The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Divers, by James Stamers

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Title: The Divers

Author: James Stamers

Release Date: November 22, 2019 [EBook #60762]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

the Divers

By JAMES STAMERS

The key to Fred's success

was simple ... he may not have

had much of a mind, but it

was all his, nobody else's!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He had forgotten the beer again. He remembered that he had forgotten only as he opened the apartment door. A wave of smoke and onions and hamburger flowed past him into the dingy corridor and he stumbled on the garbage pail, plunked right in the doorway for him to lug along the passage to the chute. The bed was not made in one of their two rooms and newspapers littered the other. Elsie was in the kitchen.

"Fred! Fred, did you remember my beer?"

He closed the door so that the neighbors would not hear the row to come, except through the walls.

"Didja, Fred?"

She stood akimbo in the kitchen doorway, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her dressing gown loose and spotted, her feet in old scuffs.

"I forgot," he mumbled. "I'll go now."

Oh, no, he wouldn't. Not until he had heard a full resumé of his lack of character, lack of enterprise, ambition, decency, thoughtfulness, manhood, semblance of virtue.

"I said I was going, Elsie. I said I was going, didn't I?"

"Well, my day! You remembered my name!"

It was true he rarely used her name or called her any husbandly term such as dear or darling instead, and rarely looked at her at all if he could avoid it inconspicuously. Ten years of marriage—ten years of legal proximity, rather, for nothing in him was married to anything in her any more.

"I don't know why you married me," he said.

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Go on, get out."

He almost knocked the man over as he left the apartment. The man was standing there, about to ring the bell. Well dressed, clean, expensive overcoat, polished shoes, black hat and a mild friendly face.

"Mr. Frederick Williams?" the man asked.

"Yes," said Fred.

"You entered the Sunday News competition for a free space ride?"

"Yes. Did I win it?"

"Unfortunately, no," said the man.

"Oh. Well, excuse me, I've got to go and get something."

"I'll come with you. My name is Howard Sprinnell, Mr. Williams, and I've been examining the entries to that competition. Frankly, we think you have considerable talent."

"Mister," said Fred over his shoulder as they went down the stairs, "if you're trying to sell me something—"

"I don't want a penny from you, Mr. Williams."

"Then what—"

"We would merely appreciate a few hours of your time, at your convenience."

"A few hours?" Fred said, distressed. By working double shift in the automation-parts supply house, he could just keep going, financially and physically. The question of mental fatigue was exclusively Elsie's province and there he had a rough working technique for responding without really listening. His job called for no mental effort greater than reading a shipping list, and his home life certainly didn't. Most of the time he had nothing in his mind at all; the days passed faster that way. But Elsie and the job kept him tired. Odd how just not listening wrung you out and drained you off.

"We are, of course, very glad to offer you compensation for your time, Mr. Williams," said the man.

Elsie would just drink it away. He'd have to haul crates of bourbon instead of cans of beer, that's all.

"Not interested," he said.

That was it. That was the way to keep a salesman stalled. Just "not interested." Keep saying it and nothing else. They all said they were not salesmen and weren't selling anything. Every salesman he had ever met at the door said that. Galactic Encyclopedia, Nuclear Brush, Your Venus Vacation, video subscriptions, even the Federal numbers game, they all started out by offering you a special opportunity and were not selling you anything. The man was still talking.

"Not interested," Fred said.

"Fred," said the man as they reached the bottom of the stairs, "I'm doing you a favor. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but either you come voluntarily or you'll come anyway. Why not get paid for it?"

"Not interested. And if anyone wants me, they can come and get me. I don't care. I just don't care."

He slouched off into the rain toward the supermarket.

As Dr. Howard Sprinnell watched him go he took a small silver case from his top-coat pocket. He raised the case to his lips and said quietly: "Sprinnell here. No. A clear case, but no. Pick him up."

The squad car arrived silently on its jets as Fred Williams reached the door of the apartment house. He was carrying a pack of beer in each hand and was glad to see the man had gone. That's all you had to do—just keep saying "not interested" until they went away.

"O.K., bud."

The troopers took him on both sides, grasped his arms, and levered him round.

"Hey!" Fred protested. "The beer's for my wife. She's waiting for it. Please, fellers, I'll never hear the end of it if she doesn't get her beer."

"Joe," said the trooper on Fred's right, jerking his head in the direction of the door behind them.

