The Stork Factor Read online

  millions died. Airborne fire raids on the southern continent left wide scars of smoking ruin. The intercontinental war lasted a month. It would take

  longer for the Brothers to ferret out the last hiding places of the scientific rebels, but the outcome was inevitable. Under the frozen tundra of the northern reaches of the Republic, Colonel Ed Baxley, sickened by the slaughter, seeing the revolt failing, worked frantically to help the underground develop the fire weapon. He shared his knowledge and all the resources of the withering revolution went into the speedy manufacture of big fire cannon, which were deployed down the plains, taking unsuspecting government forces by surprise. But

  the battle took its toll of life, both among the combatants and the civilian population. The government, having gained capitulation from the Republic of South American, turned it full fury on the advancing rebel army. Battle lines were drawn on the wide plains of the northwest. The chemical fire of the weapons chewed the earth, burned it, the very soil, slowly, but the feared spontaneous spread of the effects of the weapon were, fortunately, limited. However, the Brothers were slowly getting the upper hand through overwhelming force and superior fire power. After three days of advance and retreat through a heated, smoking devastation, the rebel forces were encircled by a ring of fire and the circle was slowly closing. Colonel Ed Baxley, commanding his second revolution, could see the

  end. Around him, in the ever-closing circle, his weapons met fire with fire, barely holding back annihilation. Now and then an overstrained weapon failed with a spectacular explosion and each time a weapon failed the circle closed. Baxley had lived out of a ground car for weeks. He had not shaved for days. He had had three hours' sleep in thirty-six hours. His white uniform was soiled. Around him men walked as if they were already dead, zombies tired to the breaking point. He faced Dr. Zachary Wundt. Wundt, himself, was red-eyed, stubble-faced, weary with fatigue and age. Battle reports were being relayed to Baxley by a former cadet who had joined the cause. They were all bad. When Wundt approached, walking slowly and with great effort, Baxley waved the cadet away. They talked, the two old, tired men. Around them the air was dense with acrid smoke. In the near distance the fire ring pulsated, roared. A weapon blew with an ear-splitting blast. Sadly, they agreed that it was hopeless. They met in a battered city in a building which had been seared by a near miss. Wundt, so weak he had to be helped into the room, sat with his face lowered. Baxley, in a clean uniform, stood stiffly at attention as Brother President Kyle Murrel strode in arrogantly, escorted by helmeted Brothertroops. «Well, colonel—» Murrel said. «We request terms,» Baxley said, eyes straight ahead. «You have them,» Murrel said. «Our terms. All ringleaders will be shot. All surviving scientists will become prisoners of the government. All medicines and equipment, will, of course, become state property.» «I must demand that our troops be treated as prisoners of war,» Baxley said. Murrel smiled coldly, «One hundred million people are dead because of you, colonel. Surely you would not be shocked by the execution of a few thousand more?» «We can continue fighting,» Baxley said. «We can cost you a half million casualties.» Murrel's smile did not change. «Actually, you've done the Republic a service, you know. Overpopulation was a problem. You've reduced that problem slightly. I, personally, would not object to a further reduction.

