CARRIER
By Robert Sheckley
EDWARD ECKS awoke, yawned and stretched. He squinted at the sunlight pouring in through the open east wall of his one-room apartment, and ordered his clothes to come to him.
They didn't obey! He wiped sleep from his eyes and ordered again. But the closet door remained stubbornly shut, and not a garment stirred.
Thoroughly alarmed, Ecks swung out of bed and walked over to the closet. He began to phrase the mental command again, but stopped himself. He must not become panicky. If the clothes didn't obey, it was because he was still half asleep.
Deliberately he turned and walked to the east wall. He had rolled it up during the night and now he stood, bare toes gripping the edge, where the floor met the outside wall of the building, looking out at the city.
It was early. The milkmen were out, soaring up to the terraces to deposit their milk. A man in full evening dress passed, flying like a wounded bird. Drunk, Ecks decided, noting how uncertain the man's levitation sense was. The man banked, narrowly missing a building, dodged a milkman, misjudged the ground and fell the last two feet. Miraculously he held his balance, shook his head and continued on foot.
Ecks grinned, watching him weave down the street. That was the safest place for him. No one ever used the streets, except the Normal's, or psi's who wanted to walk, for some reason. But levitating in his condition, he might get clipped by a teleported bale, or break his neck against a building. A newsboy floated past the window, goggles dangling from his hip pocket. The boy caught his breath and shot up, straight and true, to a twentieth floor penthouse.
Ecks craned his neck to watch the boy land his paper on the sunny terrace and sweep on. A penthouse, Ecks thought. That was the life. He lived on the third floor of an ancient building—so old that it still had stairway and elevator. But once he had finished his courses at Mycrowski university—once he had his degree—
There was no time for dreaming. Mr. Ollen didn't like him to be late; and his job at Mr. Ollen's store enabled him to attend the University.
Ecks walked back, opened the closet and dressed. Then, thoroughly calm, he ordered the bed to make itself.
A blanket half-lifted, wavered, and fell back on the bed. He ordered again, angrily. The sheets sluggishly straightened, the blankets slowly crawled into place. The pillow wouldn't move.
On the fifth order the pillow dragged itself to the head of the bed. It had taken him almost five minutes to make the bed—a task he usually finished in seconds. A shocking realization struck him, and his knees buckled; he sat down on the edge of the bed. He wasn't even able to handle simple motor-response teleportation.
And that, he knew, was how people discovered they had The Disease.
But why? How had it begun? He didn't have any unexplained tensions, any vital, unresolved problems. At twenty-six life was just beginning for him. His studies at the University were going well. His general psi rating was in the upper tenth, and his sensitivity rating approached the all-time high set by The Sleeper.
Why should it happen to him? Why should he catch the only disease left on Earth?
"I'll be damned, I don't feel sick," he said out loud, wiping perspiration from his face. Quickly he commanded the wall to close, just to see if it would. And it did! He turned on a faucet by mental command, levitated a glass, filled it and brought it to him, without spilling a drop.
"Temporary blockage," he told himself. "A fluke." Perhaps he had been studying too hard. More social life, that was what he needed.
He sent the glass back to the sink, watching the sunlight glint from it as is swooped through the air.
"I'm as good as I ever was," he said.
The glass dropped to the floor, shattering.
"Just a little shaky," he reassured himself. Of course, he should go to Psi-Health for an examination. If there is any impairment of your psi abilities, don't wait. Don't infect others. Get an examination.
Well, should he? Yes, he probably should.
But the Psi-Health agents were a jumpy bunch. If he showed his face they'd probably isolate him. Give him a few years of solitary rehabilitation, just to play safe.
That would be the end of him. Highly extroverted, Ecks knew himself well enough to realize that he could never stand solitary. His psi abilities would be completely wrecked that way.
Nuts, he said, and walked to the wall. Opening it, he looked out on the three story drop, steeled himself, and jumped.
For a horrible moment, he thought he had forgotten even the basic skill of levitation. Then he caught it, and soared toward Mr. Ollen's store. Weaving slightly, like a wounded bird.