A third trooper climbed out of the squad car, took the packs from Fred's hands and walked into the apartment house. He climbed the stairs swiftly, wrinkling his nose at the stale thickness of the air, knocked on the apartment door and waited for Elsie to open it.

"Here's your beer," he said shortly.

"Where's Fred?"

"Your husband is being detained in connection with a robbery at his office."

"Fred! Are you kidding? Fred hasn't the sense or the guts! How long will he be gone?"

"Two or three weeks."

"Oh," said Elsie, scratching herself disinterestedly. "Well, thanks for the beer."

She shut the door and the trooper returned to the squad car. He looked at Fred sympathetically but said nothing. The squad car took off, then turned on its sirens.

"What's this all about?" asked Fred Williams from the back seat.

"Just excitement, bud. We live a dull life."

You think you do, you should live mine. I don't care anyway. If I ask them what I'm doing in this squad car, I'll get a silly answer.

"A guy called Spinner or something send for you?"

"We don't get sent for, bud. Where have you been, the Middle Ages?"

He had a point there. Security troopers were under direct control of the President and came and went as they pleased. The satellite stations gave them general directives and the President directed the stations. Fred Williams grinned at the thought of Spinner, or whatever his name was, calling the President to call a satellite station to call these cops to come and get him. He would have been shocked and frightened if anyone had told him this was almost exactly what had happened.

They shot into the garage of an ordinary Federal police station, a large tiled vault smelling of hoses, soap and water. The troopers took him upstairs, along wax-polished corridors, through swinging doors and out of the muttered voices, footsteps, paper rattling and telephone tinkle of the station, into the smooth silence of a surgery. That fellow Spinner was waiting in a white doctor's coat.

"They pick you up too?" Fred Williams said.

The Security troopers hoisted him into a dentist's chair, saluted the other man and went away.

"You can leave any time you wish, Fred. If you do, though, I'll have you brought back. I'm Dr. Howard Sprinnell."

"Funny, I thought your name was Cloud Spinner or something," Fred confessed.

"That's very interesting." The doctor leaned forward across his desk. "What made you think that?"

"I just remembered it that way, that's all."

"Ah. You have an unusual mind, Fred. No, I mean it. And just to show you this is not fooling, I have a call here for you from the President."

"From Jake?"

"From President Jackson, yes."

Dr. Sprinnell pressed a green button on the video control on his desk. The wall panel lit and President Jackson's familiar face looked at Fred Williams.

"Mr. Williams," said the President. "The nation has called you to an unusual task. On your complete cooperation and absolute discretion in not mentioning to anyone—to anyone at all—what you may now learn depend matters of the utmost consequence to us all. I wish you good luck and Godspeed."

The panel went dark and the doctor switched off.

"That was Jake himself," Fred Williams said. "Talking to me."

Like the many thousand million in the System, Fred referred to the President familiarly as Jake, but he never thought he would get to talk to him, or be talked to personally.

"What did he want to talk to me for?" Fred asked, dazed.

"That's what I want to show you," said Dr. Sprinnell. "You understood what the President said about keeping this entirely confidential?"

"Hell, no one would believe it if I said I'd been talking to the President, anyway."

"That's what we figure," said the doctor, smiling slightly. He picked up a pack of cards and flipped five of them onto the desk, a circle, a cross, two wavy lines, a rectangle and a star. "These are Zener cards, Fred. Ever see them before?"

No, but they didn't look like much. This was cockeyed, the whole situation—having the President call him so that he and a quack could play cards.

"It will be clearer in a little while," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said. "But first we must run this little check. Please point to one of these cards every minute when I say 'now.'"

Fred shifted himself in the high chair and pointed to one of the five cards obediently every minute. After twenty minutes, the doctor increased the rate. He noted every selection.

"Last lap now, Fred."

He was sick of this, but it was better than sitting in the apartment with Elsie. Fred pointed to a card for the last time.

"And now," the doctor said, standing up and feeding his notations into a machine in the corner of the room, "we have here the results."

He pulled a tape from the machine as it purred out, and showed it to Fred. It was a score of some sort.

"In another room," Dr. Howard Sprinnell explained, "we have a synchronized telepath trying to influence your selections of these cards. If you have psi qualities, Fred, these results will show how high they are. If you have none, then your chances of picking the right card are one in five. That goes for picking the card ahead of the right one, or behind it, or two ahead and so on. In other words, if the cards had been selected here by a machine instead of you, we would expect twenty per cent of the answers to be right, by sheer chance—or statistical probability, to put it more accurately."