  However, I will agree to execute only the leaders and all those in your army above the third rank.» «But— « «What does it matter?» Zachary Wundt asked. «What does it matter if we die now or next week or next month?» «Why, doctor,» Murrel said, «can't you heal yourself? A man with your ability should be able to cope with a few bullet holes.» «Couldn't you pardon the members of the rank and file?» Baxley asked. «Wouldn't you be satisfied with just the officers?» Murrel spread his hands. «It is beyond my control. The people demand revenge.» «The people—» Wundt said. «The people…» «You will command your forces to cease firing,» Murrel said. «You will march them, in orderly fashion, into areas which will be prepared for them. They will carry no weapons. If there is any resistance, we will open fire.» Ed Baxley turned away to hide the tears which came to his eyes. It was late evening before the word could be passed. Isolated groups refused the surrender orders and continued fighting. They were overwhelmed and burned out of existence. The bulk of the tattered rebel army marched listlessly toward the designated areas. The firing squads were already at work. Officers and noncommissioned officers were marched directly to execution areas. High-ranking personnel were imprisoned, awaiting public execution. The army disarmed, beaten, was crowded into three areas encircled by government troops and fire cannon. The early morning saw a renewal of the firing squad activity. Colonel Baxley and Zachary Wundt were roused from their exhausted sleep and escorted to a small hill overlooking the valley in which the mass of the troops were concentrated. Kyle Murrel was there along with members of the government high command. «I must report that my recommendation for mercy for the rebel army has been overruled,» Murrel said. «It has been decided that there will be no reward for treachery.» He turned to a uniformed Brother. «Brother General, you may proceed.» The general raised his hand. Below, in the valley, crews looked to their fire weapons, the muzzles trained on the massed rebel troops. Shocked beyond horror, Colonel Ed Baxley prayed. He prayed aloud. «God in heaven, don't let this happen.» They came out of the north. They came soundlessly, floating high, moving in formation. They numbered in the hundred, the thousands, huge, spheroid things glintingly metallic in the morning sun. A low murmur spread over the plains. Murrel, face gone white, stood with his eyes turned toward the heavens. A shape detached itself from one of the large spheres, lowered silently. It hovered over the hill on which stood the President of the Second Republic and his military staff, shocked into momentary inactivity. A great voice came thundering down to them. «I have the means to destroy you. I will not hesitate to do so. All Brother troops will lay down their arms and withdraw.» «The guns,» Murrel said. «The guns!» Orders were given. Fire cannon raised their muzzles to the sky. «Fire!» Murrel said. Lances of force shot skyward. The massed fire of the government cannon concentrated on the stationary spheres and there was a roar of power as weapons discharged massive beams. Visible, deadly, the fire streams shot upward and flared and were absorbed. The spheres were untouched. The small vehicle which had lowered toward the hill shot high, attached itself to a large sphere. The large sphere moved slowly, settling, making a slow movement above the circle of discharging cannon. The earth rocked and shook. Dust swirled as tremendous force was brought into play. It took five minutes for the sphere to make the circuit and when it rose there was, where the massed cannon had encircled the rebel army, a trench fifty feel deep and hundreds of yards wide. The smaller sphere

  detached itself once again, hovered over the now silent group on the hill. A small port opened. A boiling, vibrating blast of dust appeared only yards to the front of the Presidential group, Murrel bolted. The generals held their ground for a moment. One aimed a hand fire-gun at the sphere. The beam was absorbed. There was a sound much like the clapping of hands and the general who had fired was gone. In his place there was a smoking hole in the earth. Then it was over. Stunned, not yet believing the sudden reversal, Baxley and Wundt stood nervously watching the sphere above them as a port opened and a man stepped out into open air and descended. He reached ground directly in front of them. He was dressed in a metallic garment. He was strikingly handsome, well muscled. He was smiling. He walked toward them. He paused. «Who are you?» Wundt asked in an awed voice. «Where are you from?» «I'm from East City,» Luke said. «You know that Dr Wundt.» CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The computer had been right. Not all of the Earth's people had the capacity to make the change. Zachary Wundt and Colonel Ed Baxley were, as the first people whom Luke met and tested after his return, a source of great concern. When Luke first faced them, he looked into them and saw—nothing. He could use his power to make repairs in their aging bodies, but the potential for using their own life force was frighteningly absent. The va
st, unused portions of their brains were fallow, incapable of being altered, having no connective passages to be opened. Luke envisioned disaster. He had seen the planet from space and new devastation had been added to the still unhealed scars of the old atomic war between the giant Communist powers. Now a good portion of the two remaining usable land areas was a fire-gun-scorched wasteland. He had counted on being able to alter those with whom he came into contact, make them capable of the feats which came so easily to him. He had envisioned a spreading wave of change, one person helping his brother to reach the capabilities of repairing his own physical imperfections, passing that ability to others, and the others passing it in a progression which would, in a short time, affect the population of the entire world. Then he saw blank, fallow hopelessness in the brains of the two leaders and his hopes were, momentarily dashed. Desperately, ignoring the excited questions of Wundt and Baxley, he turned to others. He found that the capacity to change was present in a large percentage of those who had lived in the overcrowded cities. He wondered then, for a moment, remembering the old, old adage which said that God moves in mysterious ways. It was hard to accept the supposition that God had made millions suffer in order to prepare the race for a great leap outward, but the fact remained that it was the poor and downtrodden who were able to accept Luke's penetration of the dark, closed ball in that large, unused area of

