as the executives of the McMally Corporation? The members of the Extraordinary Committee for Public Safety? Police Director Lloyd Barnes? Probably Barnes, he was the smartest, and the most sane, of them all – at least among those at high level in the governmental apparatus. There were also independent research New Men scientists, such as the eerie Amos Ild. Ild! What if Gram consulted him? Ild would probably sketch out a shield that would protect Earth against everything. God help me, Provoni thought, if they’ve brought Ild – or Tom Rovere, for that matter, or Stanton Finch – into this. Fortunately the truly brilliant New Man gravitated toward abstract, academic studies: they became theoretical physicists, statisticians, and the like. Finch, for example, had, at the time Provoni left, been working on a system to duplicate the microsecond come third in the succession of creation of the universe; ultimately, under controlled conditions, he wished to work his way back to the first second and then, God forbid, push – in theory, in mathematical terms – the entropic flow back to the interval, called a valence-passage, before the first second.

But all on paper.

When he was finished, Finch would be able to show mathematically what situation was required for the big bang universe to come into existence. Finch could work with concepts such as negative time, as well as null-rate time… probably by now it was all done, and Finch was involved with his hobby: the collecting of rare eighteenth century snuffboxes.

Now Tom Rovere. He had been working on the subject of entropy, basing his project on the arbitrary assumption that ultimately enough decay, and enough random distribution of ergs throughout the universe, would automatically start an anti-entropic flow backward, due to collisions between simple, indivisible bits of energy or matter with one another, out of which more complex entities would emerge. The frequency of the possibility of these gradually more complex entities would be in inverse proportion to their complexity. Once the process began, however, it could not be turned back until ultimately complex entities had been formed, with a unique – and uniquely complex – entity forming which would involve all the molecules in the universe. This would be God, but He would break down, and with His breaking down the force of entropy would assert itself… as in the various laws of thermodynamics. Thus, Rovere demonstrated that the current epoch was slightly after that of the breaking-apart of the totally inclusive unique entity called God, and that a growing progression away from individuality and complexity was already under way. It would continue until the original equal distribution of waste heat occurred, whereupon, after much time, the anti-entropic force would, by randomness, by chance motion, manifest itself once more.

But Amos Ild. He differed from them: he was building something, rather than merely describing it in theoretical, mathematical terms. The government would make good use of him, if it did happen to occur to Gram. Yes, he would think of it, Provoni decided. Because by bringing Ild into top government levels, work on the Great Ear would slow down, perhaps even cease. It would take Gram time to figure this out, but eventually he would.

So I have to assume, Provoni thought, that we’ll be up against Amos Ild. The brightest light the New Men possess – hence the most dangerous to us.

‘Morgo,’ he said.

‘Yes, Mr. Provoni.’

‘Can you construct a receiver out of yourself or out of parts of this ship by which you can monitor thirty meter band output by Earth transmitters? I mean ordinary transmitters, used for commercial purposes.’

‘Why, may I ask?’

‘They run regular news broadcasts at two spots on the thirty meter band. Hourly.’

‘You wish to know what’s happening on Earth politically?’

‘No,’ he said with sarcasm. ‘I want to know the price of eggs in Maine.’

My temper’s wearing thin, he realized.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No sweat,’ the Frolixan answered.

Thors Provoni threw back his head and laughed. ‘“No sweat” from a ninety ton gelatinous mass of protoplasmic slime that has engulfed this ship in its fluid body, that’s on every side of me, like a barrel. And it says, “No sweat.”’

This kind of usage would surprise the New Men, when they reached Terra. After all, it had learned his vocabulary and mannerisms – which were not the king’s.

‘I can pull the sixteen meter band,’ Morgo said presently. ‘Will that do? There seems to be considerable traffic on it.’

‘Not the kind I want,’ he said.

‘The forty meter band, then?’

‘Okay,’ Provoni said irritably. He put on the headphone, turned the variable condenser of his receiving rig. Cross-talk came and went, and then, for an instant, he had a news broadcast.

‘… the end of relocation camps on… and Luna brought a… who some of which for years… coupled with this, the destruction of the subversive 16th Avenue printing…’ It faded out.

Did I hear that right? Provoni asked himself. The end of the relocation camps on Luna and southeastern Utah? Everyone freed? Only Barnes could have thought of that. But even Barnes… it was hard to believe. Maybe as a whim of Gram’s, he thought. A momentary panic reaction to our three radio messages to the 16th Avenue plant. But if it’s been destroyed, perhaps they didn’t receive the messages; perhaps they received only the first one or two.