"So how did I do? Am I a mind-reader? That would make me laugh."

The doctor glanced at the result tape he was holding.

"You have the results we want," he said. "Otherwise I would not tell you this. You would be thanked, given a reward, made a fuss of by some civil servant of prominence and sent home in style."

He looked up at Fred in the dentist's chair.

"Do you remember that contest in the Sunday News?"

Fred Williams remembered it. Every week there had been a puzzle picture to identify. The contest had lasted nearly a year. He remembered particularly that each week there had been a cut of the room in which entries were to be judged, a large editorial office, just above the puzzle picture. Just a room. He had wondered why they bothered to put it in.

"There was a picture of a room in the paper," said the doctor, "where each week, without any possibility of fraud or anyone seeing it except the judges, the solution to the puzzle was hung up on the wall in the middle of the picture shown in the paper. The puzzles themselves were meaningless. We wanted to see how many people wrote in the right solution just from seeing the picture of the empty room. The right solution, of course, was the one hanging in that room at that time, which no one could see, and which was selected an hour before publication of the paper each week by random selection in a dictionary."

"So what did I get, a consolation prize?" asked Fred.

"In a way," the doctor smiled. "But not for coming near winning. The top twenty winners were highly gifted people we recruited into the Psi faculties of Duke, Harvard, Oxford, Paris and elsewhere. They scored consistently throughout the year with a better than probability deviation."

"Huh?"

"They got a lot more right than they could by chance alone. But your results were even more interesting to us. You got the same result here, just now, on the Zener cards."

"I'm still in the running?"

"Fred, quite seriously, you are the best candidate we've ever met. Hence the special treatment. In the history of the System Government, there have only been ten other people with results similar to yours."

"Is that so? Well, I suppose you know what you're doing, Doc. But I never had a premonition in my life."

Doctor Howard Sprinnell frowned. "I should hope not. Almost everyone has some psi capacities, but we're not interested in minor phenomena. This is a government department, Fred. Here a thing has to work all the time, whenever it's needed, wherever it's needed. A faculty professor has off-days when he couldn't roll a die against chance. But you can't."

"Look, doc. I think you've got the wrong man. I'm Fred Williams. Frederick L. Williams. Are you sure—"

"Look yourself," interrupted the doctor, leaning over to wave the tape under Fred's nose. "Chance would give you twenty per cent right—one out of five. Look at your result."

Fred took the tape and studied it. "You've read it wrong. This says several million per cent."

"It says zero per cent. Nil. Not one answer right, Fred. The millions are the probabilities of that deviation ... oh, never mind. See the big black zero?"

"Yes, Doc."

"That is your result. It's statistically almost impossible, but you've done it. You did it with the puzzle in the competition. You did not get one single, solitary answer right. Not one! Even a machine gets one out of five right, Fred. Don't you see?"

No, he didn't, and it seemed to be just what Elsie was always complaining about. He lacked this and lacked that. And now he couldn't even do what a machine did.

"Okay, Doc," Fred said tiredly. "So I'm dumber than a machine. That figures."

"If you talk like that, you are," snapped Doctor Howard Sprinnell. "You have the highest negative Psi rating in the Solar System. No clairvoyance, no telepathy, no induced hallucinations, no precognitions, no telekinesis, no psi-screens, no interference of any kind. When we send you out into—well, never mind, Fred. The main point at present is that you are a very, very rare observer."

"That's fine," Fred said. "Look, Doc, I feel beat."

"You're meant to. Hell, man, I've been tiring you for two hours now. And what's more, I'll give you a little warning in advance. We aren't going to let you eat for three days either. You're going to be so tired that your body is going to loosen its grip. Don't worry, you won't die. Ten people have done this before you and they're all right. You'll meet them all soon. Now just hold still."

Dr. Howard Sprinnell slipped a hypo needle swiftly into Fred's neck, withdrew it and dabbed with a piece of surgical wool.

"Off you go, Fred."

