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Ebook has 795 lines and 32114 words, and 16 pages

THE ETERNAL QUEST

A Novelette by Joseph Gilbert

"I have come," said the little man, "a new Moses, to lead my people to the Promised Land." He said it slowly, with dramatic restraint. "Fate has led me to a star, and I have returned to show mankind the way to a thing it has not known for over a hundred years--hope!"

He was not quite five feet tall, with a chubby face and a beet-red nose, straw-colored hair, and mild gray eyes. He was nondescript. And it seemed very strange, somehow, that this ridiculous little man could stand there on that platform, with the gleaming majesty of that five-hundred-foot spaceship in the background dwarfing him--and facing that battery of telecasters, talk to two billion people and awaken in them a thing that had been dormant for a century or more.

He said, "We have died spiritually, and the eternal quest of man for contentment has almost ceased--for he knows, in his barren, bitter heart that there is no contentment to find." He paused, and the tremendous crowd that filled the rocket-ground were weirdly silent, waiting. "No longer shall only the Space Patrol know the thrills of adventure and discovery. We, too...."

Robert Lawrence smiled whimsically and cut off the televisor. It was almost impossible to hear the speaker, anyway, for no matter how well sound-proofed a Space Patrol ship is, the noise is still deafening to one not long accustomed to it. You can't stop the vibrations of an atomic engine.

Besides, the reference of the little man to the adventure and discovery of the Space Patrol was rather amusing to one who held that job, and was tired of it.

You took up a tight orbit around Mars and were bored to death for some four weeks, and then there was an order to intercept a gang of wild youngsters who had run past the Interplanetary Way Station without signaling, for the thrill of it.

Occasionally you sent out a call for a battle cruiser when you spotted a private ship that wouldn't answer your demand for call letters, and if part of the crew tried to run for it in the life rocket, you would chase them out as far as Venus before you got a magnetic grapple on them.

Then you risked your life, but it still wasn't much fun, because the crew was probably made up of a bunch of scatter-brained kids, with a hysterical finger on the trigger of their blasters, ready to kill instantly when you got them in the corner.

The rest of the time you dropped in on settlers who were sick and tried to bring them around; answered any call for help on the planet or in your sector of space; acted as a sort of watchdog; and wondered what the hell to do with yourself.

Still, it was the only life left for a strong, active man, and he had been following it for four years now and would certainly continue it until the little man's plans were carried out. And carried out they would be--of that he was confident. Proud, too. Proud that his quiet faith in the future of mankind had proven itself in spite of the contempt and cynical ridicule of some of the best minds in the decadent, dying Science Hall, where he had received his training for this job.

Not, he thought wryly, that they didn't have excellent reason for their cynicism. Few people had quite as much opportunity as he to see what was happening to the world, how effeminate its inhabitants were becoming. The patrol had been recently cut in half, not for any lack of material resources, but due rather to the fact that there weren't enough men to fill the ranks.

A man with sufficient stamina to be in the Patrol, plus the necessary mental and emotional stability, was practically unobtainable. Perhaps, he mused, that was why men in the Patrol married so well; they were the very cream of mankind, the finest group of its kind on earth. But the thought of women and marriage brought the old hurt and the old memory, and he turned his attention to checking his unquestionably accurate course in an equally old and equally futile attempt to forget the past.

Finding it correct, as he had known it would be, he leaned back in his chair against the centrifugal push of the ship as it banked slightly and headed in for Mars. Then a buzzer made frantic bees' noise, and he released the automatic pilot, taking the controls himself. The buzzer had been a warning that atmosphere was close, and it takes a human hand to handle a rocket in an atmosphere.

It was possible, of course, that this trip of his was purely a waste of energy, but it wasn't his job to guess; he was the type who made sure first--if he had not been, the Patrol would never have accepted him.

With one hand he reached over and flicked on the televisor.

He wouldn't be able to hear much, and already knew the general trend of the little man's plan, but to have that belief around which his entire philosophy of life had been built borne out by the man who was himself to restore mankind to the glory that was its heritage, to the ultimate fulfilment of its age-old quest--that, indeed, was worth the hearing.

The image of the little man snapped on the screen with an abruptness that was startling after the long minutes required for the televisor to warm up.

The colors were blurred from the distortion of millions of miles of travel in space, but the ruddy nose of the little man was still prominent.

Above the crashing pound of the rockets, Lawrence heard faintly, "... the psychologists have long known the reason for this soul-decay in man...."

The small room was so Grecian in its simplicity, with its shining marblelike walls, the bench of the same sea-foam white in the corner, and the three tunic-clad men, that the televisor screen set in the wall appeared incongruous and out of place.

"Hear him talk about 'the psychologists'," said Herbert Vaine, with a wave of his slender, beautiful hand toward the little unimpressive man on the screen, "when he knows more about applied psychology than any of us in this room. More than you or I, Stanton, or even Parker there."

He smiled cynically, and his eyebrows climbed an astonishing distance up his dome of a forehead.

Stanton grunted. He was a sour, disillusioned little monkey of a man, and prone, at times, to communicate largely by grunts. But now he spoke. "Be grateful. If it wasn't for that little runt we'd be fighting off a howling mob of neurotics and incipient schizophrenics right now. And not only is he giving us a holiday, he's practically saving the entire race.

"After that speech of his, there's going to be a wave of hysteria that will make the panic over that comet-striking-the-earth hoax way back in 2037, ninety-six years ago, look as innocuous as a Sunday school picnic. And it'll be healthy, it'll be the best that could possibly happen to this jaded civilization of ours, a safety valve for the pent-up emotions of over a hundred years! Lord, I hope he can go through with it--if they're disappointed after this renewal of hope, I dread to think of the reaction."

