But the minutes passed and the body did not fall. Instead, Ruiger himself became entangled in a clump of grass. By the time he freed himself it was far too late. Desperately he lunged forward, only to see his body, striated by blades of grass, walk straight over the edge of the cliff, to fall on the rocks and the sea below.
It was gone. His body was gone. Numb with failure, Ruiger turned round. The Brand body, too, had disappeared, and of the Brand brain there was no sign. He made out the Chid hut. Near it was Wessel, standing casually, his brain out of his skull again and clinging to the side of his neck like an enormous slug. Beyond that, he dimly saw the Chid spaceship, not far from the little wood.
He saw his own spaceship, too, but that was no use to him now. Ruiger’s gaze settled on the wood. The dark patch, the motionless copse, was like an island amid the tawny bush. Curious… he was already forgetting what it was like to have a body… The burning hunger faded, his humanity receded from him as if he had lost it, not minutes ago, but decades ago, and the little wood was no longer gruesome or grotesque. It was a lush, gentle, sheltering place to part-animals like himself. It protected and nurtured them. In the wood he could live—after a fashion. And life, he remembered dimly, was worth hanging on to at any cost.
The sun and stars were burning down on him. He was naked and helpless here in the open. He could not live here. Steadily, pushing his way through the stiff grass, thinking of the welcoming pool of blood, of the enclosing black foliage, of the pulsing warmth, he crawled towards the still, dark hollow.
The God-Gun
It might seem improbable that my friend Rodrick (the spelling is his) could be the perpetrator of the world’s ultimate evil. His everyday conduct is neither more nor less reprehensible than the average man’s, and indicates no propensity for extreme villainy. Yet philosophically his depravity is profound, and has led him to commit the supreme crime, a crime of such magnitude as even to put him beyond the reach of divine retribution (or so he claims, and I, his only confidant, believe him).
The event of which I speak took place late one summer evening, in the final quarter of this century. It is thanks to Rodrick’s vanity that I witnessed the deed—that and our habit of drinking together in various bars in the town where we both live. I believe these meetings are for Rodrick almost his only social activity. For me, they provide the kind of stimulating conversation that is not always easy to come by in a small town. In the course of an evening our discussion might range through particle physics, organic chemistry, metallurgy, magic, magnetism, senology, cosmology, comparative religion, systematics, computer design, and on what would be the proper classification of human types. But always it has been a somewhat one-sided debate, for there has never been any question of my being equal to Rodrick. Always he outdistances me, always I am the pupil being talked to by a master who holds in his memory every fact and idea known to man.
My acquaintanceship with Rodrick has been a long one, and goes back nearly fifteen years. We both lead prosaic lives; I as an accountant and he, with a waste of ability all too typical of him, as a designer in a local television factory. We are, it will be guessed, intellectual dilettantes. But whereas I am strictly an amateur, Rodrick might almost be termed a professional, an avid scholar, and besides that a genuine inventor. The range of his studies is vast. I know, for instance, that he not only keeps himself fully informed as to the state of the physical sciences, but that he has also made a detailed examination of every philosophical and mystical system available. Confronted with the latest X-ray readings from suspected black holes, he is able to add comment derived from some obscure Kabbalistic text. Conversely, to refute a point in some ancient metaphysical doctrine quite unheard of by me, he will cite the discovery of the microwave background radiation.
But it would be wrong, I suppose, to describe Rodrick as a genius, for all his mental scope. Genius usually carries with it the capacity for deep feeling, and there Rodrick is, not simply deficient, but actually disabled: he is an emotional imbecile. I have come to know well his dry, arrogant voice, his tight, triumphant smile, his rapidly blinking eyes, symptoms of features in his psyche that are, perhaps, an aspect of our time. Nothing ever engages his attention that is not of a purely intellectual character; he worships, so to speak, the problem-solving intellect, its cleverness, its ingenuity, its facility for making the previously impossible possible. The need for a new type of life-saving surgery, or the interesting but frustrating question of how to achieve controlled nuclear fusion and so supply limitless energy to mankind, is to him no different from the problem of how to arrange the perfect murder, or of how to annihilate a nation.
This manic obsession with means regardless of the morality of ends, this extraordinary shallowness in his otherwise brilliant make-up, may be why so little has come out of Rodrick’s efforts. His minor improvements in radio engineering have not been commercially adopted, and though he maintains a well-equipped workshop on the top floor of his house, most of his private inventions have too small a practical application to make them viable. Only the automata with which he has populated his house seem to have proved even moderately useful, dusting and cleaning, finding their way by following white lines painted on the floor, climbing stairs and walls on a system of guide-rails, but leaving large patches of dust and rubbish unattended. And even they are complicated, clumsy, and too expensive to be marketable.
Of late Rodrick has become much absorbed in laser technology. It was to this subject that he first turned on the evening in question. He told me that he had just finished constructing “a unique device” employing a number of very powerful lasers he had bought recently. When I asked him what this device did, he changed his tack and went on to discuss the incongruent properties of electromagnetic radiation: its constant velocity in vacuo, unaffected by the velocity of the observer; its ubiquitous role as a conveyor of energy, and so forth. He said he suspected that laser light, because of the discipline of its coherent vibrations, could be used to disintegrate solid objects “into atoms”, as he put it, if only it could be tuned finely enough.
We were drinking in the White Bear, a quiet place lit by shaded lamps. Suddenly breaking off his discourse, Rodrick turned to me and asked abruptly if I believed in God.
The question surprised me. “Not in so far as I’ve ever thought about it,” I said.
“I have thought about it a great deal,” Rodrick said airily, “and I’m convinced that God does exist. The universe is the result of an act of creation. In other words, we have a maker.”
It surprised me a great deal to hear Rodrick talk this way. We had both always taken a materialistic view of things, and although Rodrick is familiar with mystical doctrines, as I have said, I had presumed his interest in them to be for the sake of completeness only. To take seriously the notion of God, to admit religion, seemed to me to smack of superstition, of unreason, of what Rodrick has called “animal belief”. I would not have thought it possible, either, for Rodrick to experience the sense of humility that belief in God is supposed to inculcate, and it saddened me, a little, to imagine now that there was a breach in the armour of his hubris.
His next words, however, were reassuring. “And if God exists, the next question is, how may he be contacted, influenced, forced, even injured.”
“It’s not possible,” I answered. “Believers are unanimous on that score. He is impalpable, transcendent.”
Rodrick looked at me intently, with that small, tight smile of his that meant he was leading up to something. “They are quite mistaken,” he said firmly. “What you are quoting is the shoddy superstition of the worshipper, the cringing obeisance he adopts towards the creator. The point is, I have never yet studied an account of the creation, whether mythical or metaphysical, that managed to do without some connection between the creator and the created. Since the universe is physical, it follows that this connection must, necessarily, be of a physical kind.”