He was breaking into pieces, but he didn't care. He slept and woke and slept and woke in the chair in old Cloud Spinner's office and now he was coming apart and he just did not care. Fred Williams had had several years of simple apathy. It came naturally to him. His body rested, tired and inert, lacking in vigor from lack of food, and his mind separated slowly from it, like a man standing up in a pool of pygmies. His heart, hands, liver, stomach, viscera had their pygmy minds all bundled in with his, and now falling away in separation as he rose from them.

His mind rose away from his body in the chair altogether. He viewed his body with unconcern, and the chair in which it sat, and the room, and through the walls the surrounding offices, and the rooms of the Federal police station, where the Security trooper named Joe who had taken the beer sat picking his teeth and gabbing with a pair of young Federal cops, and the roof of the block in which the station stood.

His mind went up like a balloon, rising swiftly into the atmosphere, and the city shrank away under him like a toy plan, a kid's aid to Better Civics, Home Town box VI, no Solar Credits necessary. He shifted automatically away from the main airport, but a moment later he went clean through an airliner cockpit, cabins with passengers, exhaust, and out exactly where he was before. His mind followed the airliner involuntarily, until he asked himself why, and immediately continued rising into the sky, looking down at the ground and the great spherical horizon.

His mind rose into cloud and examined minutely a water molecule floating from a piece of dust as big as a rock. His sense of proportion sent him shooting out of the top of the cloud suddenly, like a startled fish. The ground became a globe gradually, and as the clouds below became little wisps over the light blue haze of the Earth, his feeling of liberation increased and he rose faster. He went through layer after layer of radiation sparking fitfully around him, and fiercer belts. And then the dust thinned out like scattered transparent ball bearings, and his mind approached the satellite stations riding over the Earth. He was tempted to go through one, but it seemed unimportant and he rose out.

The Moon was swinging down away from him, a vast pitted ball bigger to his mind than the Earth now. He put on more speed, so that his mind flashed away from the Sun. Then as he paused an odd thing happened. One moment he was up there, alone above the small Earth and its smaller Moon, and the next instant his mind had flashed right into the center of the Sun, deep in the inferno of its core, where violence and variegated light surrounded him. And then he was out again, and his mind zoomed off as if he were sitting in the front seat of a low-slung car with the landmarks coming at a rush toward him and away to the side. The Galaxy fell away behind his mind in this fashion and the Great Nebula of Andromeda passed by.

His mind roamed for a while among the other galactic clusters and the spiral galaxies. He found his mind could appear at any point he wished, without the long rush through space. He could transfer instantaneously from place to place, and he hopped in this way at random from Crab to Lagoon and in to Polaris and out to the Great Spiral of Ursa Major, and onward to the open centers of the universe.

In deeper space, where endless banks of galaxies roller-coasted away from each other, he felt a change of quality come over his mind. It turned within itself where all the vivid stars became mere floating lights on the surface of a bubble outside. Here, within his mind, was deeper space and yet another liberation. His mind hung like a grape about to empty into a vat, which in this larger sense was truly himself. Insofar as he, Fred Williams, was a mind, it was only a skin around the greater liquid, in which indeed he perceived all things held in common.

He was about to throw off the skin and mingle in this condition where he and the Magellanic Clouds and Joe the Security trooper's toothpick had a single existence, when he was back in the chair in the office.

His body settled over him again. He felt compressed and imprisoned and robbed. His head turned as if it were on antiquated pulleys and his arms and shoulders were strung together awkwardly.

"It's bad to be back, isn't it? You'll never get used to that. But that was one hell of a Dive."

Fred Williams looked at the other people in the office. There were ten of them and Dr. Howard Sprinnell. Three were women, and all except the doctor had large eyes.

That was what you noticed about them, their enormous gentle eyes and their slightly thin faces. The doctor held a mirror up for him to see his own face, and it was much the same.

"They thought we had lost you there for a while," said the doctor. "All Divers do that on their first trip out—but you, I'm told, almost joined the Lord."

"Is that what This is?"

"It's a matter outside our field," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell carefully, "and a matter of choice as to name. But mystical evidence seems to point that way."

One of the girls laughed. "You're embarrassing the Solar Government, Fred. They are not supposed to have any sectarian views. But that's what we Divers think the This is. My name's Milly. This is Pat, and Joan, Bill, Ed, Al, John, Anthony, Ricardo and Mitch. Welcome to the Divers, Fred."

Fred Williams smiled around. The women were attractive, all brown-haired and nicely shaped. The seven men were just regular guys you might meet anywhere. But then, he wasn't anything to win a prize himself.