PSI-HEALTH Headquarters on the eighty-second-floor of the Aerinon Building hummed with activity. Messengers levitated in and out the great windows, flying across the room to drop their reports on the Receiving desk. Other reports were teleped in, recorded by Psi-Grade-Three telepathic-sensitive office girls. Samples were teleported through the windows, recorded, and shuttled downstairs by Grade Two Polters. A skinny Grade Four psi girl collected the typed reports and levitated them across the room in a steady stream to the file clerks.
Three messengers swept in through a single window, laughing, barely clearing the jambs, and shot across the room. One, misjudging his arc, intercepted the path of reports.
"Why don't you look where you're going?" the Grade Four girl asked angrily. Her bridge of papers was scattered across the floor. She levitated them again.
"Sorry, honey," the messenger said, grinning and handing his report to the receiving desk. He winked at her, looped over the white stream, and shot out the window.
"Some nerve," the girl murmured, watching him streak into the sky. Without her attention, the papers began to scatter again.
The end-product of all the activity was funneled to the orderly black desk of Senior Health Officer Paul Marrin.
"Anything wrong, chief?" Marrin looked up and nodded to his assistant, Joe Leffert. Silently he handed him five file cards.
They were breakdown reports. Leffert scanned the first one rapidly.
"Jane Martinelli, waitress, Silver Cow, 4543 Broadway. Subject: Loss of psi ability. Observations: Discoordination of psi motor functions. Diagnosis: Acute loss of confidence. Infectious. Recommended: Quarantine, indefinite period."
The other reports were about the same.
"Quite a few," Leffert said, his tone perfectly even.
Another pile of cards was dropped on the black desk. Marrin leafed through them rapidly, his face impassive. The impassivity was mental as well. Not a thought leaked out of his rigidly held mind.
"Six more." He turned to a large map behind his desk and pinpointed the new locations. They formed an irregular pattern across almost a third of New York.
Leffert didn't have to speak. Even undirected, his teleped thought was strong enough, for Marrin to catch.
Epidemic!
"Keep that to yourself," Marrin said in his normal low voice. He walked slowly back to his desk, considering the implications of eleven cases in a single day, when their average was one a week.
"Get me the full reports on these people," Marrin said, handing Leffert the file cards. "I want a list of everyone they've been in contact with over the past two weeks. And keep quiet about it." Leffert hurried away.
Marrin thought for a moment, then teleped Krandall, chief of The Sleeper project. Normally, teleped messages were handled through a series of telepathic-sensitive girls; there were just too many minds for most people to make contact easily, without auxiliary guidance. But Marrin's psi abilities were of unusual strength. Also, he was strongly attuned to Krandall, having worked with him for many years.
"What's up?" Krandall asked, and the accompanying identity-image had the full, indescribable flavor of the man.
Quickly Marrin outlined the situation.
"I want you to find out if it's a random scattering, or if we've got a carrier to deal with," Marrin finished.
"That'll cost you a supper," Krandall teleped. From the peripheral thoughts, Marrin knew that he was sitting on a pier at Sag Harbor, fishing. "A supper at The Eagles."
"Fine. I'll have all the data. Is five-thirty all right?"
"Please, my boy! Make it six-thirty. A man of my—ah—dimensions—shouldn't levitate too rapidly." The accompanying visual was of an overstuffed sausage.
"At six-thirty, then." They broke contact. Marrin sat back and arranged the papers on his desk into still neater piles. At the moment he wished he were a health officer in some earlier age, with a nice fat germ to hunt down.
The source of The Disease was more subtle.
Diagnosis: Acute Loss of Confidence. Try putting that under your microscope.
He thought momentarily about the waitress, the first case on the files. Perhaps she had been stacking plates on a shelf. A doubt planted in her mind hours before, minutes before, blossomed. The plates fell. And a girl was seriously sick, horribly infected with mankind's last disease. Loss of motor-coordination. So she had to go into solitary, in order not to infect anyone else. For how long? A day, a year. A life.
But in the meantime, perhaps some of the customers had caught it from her. And spread it to their wives…
He sat upright and teleped his wife. Her answering thought was quick and warm.
"Hello, Paul!"
He told her he would be working late.
"All right," she said, but her accompanying thoughts were confused with a strong desire to know why, and the knowledge that she couldn't ask.