  brain. It was the suffering mass of people, those who had lived like rats in the hell of the cities, those whose bodies had altered through the tension, the irritation, the overcrowding, those with vastly enlarged adrenals and seared lungs and overworked hearts who had developed the unopened conduits through which could pass, with stunning stimulation from Luke's mind, the life force, the knowledge, the ability. He found it first in a tired old non-commissioned officer on the fringes of the mass of rebel troops who milled and shouted and wondered at the vast fleet which had appeared so miraculously overhead to save them from

  the Brothers' fire guns. He saw the black ball of potential, shot power into it, sent the old man reeling down to his knees holding his head in pain. Then there was communication. «Know yourself, brother,» Luke told him in his mind, giving instruction, leading, showing the old non-com the key to it all. «Pass it on, brother.» It spread out through the troops with a visible ripple of movement,

  rapid, the aching, almost-dead city people finding a reward, at last, for the

  lifetime of almost non-living. And from the battlefield, small ships carried converters to the cities, across the country, to the south into the devastated Republic of South American. «Know yourself, brother. Pass it along.» With the change spreading in a moving wave of wonder, the education process was begun. The fleet from the inner galaxy moved to key points, thousands of ships, each ship's system connected with the main computer, each ship able to reach into the minds of a hundred changees at once, force-feeding information to newly opened minds eager for knowledge. Luke, having begun the wave of change, flew with Wundt and Baxley to the underground capital near old Washington, installed Baxley as temporary President of the Third Republic. The crippled communications system was augmented by the mind-to-mind passage of the news among the changees. Organization slowly began to come from chaos. From the very first a special search team had been looking for Irene Caster. She was traced from the shakeshock therapy room in police headquarters in West City to a Fare home for invalids. The home, itself, had been in the path of a localized skirmish involving conventional weapons. The buildings were sagging, burned-out, empty. There was no trace of any of the occupants of the home. «Too late,» Luke said, when he received the report. «God I was too late.» He was with Wundt and Baxley. It was six days after Luke's return. Already, computer-educated technicians had patched the nationwide network of communications to establish a link to the west. The news saddened Luke. He walked to the wall on which hung a large, military map of the Republic, looking at it with unseeing eyes. He thought of Caster as she was when they were together in West City, gay, optimistic. He

  remembered the fright on her face as he was lifted by the girl called, in his mind, Blaze. He imagined the tortures she had endured, the final treatment on the shakeshock rack which blasted her mind, left her a vegetable, for that was the only conclusion to be drawn from the information that she'd been sent to a Fare home for invalids. Then the

  local battle with high-explosive shells tearing and blasting and ripping the buildings and people fleeing in panic, those who could move. Caster, perhaps, not realizing the danger, moving slowly, zombilike, walking into the path of the onrushing troops. She was dead. He had to accept it. And there was an empire to be built. It was estimated that some 60 percent of the population had changed. Another small percentage would be reached, but that would leave almost 40 percent of the people in misery. Orders went out. Those who have the life-control power are to use it to heal those who have not been able to make a change. Time passed. Local areas elected representatives to the First Congress of the Third Republic. The congress approved Luke's unilateral appointment of Colonel Ed Baxley as President, pending organization of the elective machinery based on the old system of the First Republic. Luke spent long hours in consultation with Baxley and a staff of newly changed, vibrant, healthy young men. There was so much to be done. A task force was set to work revamping the industrial facilities of the Republic. Plants which had produced endless lines of useless ground cars turned to the making of elements which went into ships patterned after the fleet which