"So far as we are concerned, Fred," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said, "and this is official, there is the normal conscious mind, the subliminal mind of which we are not usually conscious but which is apparently a parcel of regional physical minds and the mind you roam in, and there is the unconscious mind, which does not seem to belong to any one person, although everyone has it, and which you people embarrass me by referring to as the This.

"All we know, officially, is that the This is the natural or original home of the universe, and the only reason we know that is because we don't want Divers to disappear into it and not come out. You're all too rare. I gather it is almost unbearable to come out of. But you'll just have to avoid the temptation to go home, as it were. After all, it has taken several million years to get man out here where he is and what he is. And the second reason is that the entire Solar Government depends on the people in this room for information."

Fred Williams looked at the others. They were serious. The smallest of the girls, Pat, caught him looking and smiled.

She turned to the doctor. "Can I tell Fred?"

"You followed him, so you may as well. I don't know what you Divers feel. But the Defense Council is waiting for the rest of you and we must hurry along."

Dr. Howard Sprinnell patted Fred on the shoulder as he passed. He stood aside for the other Divers to leave the room, nodded to Pat and Fred, and shut the door behind him.

Fred Williams levered his body off the dentist's chair and stood unsteadily. The girl took his arm. She was smaller than he, the top of her head reaching to his mouth, small, delicate and scented with heather.

"There's a lounge next door—you may not have noticed it on the way out—and there's always a bowl of fruit and some cheese and biscuits there. Let's go in."

He followed her.

Even the short walk helped accustom himself to his body again. And the room was large and airy, overlooking the central park of the city and the clouds beyond the tall buildings in the distance.

He stood looking out at the view and eating an apple while she sliced cheese and laid the pieces on a plate with some biscuits for him. Then she sat down, folded her hands in her lap and looked at him. She was wearing a white-and-blue-check dress. She looked young and fresh and alive. The room was clean and fresh. He could not think of Elsie and that apartment as being in the same world.

"Did the doc say you followed me?" Fred asked eventually.

"One of us always goes with a new Diver on the first trip."

"What did I look like? I mean was there anything to see?"

"Oh, yes." Pat laughed. "As a matter of fact, our minds look like the inside of eggs out there."

"But a plane went through me. And I shot for some reason into the Sun."

He turned and looked disbelievingly up into the sky.

The Sun made him blink and his eyes watered.

"Now I can't even look at it," he said, "any more than I could before."

"Show me your mind," she said simply. "Where is it?"

"Well ..."

"That's the whole point of the Divers. A mind is not in space-time. It is connected with a body which is—or, to be exact, it is associated with—a physical brain, which in turn can work a mouth and hands to communicate what the mind has seen. The Solar Government has the problem in reverse. They can send ships through hyper-space; otherwise, as you know, we could never have populated the Galaxy. Why, Polaris, which you visited, is over a thousand light-years from Earth! They can make matter shift in and out of hyper-space. But they can't communicate that far away. Radiation won't take the shift. So the government can either send radio waves out and wait a couple of thousand years for the answer, or it has to shuttle whole ships to and fro just to get a simple message.

"Worse, from a defense viewpoint, there are times when they must have information fast and when the nature of the news means that no ship will be either available or allowed to become available to carry the news. Suppose you are an intelligent life-form off Canopus and you think up a magnificent way of taking over the Solar System. You're six hundred and fifty light-years away, but time is no problem because either you live longer than that or you have a tribe-culture. Even if the system had a billion police ships, which it hasn't, it could never be sure of catching Canopus preparing, or intercepting whatever horror they sent off. And even if it were lucky, the ship would have to come back itself to get the news to the Solar Government.

"A Diver can send his mind instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other, he can examine atomic particles or survey galaxies, he can see through matter as if it were full of holes—which it is—he can patrol sectors and report exactly what he found there. He can dive into deep space and be free."

"Yes," Fred Williams said. "That's it. Free. That's exactly how we feel, isn't it?"

"Never mind. You'll be going out again. Regularly. With me at first until you get patroling under control. And then on your own."

"Are we always hungry?" asked Fred Williams, taking another apple.