"Nothing serious," he said in reply to the unspoken question, and regretted it instantly. Lies, untruths, half-truths—even little white lies— didn't telep well. Nevertheless, he didn't retract it.
"All right Paul," his wife said, and they broke contact.
FIVE O'CLOCK, and the office staff put away their papers and headed for the windows flying to their homes in Westchester Long Island and New Jersey.
"Here's the stuff, chief," Leffert said flying up to the desk with a thick briefcase. "Anything else?"
"I'd like you to stand by," Marrin said, taking the briefcase. "Telep a few more agents, also."
"Right. Do you think something might break?"
"I don't know. Better get some supper." Leffert nodded. His eyes grew blank, and Marrin knew he was teleping his wife in Greenwich, telling her he wouldn't be home tonight.
Leffert left, and Marrin was left alone in the room, staring at the sunset. Out of the west window he could see the great red disk of the sun, and flitting across it were the black silhouettes of commuters, levitating home.
Marrin felt very much alone. Just him and a probable epidemic.
At exactly six-twenty, Marrin picked up the briefcase and levitated to The Eagles.
The Eagles restaurant was two thousand feet above New York, suspended on the backs of 200 men. The men were Grade One Psi laborers, government-tested for load capacity. As Marrin approached, he saw them under the base of the building. The restaurant floated above them, easily supported by their enormous combined psi strength.
Marrin landed on the main guest deck, and was greeted by the head waiter.
"How's everything, Mr. Marrin?" the waiter asked, leading him to a terrace.
"Fine," Marrin said, as he always did.
"You should try our other place some time, Mr. Marrin. If you're ever near Miami, there's an Eagles there. Same high-quality food."
And high-quality prices, Marrin thought, ordering a martini. The owner of the Eagles was making a fortune. Air-borne restaurants were common now, but Eagles had been the first, and was still the most popular. The owner didn't even have to pay a New York property tax; when he wasn't open, he parked his restaurant in a pasture in Pennsylvania.
The terraces were starting to fill up when Krandall arrived, out of wind and perspiring.
"My God," he gasped, sitting down. "Why aren't there any more airplanes? Bucked a head wind all the way in. Scotch on the rocks."
The waiter hurried away.
"Why do you have your emergencies on my day off?" Krandall asked, teleping the question. "Long distance flights are for the strong young apes. I am a mental worker. How is your wife?"
"The same," Marrin said. His face, schooled for years into a health officer's blank mask, refused to smile now. He ordered his dinner, and handed Krandall the briefcase.
"Hmmm." Krandall bent over the pages, scanning them rapidly. His broad, good-natured face grew abstracted as he memorized the information.
Marrin looked across the terrace while Krandall absorbed the data. The sun was almost gone, and most of the land was in shadow. Beneath him, the lights of New York were winking on in the shaded areas. Above, the stars snapped on.
Krandall ignored his soup, flipping the pages quickly. Before the soup was cold, he was through.
"That's that," he said. "What shall we talk about?" Krandall was the finest psi calculator in the business. He had to be to head the important Sleeper project. Like all calculators, he let his unconscious do the work. Once the data was committed, he ignored it. Unconsciously, the information was assimilated, examined, compared, synthesized. In a few minutes or hours he would have an answer. Krandall's great talent was compensated for in other ways, though. He couldn't pass a newsboy's test for levitation, and teleportation or telekinetic manifestations were almost out of the question for him.
"Is there anything new with The Sleeper?" Marrin asked.
"Still sleeping. Some of the boys cooked up a subconscious-infiltration technique. They're trying that in a few days."
"Do you think it will work?"
Krandall laughed. "I give them a one-point-one probability. That's high, compared with some of the stuff they've tried."
Krandall's brook trout was served, teleported fresh from the stream. Marrin's steak followed.
"Do you think anything will work?" Marrin asked.
"No." Krandall's face was serious as he looked at the lean, impassive health officer. "I don't believe the Sleeper will ever awaken."
Marrin frowned. The Sleeper was one of Psi's most important projects, and its least successful. It had started about thirty years ago.
Psi had been standard, but still unpredictable. It had come a long way in two hundred years from Rhine's halting experiments in extra-sensory perception, but it still had a long way to go.