  Luke had brought into the last battle on the northern plains, for vast as it was, the fleet was inadequate for the purpose of resettling almost three billion people on new planets scattered long light-years along the periphery of the galaxy. Another task force went into the Republic of South American, working toward union, toward peace among the survivors of centuries of warfare and pestilence on a tired, wasted planet. Vast efforts were underway to clean the environment of the Earth. This effort had priority, since it would take years, decades to complete the colonization of new planets and, moreover, there were those who were sentimental about the home planet, who wanted to keep it, return it to health and beauty. It became increasingly apparent that the non-changees were being left behind. Baxley and Wundt, healthy, cared for by the changees on the staff, found themselves turning over details more and more to the vibrant young men with the expanded minds. It was thus over the entire area of the two continents. Those who could not change found themselves being left out. They were treated with courtesy, but there was a touch of condescension which, as the exciting days passed, brought a crisis. The crisis came when the majority, the changees, voted to limit the franchise to changees only. Colonel Ed Baxley, at the head of the table, resplendent in white, rose, his face grim. «Gentlemen, I find myself, as President of the Republic, in an untenable position. You are saying that I will be unable to exercise the basic rights of citizenship.» «The rule will not apply to you, of course,» said a bright young changee. «Why should I be allowed special status?» Baxley asked his face flushed. «I am, along with all the others who have not been able to change, an inferior being.» «As I understand it,» Dr. Wundt said, with a rueful smile, «We are being punished now for having lived a childhood of comfort.» «Perhaps we can find a way,» Luke said. «Research is under way.» «I don't have your mental abilities, my boy,» Wundt said, «but I'm a medical doctor. I've studied the matter. Encephalograph of changees and those who have the change potential, when compared with the ordinary

  brain, say the brain of the colonel or myself, show differences so basic that I, in my ignorance, hold no hope of ever knowing the feeling of being a superman.» «But we can help you,» Luke said. «We can heal you, keep you healthy.» «And keep us as poor, retarded relations locked in a back room?» Baxley said. «No, not at all,» Luke insisted. «He is right, of course,» said one of the young staff men. Luke looked angrily toward the speaker. «I've always wanted to go into space,» Wundt said. «It's been a lifelong dream. Give us, the retarded relations
a back room, a planet or two somewhere. Give us a basic technology, medicine—» «But that's exile,» Luke said. «That's what they did with us.» «Yes,» Wundt said. «I've been thinking of that. It's almost as if there had been a long-range plan, almost as if we were put here, God knows how long ago, to act as a blood bank for the race, to furnish new blood when the old became tired, inactive. Now they had lapsed into complete inactivity. You might even say they're being rewarded for good work. When it comes right down to it, being eternally healthy, euphoric, sexually stimulated, without care or responsibility is not a bad way to live.» «But don't you see,» Luke said, «we'd be doing exactly as they did. We'd

  be pushing you out, cutting you off from all the benefits of our new status. You'd face death, disease, poverty, war, all the old things which have made this planet a living hell.» «It wasn't always a living hell,» Baxley said. «Once it was good here.» «Then you want this, too?» Luke asked. «In the past weeks I've found myself pretending that I understood the things that are happening,» Baxley said. «But I've been fooling no one but myself. Ask your young men. They come to me and say, 'Mr. President, there is this situation in Middle City,' and I listen and nod and don't

  understand half what they're saying. It's like putting a baby who can't even speak in charge of a group of adults.» «We'll talk about it,» Luke said. The first ships lifted away two months later. Scout ships, sent out during the early days of the change, reported habitable planets in the group of stars surrounding Antares in Scorpio. Non-changers went eagerly, happy to leave behind the yet uncured filth and pollution of the Earth, pleased to be among people of their own kind. With them went the knowledge to build a civilization based on science and medicine with a limited space capacity, for it had been discovered that the knowledge needed to man and maintain the starships came only with the expanded mind. As the word went out across the two continents and the giant starships flashed outward, they came by the millions, the thousands, the hundreds, in a diminishing trickle, all the non-changers, flocking together with people they could understand, seeking the clean air and expansion room of the new planets. Irene Caster was discovered with a small group who had been, since the battles around West City, hiding in caves on the rocky coast. Notified in New Washington, Luke flew out quickly. She did not, of course, recognize him. Even if her mind had been whole, she would not have seen in the muscled, handsome, vibrant young man the slack, sick, wasted, middle-aged nineteen-year-old who had gone with her into West City to preach and try to heal. She was sitting in a chair in a bare, efficient office at the port which had been built on the wasted site of the last battle. She had been sorted out of the mass of non-changers by the identification-record method, which was to be a permanent history of all those who went to the new planets. Her fingerprints, checked against the undamaged central file in old Washington, had matched those which Luke took from Zachary Wundt's records in the old underground. Without fingerprints, she would never have been recognized. She was forty-two, a ripe old age in the olden times, when a member of the masses lived a long life if he reached thirty. She looked sixty. Her hair was dirty, long, and lank. It had turned a streaky, unattractive gray. Her body was flabby, weak, racked by disease and malfunction. The old lung disease had ravaged her. But in those respects she was not unlike thousands of others who had not yet been