"It helps. The government would like us to be permanently at the point of death, but that is fortunately impractical. The less hold our bodies have, the easier it is to go out. There's one other point, though. And since you're coming with me on your training, I'd prefer you to know—no matter what the rules say. Whenever you go near another living being in a Dive, your mind can see the other mind, and you can read it from the pictures in it. It's difficult to describe, but you'll see for yourself. And if the mind you are looking at is connected up to a body, as we are now, and if the pictures don't seem to fit the situation, you can take it that they refer to events still in the future as far as that body is concerned. The mind has a different space-time existence from the body, obviously, and quite often it is ahead in time. That's why we have to be negative Psi. Anyone can Dive, but only a negative Psi can remain objective about other beings' minds. A Psi would collect other minds' contents and get them confused with his own—future and present all messed up, full of symbols—take a look at a Psi's mind sometime on the way back. There are a lot of accidental roamers around on Earth."

"If we can read other minds," Fred Williams said thoughtfully, "then we Divers could have a hell of a lot of power."

He was surprised when Pat laughed.

"We all think of that," she said, "but so did the Solar Government. We have a bunch of Psis and Security troops tracing us all the time when we're in the body. But the real hold on us is not that. How would you feel if you were told you could never Dive again?"

"I—I wouldn't like that."

"You see? And you've only been on the first experimental Dive. Imagine when it is your whole life."

Fred Williams nodded slowly.

Then he asked: "Where do you live?"

"Oh, no. Divers never mix. Our existence is a top-secret. And the risk of losing two Divers in a single accident would keep the Defense Council awake at night."

"But everyone was here today."

"To welcome you. That's a big occasion to us."

"It's the biggest thing that ever happened to me," Fred Williams said.

"I know," Pat answered quietly. "I saw your mind. But I'll change that, Fred."

She stood up and brushed her hands over her dress.

"Where will I see you again?" he asked.

"You never will."

He stood up to protest.

"Not in the body," she amended.

He looked so mournful that she walked over and kissed him.

"There's a good-by present, Diver. But we will meet regularly."

Finding him sitting with a pile of apple cores beside him, the doctor clicked his tongue reprovingly.

"Tell me, Doc, how could you stop me Diving?" asked Fred worriedly.

"Fill you full of vitamins and carbohydrates and alcohol and send you on a pleasure-cruise with a lot of accomplished women," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell promptly. "Or allow you to stuff yourself with apples, for a start. Now come along or I'll bar you from the exercise room."

Fred Williams followed him thoughtfully.

"By the way," the doctor said over his shoulder, "your wife thinks you're under arrest. You've been here four days so far and we can keep you another ten or so. After that you'll have to go back. You're on our payroll now, but you'd better keep your job. Or we can find you a heavier one, if you're not tired enough. We'll seal a miniature transmitter into your larynx under the skin before you leave, so that you can report audibly from wherever you are. Diving has the same effect on the body as sleep, you'll find, so you can do both at once. I'll grade off the injections before you leave here. Now this is the political field as we know it...."

They stood in a large lecture hall, filled with spaced models of the Solar System, set in the Milky Way and surrounded by the related galaxies.

"Here's the spiral in Andromeda," said the doctor, using a long pointer. "I understand you went there...."

He took Fred Williams on a general tour of the hall.

"Of course there are others not shown here," he concluded. "The Coma-Virgo system of galaxies, for one example. But these are the ones politically important at this time. In Sagittarius, we have a problem. There's a human colony there—a very early one, as a matter of fact—which we're sending an envoy to. But we don't know what sort of an envoy they are expecting, whether he should be a technical agronomist, a sociologist, a radiation expert, or a plain folksy reminder of Earth, or what. A simple problem really, but a mistake will cost us several billion credits to correct. So your first assignment, under Pat's tuition, will be to find out and report. When you get back, you'll rank officially as a Diver. Rendezvous is over the Peninsula, above San Francisco; you can't miss it. Take your mind there before you leave and come back there on the way in. Around fifteen thousand feet is the recommended height, but that, like your mind, is immaterial, if you'll pardon the pun. And now I suggest you go down to the police gym and take some good strong exercise so that you feel properly tired for the journey."

Dr. Howard Sprinnell put his hands in his pockets and gazed at his polished shoes.

"I don't quite know how to say this, Fred," he continued, "but I'm responsible for you Divers. You're entitled to your own forms of amusement, of course, but please remember you are being watched by Psis. No dropping in on the President's bedroom. Other people's bedrooms, all right, though I trust you'll keep out of mine. But do nothing that could make you be considered a security risk. That is the only thing that would worry us."