He paused, took a deep breath. "Listen."

"--were wise, those ancient ancestors of ours," came the voice of the little man, "but they did not have the background of experience that would have enabled them to predict what has happened. They realized that if machines became so perfect that they could do the work of man, without the guidance of man, then the hedonistic existence this would leave as man's only alternative, would quickly lead him back to the jungles.

"The world became one giant hobby field, a paradise apparently.

"They were wise; it was a good plan. But it didn't work.

"The machines were to blame. They could do things better, infinitely better, than human hands. You built televisors and put them together carefully with the proud hands of a creator. With your care and skill you were able to turn out, say, some ten televisors a month, but they were the best of their kind, and you were happy in that knowledge. Then you discovered that the machines could produce those televisors of yours at the rate of some five hundred a month, and could make a better one than you could, with all your patient toil and trouble. You were a rocket builder, a constructor of homes, a monocar designer? It was the same.

"Or perhaps you were an inventor? Why? That, too, was what the inventors wondered--and ceased to invent. There had been too many wonders, the world was satiated with wonderful things, and those who create more, found for them merely a bored acceptance. The acceptance was of the machine, not himself, for the majority of the population did not even know who had built the marvels that made their life so monotonously comfortable.

"The incentive to do good in this world died--there was no good to do. There were no physicians, because the machines could diagnose an ailment better than they; there were no diseases to eliminate because they had long been eliminated; there were no surgeons to operate, because the machines did it quicker, safer, better. There were no abuses to correct, no social conditions to improve, because there were no abuses, and the social conditions were Utopian.

"There was no longer any desire to achieve in writing, in art, in music--for achievement was no longer recognized. If your writing was packed with significance, with powerful, thought-provoking originality, then it probably would not even see publication. Those who wrote and were recognized were those who could thrill with screaming action, with the forgotten danger of the old, primitive days back in the twentieth century; cheap stuff produced by men who were more mechanical than the machines. The only art that any man recognized was illustrating posters and those stories. Beauty had become too tame. The swing, the jazz, of an earlier age had evolved into a nerve-racking bedlam of discordant sounds not even needing a composer--mechanically timed, mechanically produced, mechanically precise.

"Mankind lost its most precious possession--the sense of achievement, of being valuable, and with it lost its initiative. They suffered from a mass inferiority complex that was only too well justified by the superiority of the metal monstrosities they, the Frankensteins, had made.

"Something died inside the mind of man--his self-confidence, his superiority. And with it died achievement and progress. Mankind no longer lived. It existed."

His rather ridiculously high-pitched voice died quietly away as he paused and gazed into, it seemed, the room, as he had gazed into the empty temple of man's intellect but a moment before. And in that instant, standing there with his stubby hands on the railing of the platform, he had the surpassing dignity of one who sees conquest near and rejoices in the knowledge that his achievement has been something more than worthy.

"The result," he continued, "was inevitable. The hobby system, as it has been flippantly termed, dissolved in a chaotic attack on the machines. Fortunately, the mobs were too disorganized to destroy much before they felt the effects of their attacks. For men, subject to a cold they had never known before--due to their damaging the weather towers--died from exposure, untended by smashed machines that could have saved them. Everywhere hundreds of people, deprived of the comfort of machines they had come to regard as essential, died swiftly from unaccustomed hardships to which their delicate constitutions had been too long unconditioned.

"That, as you know, was the first and only attack on the machines. It had become apparent that they had not only degenerated man, but so degenerated him that he could not live without them.

"And so the present system of credits for the amount of work done by each person in his own line has come into being. It has not changed the situation. Man still has no excuse for living, only for existing.

"The frenzied, maddened search for some purpose, some reason for being, that has taken place since--I need not go into. It is a rather horrible thing to think about. And in the last twenty-five years it has resulted in a revolt against convention and the accepted decencies in life. That has led, in turn, to orgies, to abandoned pleasure-seeking that has no parallel in our written history. The frustrated creative genius of our time has found outlet shocking to more ordinary people--if any person can be called ordinary in this time and age. I do not believe there is such a person. I believe that we have all gone mad in our despair and in our lack of any intelligent goal."

The voice of Parker cut across the spell in the room like the explosion of a shell in a country graveyard.

"We can't claim immunity from it, either, you know," said Vaine. "We're all too old to join the orgies, but we try to compensate for our helplessness, our uselessness, in other ways. You, Parker," he smiled at the chubby psychologist, "are a faddist who follows every single mad-eyed craze that crops up. You have no idea how strange you look right now without any hair at all on your face; no eyebrows, no eyelashes, a bald dome. You're a remarkable sight."

Parker colored. This turned him oddly red from his smooth chin to his bald pate, so that he rather resembled a beet carved into the form of a face.

"It's not a fad. It's a hygienic movement that I highly approve of."

Vaine's laugh left little echoes repeating themselves in the corners of that acoustically perfect room.

"What term would you use to explain away the time that you brought to your office some quack's mystic device which would supposedly soothe the patient by a mysterious mixture of vibrations and music made by the movement of the operator's hands in an eddy field? Remember how the frightful noises you hauled up sent three patients into hysteria, and so accentuated another's delusion of persecution that he focused his attentions on you as the cause of his troubles? Then he chased you all around the office with a metal chair, earnestly imploring you to stand still long enough to get your head bashed in.

"And how about the time you claimed it was the duty of every citizen to learn the intricacy of a certain machine--and blew out the side of the wall with the 'harmless' little projector you rigged up? Eh?"

He chuckled and a smile flickered for an instant on the face of the sour Stanton.

"You aren't too normal yourself," retorted Parker. "Spending all your time dashing around with other people's wives."

"Granted," said Vaine. "I'm an old fool and I know it."

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