He hoped both the government and the Cordonites had received the third message. It ran:

To the Frolixan he said, ‘Would you augment my transmission strength and beam the third message over and over again. Here, I can make you a rotary loop or tape.’ He snapped on his tape recorder and read the words, grimly, and with ultra-clear articulation – and intense satisfaction.

‘On a variety of frequencies?’ Morgo asked.

‘Every one you can manage. If you can get it up into the frequency modulation channels we might be able to print over a video image. Get it right into their TV sets.’

‘Good. That will be enjoyable. It’s a cryptic message; it does not, for example, mention that I am alone, that my brothers lag half a light year behind us.’

‘Let Willis Gram figure that out when we get there,’ Provoni grunted.

Morgo said, ‘I have been meditating over the possible effect my presence will have on your Mr. Gram and his cronies. First of all, they will discover that I cannot die, and that will frighten them. They will see that I can grow, if fed properly, and in addition I am able to make nutritional use of almost any substance. Third—’

‘A thing,’ Provoni said. ‘You’re a thing.’

‘A thing?’

‘That’s what it’s all about.’

‘The psychological effect, you mean?’

‘Right.’ Provoni nodded somberly.

‘I think,’ Morgo said, ‘that my ability to replace sections of living organisms with my own ontological substance will frighten them the most. When I manifest myself smally, as say a chair, consuming the actual object as a source of energy – this event, in miniature, so they can understand it, will panic them. As you have seen, I can replace any object with myself; there is no viable limit to my growth, Mr. Provoni, as long as I am fed. I can become the entire building in which Mr. Gram works; I can become an apartment building of five thousand people. And’ – Morgo hesitated – ‘there is more. But I will not at this time discuss it.’

Provoni meditated. The Frolixans had no specific shape; their historic method for survival was to mimic objects or other living creatures. Their strength lay in the fact that they could absorb creatures, become them, using them as fuel, and then abandoning their empty husks. This process, like that of cancer, would not easily be uncovered by Gram’s detection-police apparatus; even when the transformation process reached vital organs, the imitated creature could function and survive. Death came when the Frolixan withdrew – ceased to provide counterfeit lungs, heart, kidneys. A Frolixan liver, for example, could function as well as the authentic liver it replaced… but it declined to remain once it had devoured everything of value.

Most frightening of all was the Frolixan invasion of the brain. The human – or other invaded organism – suffered from pseudo-psychotic thought-processes which he did not recognize as his own… and he would be correct; they would not be. And gradually, as the brain became absorbed and replaced, all of his thought-processes would be Frolixan. And at that point the Frolixan abandoned him, and he ceased to be, utterly empty of psychic content.

‘Fortunately,’ Provoni mused, ‘you’re selective in your choice of hosts, since you have no interest in or intention of populating Earth and bringing to an end the life of humanoid organisms. All you’re going after is the governmental structure.’ And once that’s done, he mused, you will retire.

Won’t you?

‘Yes,’ Morgo said, listening to his thoughts.

‘You’re not lying?’ Provoni asked.

The Frolixan let forth a cry of pain.

‘All right,’ Provoni said hastily. ‘I’m sorry. But suppose—’ He did not finish, at least not aloud. But his thoughts jumped to the ultimate conclusion: I have sent a race of murderers to Earth, to destroy everyone equally.

‘Mr. Provoni,’ Morgo said, ‘this is why I, and only I, am here with you: we want to try to settle matters without a physical conflict… as would happen when my brothers arrive – happen then because we will not call on them unless needed for open warfare. I will negotiate a basic change in the establishment of your planet; that establishment will agree. In the news item you monitored, it mentioned that the concentration camps have been opened. They are doing it to placate us, are they not? Not from weakness on their part but from their desire to avoid an open fight, to present a united front. Your race is xenophobic. And I am the ultimate foreigner. I love you, Mr. Provoni;I love your people… insofar as I know them through your mind. I will not do what I can do, but I will make them know what I can do. In your mind’s memory-section there is a Zen story about the greatest swordsman in Japan. Two men challenge him. They agree to row out to a small island and fight there. The greatest swordsman in Japan, being a student of Zen, sees to it that he is last to leave the boat. The moment the others have leaped out onto the shore of the island he pushes off, rows away, leaving them and their swords there. Thus he proves his claim for what he is: indeed he is the finest swordsman in Japan. Do you see the application to my situation? I can outfight your establishment, but I will do so by not-fighting… if you follow my thought. It will be in fact be my refusal to fight – yet showing my strength – which will frighten them the most, because they cannot imagine such power held but not used. Had they it, they would use it, your government. Your New Men, who to me are like the buzzing of flies. If I am obtaining an actual picture of them from your mind; if you do in fact know them.’

‘I should know them,’ Provoni said. ‘I’m one of them. I’m a New Man.’