Fred Williams assured him and left the hall to go down to the police gym. He did not understand why the warning should be necessary. On the other hand, you could take it as a delicate permission to do anything that was not a security risk. He passed the police canteen and restrained himself from going in to order a doughnut with Martian syrup. It would keep him from Diving.

He rose into the atmosphere above the city and headed across America to the rendezvous above the West Coast. The Earth spun away from beneath him. He had time to be surprised that in the few hours back on Earth he had forgotten the unburdened clarity of mind in a Dive. He knew who he was. He was unquestionably Fred Williams up here, as much as he was Fred Williams down there. But here he felt different, free, while down there he was embedded and obscured in a shell of a body. Here, this time, his vision was not limited to a forward cone but extended in a complete sphere around him.

He saw the large nick in the coast ahead and came down to meet his tutor Diver.

Pat had said he looked like the inside of an egg, but he was not prepared for the great ovoid poised there below him. He came up to her with a rush and found he was even bigger by comparison. When they touched, he heard her voice. There was a slight resistance as his mind met hers and then she slipped inside his, so that he enclosed her mind within his ovoid mind.

"One of the disadvantages of a Diver," she said quietly within him, "is that we can only talk to each other by contact. A Psi could see our thoughts radiating out like an aurora, but we can't. We travel this way when two Divers are together, which isn't often, so that we both think of going to the same place. If we do get separated, come back here immediately and we'll start again."

"Fine."

"Please. The very gentlest suggestion of vocalizing will do. That was like a cannon."

"Sorry."

"Much better. Now, gently, out. Think of rising slowly.... That's right."

They rose away from the Earth.

"Over there," she prompted, "is the galactic spiral arm we are in. See, running from Orion? The Solar System is out here on a limb. Over here is where we're going, deep into the Galaxy, our own galaxy. You'll soon pick up the main roads. See that fan-shaped arch? That's a T-Tauri variable, signposts to us. Think of being just off that one now."

He did—and there they were, in a dark lane of the Milky Way.

"Now you can imagine what would happen if we were moving separately and turned our minds to different points. You have to go back and start again then. Now, we're going down this dark lane."

They moved through the splendor of the Milky Way, through vast lanes of fine dark nebulae, across a giant rift, past glowing clouds of hydrogen and oxygen and bright expanding shells, rings within rings, flowing out from intense stars in their center as if the star were a pebble dropped in a pond of burning space, the planetary nebulae.

The Sagittarian region was well known to Pat and she commented on the Lagoon, and Omega and Trifid Nebula suspended around them. The local system they sought lay off a loose globular star cluster, one of a crowd here deep in toward the center of the Galaxy, the bright core around which the spiral arms of the entire Milky Way ponderously swung.

He was part engrossed in the technique of moving his mind, part awed by the variety and beauty of the Galaxy, and part lost in the beauty of the mind within him. She moved with deft, clear thought like the chime of crystals. The sensory images of Earth were gross and distorted projections of the way he saw her, but she was at once the beating rhythm beneath rock-and-roll and the abstracted clarity of Chopin, the summer wind and the warmth of a wine. He held her mind within his in a new union so complete that anything else was mere fumbling.

"Thank you," he heard her voice say gently, and they sank down toward the rings of small planets they had come to visit.

A colony from Earth implied an atmosphere, and several planets in the group indeed looked fuzzy. The two Divers skimmed rapidly from one to another in a general survey, selected the largest of those which might support man, and sank down through its belts of radiation.

The central mass of land lay beneath thin clouds, through which the local sun shone in drifting spotlights over the cultivated areas and irregular groups of cities.

"When we get closer," her voice said, "you'll see them walking about inside their minds, which to us will be cloudy colored eggs around them. They cannot see this, of course, any more than a non-Psi or we ourselves on Earth. If it isn't obvious what they are thinking, we'll have to go close enough to touch their minds with ours. But be very careful before you do that. If they are very empty-minded, there is a risk that their body magnetism will polarize your mind in temporarily. You can get out again, but it's messy and unpleasant while it lasts. And it's almost impossible to avoid being sucked into a medium's mind, so I hope they haven't got any."

They were now over the main city and headed toward a large domed building, apparently modeled on the Capitol.

"How did they get here?" he asked.