Mycrowski took a lot of the wild-talent aspect from psi. Classified as an extreme sensitive with genius-level psi abilities, Mycrowski was the outstanding man of his age.
With men like Krandall, Myers, Blacenck and others, Mycrowski led the telekinesis projects, explored projection techniques, theorized on instantaneous transfer in teleportation and examined the possibilities of new, undiscovered psi abilities.
In his spare time he worked on his own pet ideas, and founded the School for Parapsychological Research, later changed to Mycrowski University.
What really happened to him was argued for years. One day, Krandall and Blacenck found him lying on a couch with a bare whisper of pulse to show that he was alive. They were unable to revive him.
Mycrowski had always believed that the mind was a separate and distinct entity from the body. It was believed that he had discovered a separation-projection technique for the mind.
But the mind never returned.
Others argued that his mind had simply snapped from too much strain, leaving him in a catatonic state. In any case, periodic attempts were made to awaken him, without success. Krandall, Myers and a few others had kept the project alive, but in a few years they had all the help they needed. The rare quality of Mycrowski's genius was recognized.
The tomb where the living body of Mycrowski, The Sleeper, vegetated, became a tourists' shrine.
"Haven't you any idea what he was looking for?" Marrin asked.
"I don't think he did himself," Krandall said, starting his cherry jubilee. "Oddest damned man in the world. Didn't like to talk about anything until he could throw it in your face as done. None of us had any reason to think anything was going to happen. We were sure that the stars were right around the corner and immortality was following that." He shook his head. "Ah, youth, youth."
Over the coffee Krandall looked up, pursed his lips and frowned. The assimilated data had synthesized. His conscious mind had the answer in a manner once called intuitive, until psi research pinned down the hidden factor as subconscious reasoning.
"You know, Marrin, you've definitely got a growing epidemic on your hands. There's no random scattering of cases."
Marrin felt his chest contract. He teleped the question tightly. "Is there a carrier?"
"There is." Mentally, Krandall checked the names on his list. His subconscious had correlated the frequency factors, tabulated probabilities and sent up a "hunch". "His name is Edward Ecks. He is a student, living at 141 Fourth Avenue."
Marrin teleped Leffert immediately and told him to pick up Ecks.
"Hold it," Krandall said. "I don't believe you'll find him there. Here's a probability-course of his movements." He teleped the information to Leffert.
"Try his apartment first," Marrin told Leffert. "If he's not there, try the next probability. I'll meet you downtown, in case we have to hunt him." He broke contact and turned to Krandall. "For the extent of the emergency you'll work with me?" It was hardly a question.
"Of course," Krandall said. "Health has top priority, and The Sleeper isn't going to be doing much moving. But I doubt if you'll have much trouble picking up Ecks. He should be completely crippled by this time."
UPON LANDING, Ecks lost his balance and fell heavily to his knees. He got up at once, brushed himself off and started walking. A sloppy levitation, he told himself. So even that was going!
The crumbling streets of the lower New York slums were scattered with Normals, people who had never mastered the basic psi power. This mass of land-borne people was a sight never seen in the more respectable uptown areas. Ecks moved into the crowd, feeling safer.
He discovered, suddenly, that he was hungry. He went into a luncheonette, sat down at the empty counter and ordered a hamburger. The cook had one all ready. Expertly he teleported it to a plate and, without watching, made the plate loop in the air and drop lightly in front of Ecks.
Ecks cursed the man's casual ability and reached for the ketchup. He expected the bottle to slide toward him, but it didn't. He looked at it for a moment, blankly, then stretched his arm. He'd have to watch his step, making a mistake like that.
Ecks was beginning to discover what it was like to be a cripple.
Finished, he held out his hand, palm up, expecting the change in his pocket to come. But of course, it didn't. He cursed silently. He was so used to it—it didn't seem possible that he could have lost all his faculties at once.
But he had, he knew. His unconscious had decided, and no amount of surface assurance would help.
The cook was looking at him oddly, so he reached quickly in his pocket, found the change and paid. He tried to smile at the cook, then hurried out the door.
