Dead End 2

Dead End 2

"Now, now," said Scientist Norcross, "don't cry, my dear."

 

"But this is so puzzling--and I wasn't crying," she answered. "What's

happened to me?"

 

"Sit down, Monica, and tell me what you think has happened."

 

"But I don't know. You see, the last I remember is walking through the

Psych Lab in San Francisco, and suddenly--suddenly, I'm in New York and

they're sending me to you. What has happened?"

 

"Where do you first remember being in New York?"

 

"In the--oh, I don't know!" She was in a flush of embarrassment.

 

"I'll help you, my dear. You were in the pseudo-life clinic. You

are not _exactly_ Monica Drake Lane any longer. She died. You are

pseudo-life."

 

Her eyes were bright and the pupils were pinpointed from shock.

 

"You are the pseudo-life Monica Drake Lane. To all outward appearances,

you are an exact counterpart of the girl. Inwardly? Well, your

internal organs have been simplified, and you cannot reproduce. Aside

from such minor changes, you are identical, and incidentally a much

more efficient creature than your prototype. And if your mind, which

is a very good one, was a human mind, I could not tell you this.

Pseudo-life is a most remarkable thing, but Lewis and Havinghurst

and Covalt, who developed it 300 years ago, were never able to imbue

pseudo-life with what they called the minus-one factor, which includes

the phenomenal human emotional sensitivity, among other things. Are you

feeling better now?"

 

"Why, yes--" Her voice trailed off.

 

"You are no longer a slave of your emotions," said Scientist Norcross

complacently. "None of us are."

 

"You--you are--?"

 

"Oh, yes. We generally don't speak of such things, but since I'm to

introduce you to pseudo-life, I can tell you that I died two years ago."

 

"I'm afraid I never did know--or Monica Drake Lane never--that is, I--"

 

"You _are_ Monica Drake Lane. If you will sit quietly, I'll tell you

about it." Scientist Norcross took two cigarettes from his reticule

and offered the girl one. The lip play was considered somewhat daring

between the sexes, but under the circumstances he thought the mild

narcotic would be good for her, as well as the sharpening of the senses

brought on by actually smoking together.

 

"When the Americans, who inhabited this continent, gained domination

of the world in the 21st Century, they consolidated their position by

carrying their customs to the ends of the Earth. For that matter, to

Alpha Centauri, if the ships did get through.

 

"Forgive me," he interrupted himself, "if I seem improper or even

immoral in this little talk of ours. Believe me, it's not with an easy

disregard of proprieties that I bring myself to speak of such things.

 

"Well, the Americans believed, and rightly so, that death is a dreadful

thing. Until Lewis and Havinghurst and Covalt developed pseudo-life,

a great deal of time and effort and money went into such things

as cemeteries--places where they literally buried their dead with

elaborate ceremonials and much anguish. They had other equally wasteful

practices, such as madhouses and jails, which were done away with when

it became practical to replace a useless person with another, who

matched the original to near absolute perfection, but without fatal

flaws of body or weaknesses of the mind.

 

"Emphasis has shifted since those early years, when the abnormals

were dealt with, to the comforting of human beings. Should John Davis

Drumstetter suffer greatly at the loss of his mentor, the man who

guided him in the ways of science? Of course not. He never knew I died."

 

Norcross puffed complacently, sending iridescent rainbow smoke rings

over the mind machine.

 

"And I am his fiancee," said the girl.

 

"Should he suffer because you died? No reason for it," said Norcross

heartily. "A psychic trauma of that nature would make him desperately

unhappy. Happiness is the proper state in life, as everyone knows.

In fact, you will make him much happier than Monica Drake Lane, the

original, ever could."

 

"Yes, I shall be happy," mused the girl, as if feeling a more limited

capacity for sorrow within herself. "But you spoke of a minus-one

factor."

 

"Yes, it takes in a lot of things. Though we are immortal, barring

accidents, and we retain all the knowledge we had as human beings, the

flaw to pseudo-life is that no original thought is possible. Students

of the matter compare it to glancing at a page in a dictionary.

Of course you don't consciously remember the words there, but in

pseudo-life you are capable of remembering and using them properly, so

to speak, but not using them creatively. That is our trouble with John

Davis Drumstetter. I was a brilliant physicist, but the understanding

of new problems is beyond my limitations, and he is beyond me."

 

"But I woke in New York," she said irrelevantly.

 

"Because your master pseudo-life file was kept there," explained

Scientist Norcross. "As a human being, you were required to visit the

psych lab every month, where your changed pattern was recorded by the

mind machine. The pseudo-life girl could never lose more than a month

of the human being's life. What was your regular appointment date?"

 

"The 21st."

 

"Let's see--you died yesterday, so that would be only three days gone.

We're very fortunate."

 

"But won't he notice a difference in me?"

 

"Absolutely not."

 

"Am I--still capable of love?"

 

Scientist Norcross blew a plume of rainbow smoke into the air.

"Suppose, my dear, we find out."

 

Monica Drake Lane agreed, for morality, which is essentially organized

taboo that changes as society changes, had, in the 26th Century, been

confined exclusively to eating. Scientist Norcross had often amused

himself by imagining how people of other ages would have been outraged

by the moral standards of his own era, but his famous sense of humor

was not rugged enough to be amused by the moral standards of the past.

Not, at any rate, if he had had to endure them, though he found them

sufficiently comic as history.

 

She built a bower, an attractive courtship custom that had been adopted

from the birds, and the day ended much more pleasantly than Scientist

Norcross had expected at lunch.

 

* * * * *

 

The reports came in from Prime Center. Drumstetter stayed in Los

Angeles two days, in San Francisco three, and then consulted with

Dowson in Honolulu. He skipped to New Zealand, back north to Japan,

and swung across Siberia with short stops at various laboratories and

universities. He was in Finland for three days with old Scientist

Theophil Gertsley, who, though little better than a witch doctor,

called himself a psychologist.

 

When John Davis Drumstetter set his skip down beside the live oak

tree, Scientist Norcross and Monica Drake Lane were waiting for him.

He was gaunt from hunger and weary from travel, but the __EXPRESSION__ in

his eyes was not one to be assuaged by any food cubicle. Nor was it

love he had been seeking and not found, for Prime Center had seen to

it that opportunities were offered, from austere tropical girls to the

warmth-seeking women of the north, who would even eat with a member of

the opposite sex.

 

He greeted Scientist Norcross and his fiancee with an offhandedness

that Norcross had not expected, and asked that he be excused from any

long immediate association with them, due to the press of uncompleted

work.

 

"But, Johnny," said Monica Drake Lane, "I've made a bower close by, and

you seem very tired."

 

"There's work to be done," said the young man firmly. "I have no time

to--Wait. I'll see your bower."

 

As they walked over the lush artificial grass, Scientist Norcross

explained that his results from the overdrive relay equations were in

the mind machine even now, but John Davis Drumstetter only patted him

on the shoulder in a friendly way and told him not to bother.

 

When they reached the bower, Scientist Norcross expected that

Drumstetter would sleep there after all, for it was an exceptionally

pleasant design. The force field was night, and the sky was filled with

adapted creatures from Mars dancing to their susurrate music, and

the air was permeated with the bitter-sweet and exciting scent of a

Venusian lake, the very odor of romance. In the background was the song

of the sea.

 

John Davis Drumstetter stepped out of the bower and said gently, "It's

one of the nicest I've ever seen, and we spent some happy nights in it

a year ago, didn't we, Monica?"

 

He kissed her gently, as he might kiss a child, and walked back to the

oak tree.

 

"He's behaving very oddly," reported Norcross to Prime Center, as soon as he could, and gave the details.