A Gift From Earth

On a far-distant day they would call the phenomenon Plateau trance. It was a form of autohypnosis well known to Plateau citizens of both social classes, differing from other forms only in that nearly anyone could fall into such a state by accident. In this respect Plateau trance compares to ancient, badly authenticated cases of "highway hypnosis" or to more recent studies of "the far look," a form of religious trance endemic to the Belt of Sol. The far look comes to a miner who spends too many minutes staring at a single star in the background of naked space. Plateau trance starts with a long, dreamy look down into the void mist.

For a good eight hours Matt had not had a chance to relax. He would not get a chance tonight, and he didn't want to dwell on that now. Here was his chance. He relaxed.

He came out of it with a niggling suspicion that time had passed. He was lying on his side, his face over the edge staring down into unfathomable darkness. It was night. And he felt wonderful.

Until he remembered.

He got up and climbed carefully over the wall. It would not do to slip, three feet from the edge, and he was often clumsy when he felt this nervous. Now his stomach seemed to have been replaced by a plastic demonstration model from a biology class. There was a jerkiness in his limbs.

He walked a little way from the wall and stopped. Which way was the Hospital?

Come now, he thought. This is ridiculous.

Well, there was a swelling hill to his left. Light glowed faintly along its rim. He'll try that.

The grass and the earth beneath it ended as he reached the top. Now there was stone beneath his bare feet, stone and rock dust untouched by three hundred years of the colony planting program. He stood at the crest of the hill looking down on the Hospital. It was half a mile away and blazed with light. Behind and to either side were other lights, the lights of houses, none within half a mile of the Hospital. Against their general glow he saw the black tongue of forest he'd noticed that morning.

In a direction not quite opposite to the dark, sprawling line of trees, a straighter line of light ran from the Hospital to a cluster of buildings at the perimeter of the bare region. A supply road.

He could reach the trees by moving along the edge of town. The trees would give him cover until he reached the wall--but it seemed a poor risk. Why would Implementation leave that one line of cover across a bare, flat protective field? That strip of forest must be loaded with detection equipment.

He started across the rock on his belly.

He stopped frequently. It was tiring, moving like this. Worse than that, what was he going to do when he got inside? The Hospital was big, and he knew nothing about the interior. The lighted windows bothered him. Didn't the Hospital ever sleep? The stars shone bright and cold. Each time he stopped to rest, the Hospital was a little closer.

So was the wall that surrounded it. It leaned outwards and on this side there was no break at all.

He was a hundred yards from the wall when he found the wire. There were big metal pegs to hold it off the ground, pegs a foot high and thirty yards apart, driven into the rock. The wire itself was bare coppery metal strung taut a few inches off the ground. Matt had not touched it. He crossed it very carefully, staying low but not touching the wire at any time.

Faintly there came the sound of alarm bells ringing inside the wall. Matt stopped where he was. Then he turned and was over the wire in one leap. When he hit the ground he didn't move. His eyes were closed tight. He felt the faint touch of numbness which meant a sonic beam. Evidently he was out of range. He risked a look behind him. Four searchlights hunted him across the bare rock. The wall was lousy with police.

He turned away, afraid they'd see his face shining. There were whirring sounds. Mercy-bullets falling all around him, slivers of glassy chemical which dissolved in blood. They weren't as accurate as lead pellets, but one must find him soon...

A light pi

From the wall came a voice. "Cease fire." The whirr of anesthetic slivers ended. The voice spoke again, bored, authoritative, tremendously amplified. "Stand up, you. You may as well walk, but we'll carry you if we have to."

Matt wanted to burrow like a rabbit. But even a rabbit wouldn't have made headway in the pitted, dusty stone. He stood up with his hands in the air.

There was no sound, no motion.

One of the lights swung away from him. Then the others. They moved in random arcs for a while, crossing the protective-rock field with swooping blobs of light. Then, one by one, they went out.

The amplified voice spoke again. It sounded faintly puzzled. "What set off the alarms?"

Another voice, barely audible in the quiet night. "Don't know, sir."

"Maybe a rabbit. All right, break it up."

The figures on the wall disappeared. Matt was standing all alone with his hands in the air. After a while he put them down and walked away.

The man was tall and thin, with a long face and a short mouth and no expression. His Implementation-police uniform could not have been cleaner nor better pressed if he'd do

Every fifteen minutes or so he would get up to look at the coffin.

Seemingly the coffin had been built for Gilgamesh or Paul Bunyan. It was oak, at least on the outside. The eight gauge dials along one edge appeared to have been pirated from somewhere else and attached to the coffin by a carpenter of only moderate skill. The, long-headed man would stand up, go to the coffin, stand over the dials for a minute. Something could go wrong, after all. Then he would have to act in a hurry. But nothing ever did, and he would return to his chair and wait some more.

Problem:

Polly Tournquist's mind holds information you need. How to get at it?

The mind is the body. The body is the mind.

Drugs would interfere with her metabolism. They might harm her. You'd risk it, but you're not allowed drugs anyway.

Torture? You could damage a few fingernails, bend a few bones. But it wouldn't stop there. Pain affects the adrenal glands, and the adrenal glands affect everything. Sustained pain can have a savage, even permanent, effect on a body needed for medical supplies. Besides, torture is unethical.

Friendly persuasion? You could offer her a deal. Her life, and resettlement in some other region of the Plateau, for anything you want to know. You'd like that, and the organ banks are full ... But she won't deal. You've seen them before. You can tell.

So you give her a nice rest.

Polly Tournquist was a soul alone in space. Less than that, for there was nothing around her that could have been identified as "space." No heat, no cold, no pressure, no light, no darkness, no hunger, no thirst, no sound.

She had tried to concentrate on the sound of her heartbeat, but even that had disappeared. It was too regular. Her mind had edited it out. Similarly with the darkness behind her closed, bandaged eyelids: the darkness was uniform, and she no longer sensed it. She could strain her muscles against the soft, swaddling bandages that bound her, but she sensed no result, for the slack was small fractions of an inch. Her mouth was partly open; she could neither open it further nor close it on the foam rubber mouthpiece. She could not bite her tongue, nor find it. In no way could she produce the sensation of pain.

The ineffable peace of the coffin cure wrapped her in its tender folds and carried her, screaming silently, into nothingness.