"Queer guy," the cook thought. He dismissed it, but down deep in his mind an appraisal was going on. Inability to command a bottle… Inability to command coins…
Ecks walked down the crowded, grimy streets. His legs began to ache. He had never walked so much in his life. Around him were mixed groups of Normals and psi's. The Normals walked naturally, as they had all their lives. The psi's were awkward, unaccustomed to long stretches on foot. With relief they soared into their natural element, the air. People landed and took off, and the air was filled with teleported objects.
Looking back, Ecks saw a well-dressed man drop out of the air and stop one of the walking psi's. He talked to him for a moment, then moved on.
A health-agent! Ecks knew he had been traced.
He twisted around a corner and started to run.
The street lights became fewer as Ecks moved on, pushing his aching legs. He tried to levitate, but couldn't get off the ground.
In panic he tried to telep his friends. Useless. His telepathic sense had no power.
The shock broke over him like an ocean wave, and he stumbled against a lamp post and hung on. The full realization came.
In a world where men flew, he was landbound.
In a world of telepathic contact, he was reduced to clumsy words at face-to-face distance.
In a world where artificial light was unnecessary, he could see only when his eyes were stimulated.
Crippled. Blind, deaf and dumb.
He walked on, into narrower streets, dingy, damp alleys. His numbed mind started working again. He had one advantage. His blunted mind could no longer broadcast a strong identity-pattern. That would make him more difficult to find.
What he needed, he decided, was a sanctuary. Some place where he wouldn't infect anyone, and where the health officers couldn't find him. Perhaps he could find a Normal boarding house. He could stay there and study, find out what was wrong with him; treat himself. And he wouldn't be alone. Normals were better than no people at all.
He came to the end of an alley, where the streets branched off. Automatically he pushed out his location sense, to find out what was ahead.
Useless. It was paralyzed, as dead as the rest of him. But the right-hand turn seemed the safest. He started for it.
"Don't!"
Ecks whirled, alarmed at the spoken word. A girl had come out of a doorway. She ran to him.
"They're waiting for you in there. Don't go!"
"Who's waiting for me?" Ecks asked, his heart pounding like a triphammer.
"The health officers. They figured you'd take the right turn. Something about your right-hand tropism, I couldn't hear it all. Take the street on your left."
Ecks looked at her closely. At first he thought she was about fifteen years old, but he revised his estimate to twenty. She was small, slender with large dark eyes in a bony face.
"Why are you helping me?" he asked.
"My uncle told me to," the girl said. "Hurry!"
There was no time to argue. Ecks walked in the alley, following the girl. She ran ahead, and Ecks had trouble keeping up with her.
She was a Normal, to judge by her sure stride. But how had she overheard the health-officer's conversation? Almost certainly they had teleped on a tight beam.
Her uncle, perhaps?
The alley opened into a courtyard. Ecks raced in, and stopped. From the tops of the buildings men floated down. They dropped quickly, surrounding him.
The health officers!
He looked around, but the girl had darted back into the alley. The way was blocked for him. He backed against a building, wondering how he could have been so stupid. Of course! This was how they liked to take people. Quietly, so no one else would become infected.
That damned girl! He tightened his aching legs, to run for it…
JUST AS Krandall predicted, Marrin thought. "Take his arms and legs." Hovering fifty feet in the air, he supervised the operation.
Without pity he watched. The agents moved in cautiously. They didn't want to use the force of their minds against him if they could help it.
After all, the man was a cripple.
They had almost reached him, when—
Ecks started to fade. Marrin dropped closer, unable to believe his eyes. Ecks was dissolving into the wall, becoming a part of it, disappearing.
Then he was gone.
"Look for a door!" Marrin teleped. "Examine the pavement!"
While his agents were looking, Marrin considered what he had seen. After the initial surprise, he didn't doubt it. The search for a door was an excuse for his agents. If they thought the man had disappeared through a hidden door, good. It wouldn't help their confidence—their sanity—to believe what had actually happened.
The cripple, Ecks, merging with the wall.
Marrin ordered a search of the building. But there wasn't a trace of Ecks' thought pattern. He was gone, as though he had never been.
But how, Marrin asked himself. Did someone help him? Who?
Who would help a carrier?
...
allforjesus2001