“The patient,” he said doggedly, “is a paranoid. Suspicion and trickiness is inherent in his mental processes.At any moment, to demonstrate his greatness, he may try to produce unholy destruction. You absolutely cannot trust him! Be careful!”
He hammered the fact home, arguing the sheer fact that a paranoid will do absolutely anything to prove his grandeur.
The new reaction was tried with microscopic quantities of material, and it only destroyed everything within a fifty-yard radius. Which brought the final decision on John Kingman. He was insane. He knew more about one overwhelmingly important subject than all the generations of men. But it was not possible to obtain trustworthy data from him on that subject or any others. while he was insane. It was worth while to take the calculated risk of attempting to cure him.
Braden protested again:
“I urged the attempt to cure him,” he said firmly, “before I knew he had given the United States severe centuries head-start in knowledge of atomic energy was thinking of him as a patient. For his own sake, any risk was proper. Since he is not human, withdraw my urging. I do not know what will happen. Anything could happen.”
His refusal held up treatment for a week. Then a Presidential executive order resolved the matter. The attempt was to be made as a calculated risk. Dr. Braden would make the attempt.
He did. He tested John Kingman for tolerance of euphoric drugs. No unfavorable reaction. He tested him for tolerance of drugs producing hallucination. No unfavorable reaction. Then—
He injected into one of John Kingman’s veins a certain quantity of the combination of drugs which on human beings was most effective for euphoric shock, and whose separate constituents had been tested on John Kingman and found harmless. It was not a sufficient dose to produce the full required effect. Braden expected to have to make at least one and probably two additional injections before the requisite euphoria was produced. He was taking no single avoidable chance. He administered first a dosage which should have produced no more than a feeling of mild but definite exhilaration.
And John Kingman went into convulsions. Horrible ones.
There is such a thing as allergy and such a thing as synergy, and nobody understands either. Some patients collapse when given aspirin. Some break out in rashes from penicillin. Some drugs, taken atone, have one effect, and taken together quite another and drastic one. A drug producing euphoria was harmless to John Kingman. A drug producing hallucinations was harmless. But—synergy or allergy or whatever—the two taken together were deadly poison.
He was literally unconscious for three weeks, and in continuous convulsion for two days. He was kept alive by artificial nourishment, glucose, nasal feeding—everything. But his coma was extreme. Four separate times he was believed dead.
But after three weeks he opened his eyes vaguely. In another week he was able to talk, From the first, his expression was bewildered. He was no longer proud. He began to learn English. He showed no paranoid symptoms. He was wholly sane. In fact, his I.Q.—tested later—was ninety, which is well within the range of normal intelligence. He was not over-bright, but adequate. And he did not remember who he was. He did not remember anything at all about his life before rousing from coma in the Meadeville Mental Hospital. Not anything at all. It was apparently, either the price or the cause of his recovery.
Braden considered that it was the means. He urged his views on the frustrated scientists who wanted now to try hypnotism and “truth serum” and other devices for picking the lock of John Kingman’s brain.
“As a diagnosis,” said Braden, moved past the tendency to be technical, “the poor devil smashed up on something we can’t even guess at. His normal personality couldn’t take it, whatever it was, so he fled into delusions—into insanity. He lived in that retreat over a century and a half, and then we found him out, And we wouldn’t let him keep his beautiful delusions that he was great and godlike and all-powerful. We were merciless. We forced ourselves upon him. We questioned him. We tricked him. In the end, we nearly poisoned him! And his delusions couldn’t stand up. He couldn’t I admit that he was wrong, and he couldn’t reconcile such experiences with his delusions. There was only one thing he could do—forget the whole thing in the most literal possible manner. What he’s done is to go into what they used to call dementia praecox. Actually, it’s infantilism. He’s fled back to his childhood. That’s why his I.Q. is only ninety, instead of the unholy figure it must have been when he was a normal adult of his race. He’s mentally a child. He sleeps, right now, in the foetal position. Which is a warning! One more attempt to tamper with his brain, and he’ll go into the only place that’s left for him—into the absolute blankness that is the mind of the unborn child!”
He presented evidence. The evidence was overwhelming. In the end, reluctantly, John Kingman was left alone.
He gets along all right, though. He works in the records department of Meadeville Mental now, because there his six-fingered hands won’t cause remark. He is remarkably accurate and perfectly happy.
But be is carefully watched. The one question he can answer now is—how long he’s going to live. A hundred and sixty-two years is only part of his lifetime. But if you didn’t know, you’d swear he wasn’t more than fifty.
The Lonely Planet
CHAPTER 1
PROTEAN PLANT
ALYX WAS VERY lonely before men came to it. It did not know that it was lonely, to be sure. Perhaps it did not know anything, for it had no need for knowledge. It had need only for memory, and all its memories were simple. Warmth and coolness; sunshine and dark; rain and dryness. Nothing else, even though Alyx was incredibly old. It was the first thing upon its planet which had possessed consciousness.
In the beginning there were probably other living things. Possibly there were quintillions of animalcules, rotifera, bacteria, and amoebae in the steaming pool in which Alyx began. Maybe Alyx was merely one of similar creatures, as multitudinous as the stars and smaller than motes, which swam and lived and died in noisesome slime beneath a cloud-hung, dripping sky. But that was a long time ago. Millions of years ago. Hundreds of millions of years now gone.
When men came, they thought at first the planet was dead. Alyx was the name they gave to the globe which circled about its lonely sun. One day a Space Patrol survey-ship winked into being from overdrive some millions of miles from the sun. It hung there, making conscientious determinations of the spectrum, magnetic field, spot-activity and other solar data.
Matter-of-factly, the ship then swam through emptiness to the lonely planet. There were clouds over its surface, and there were icecaps. The surface was irregular, betokening mountains, but there were no seas. The observers in the survey-ship were in the act of making note that it was a desert, without vegetation, when the analyzers reported protoplasm on the surface. So the survey-ship approached.
Alyx the creature was discovered when the ship descended on landing jets toward the surface. As the jets touched ground, tumult arose. There were clouds of steam, convulsive heavings of what seemed to be brown earth. A great gap of writhing agony appeared below the ship. Horrible, rippling movements spread over the surface and seemed alive, as far as the eye could reach.
The survey-ship shot upward. It touched solidity at the edge of the northern icecap. It remained a month, examining the planet—or rather, examining Alyx, which covered all the planet’s surface save at the poles.