"We don't really know. The contacts so far have been by radio to a very early investigating fleet. Obviously they must have come out after the hyper-space drive was invented—we're over twenty thousand light-years from Earth, here, I'm told—but they don't seem to realize the difficulties of sending them the envoy they asked for. Assuming these are the people that wanted one."

"Look, an old landcar—down there on the street!" he exclaimed.

The colony apparently still used ground vehicles. As they came closer, they could see people walking in the streets and moving in and out of doorways. There were no moving sidewalks, personal vertijets, anti-gravs. It was cleaner but otherwise as old-fashioned as the quarter in which Fred Williams lived on Earth.

"Imagine coming so far—to find this," he said, disappointed.

"You'll find colonies are usually several generations behind, but let's not be too hasty," she said. "We can have a look around later. First, let's see if we have the right planet and get this envoy matter out of the way. Down through the dome, here."

They passed through the weather sheathing and curved girders of the dome into an assembly hall full of human beings, seated around a central dais. The colonists had apparently been inspired by Congress. A quick glance at their minds showed they were politicians, no better and no worse than the Earth variety, intent on compromise and the exchange of benefits between the groups of interests they seemed to represent. Several carried visibly in their minds one fixed interest and a quick count showed that agriculture was, in one form or another, the main business of the colony.

"I think that answers it," she said. "We'll have to check on the other planets, but farm problems seem to be what they're most concerned about."

He felt dissatisfied. "Shouldn't we touch one of their minds to see if this is really the political center? It may only be a village meeting."

It seemed incongruous to use the wonderful reach of Diving to gather little facts like this and to depart knowing nothing else. Then again, he recalled the doctor describing it as a simple problem.

He felt her mind move understandingly within his. "All right, let's touch the Speaker and see how far his authority goes. He'd be very conscious of a superior Congress if there is one."

They moved together to the dais and brushed against the Speaker's mind. The short, bald man sitting impressively in the center of the bubble immediately leaned forward and banged his gavel. The entire assembly rose to their feet and stood still. The Speaker slouched in his chair. His mind shook off the influences of his body and rose up to touch the two of them.

"Welcome, at last," he said.

"You have been expecting us?"

"Of course. Though why do you say 'us'?"

They moved partly from each other, overlapping only at the extreme limit of their own minds, so that he could see there were two of them together.

A gasp sounded in the Speaker's mind like an echo and there was a movement throughout the assembly.

"Can they hear us?" Pat asked.

"Naturally. Psi capacity is a minimum requirement for the Senate. Can't you hear us?"

"Only by mental contact."

"How odd," the Speaker replied. "Still, we ourselves cannot merge in each other, only into housings."

"Housings?"

"But surely.... You must know. Of course you must."

"I'm afraid we don't."

"For heaven's sake, what part of the Solar System do you come from that you don't know a housing when you see one? Ganymede, Mercury, Jove, Venus, Bacchus? Although I was under the impression that the entire system used the same terms."

"One moment," Fred said. "What system are you talking about?"

"This system here, naturally."

"We come from a different part of the Galaxy, a part that is called the Solar System by those who live there."

There was a multiple rustling of thoughts which disturbed the Speaker momentarily.

"Please, gentlemen, please! Will every Senator please quit his housing so that we have less of these physical interruptions?"

Every member of the assembly sat down, relaxed his body and rose gently above it with a clear and uncluttered mind.

"Thank you, Senators," the Speaker said. "Now. Do we understand that you come from some other part of our galaxy?"

"Yes," Pat said. "We call it the Milky Way."

"So do we."

"You probably brought the name with you."

"You are suggesting that we came from you and brought the name of the Galaxy with us?"

"Why, yes."

"I see. Would you identify this solar system of yours?"

Pat held in her mind a picture of the Solar System and the Sun, embedded in the long spiral arm of the Galaxy. She made the image of the Earth expand and contract in emphasis.

"Thank you. So you come from that little system, do you? How interesting. And yet you have never heard of housings."

"We call them bodies."

"Well, so they are. I recall a primitive energy transmission we had here long ago. We extended an invitation to the operators, but they have not so far arrived. They came from your system, or so they said."

"They did. They contacted you by what we call radio. We were sent, frankly, to see what sort of envoy should be sent here to you."

"Ah! There has been a natural confusion. We thought you were here from one of our outer systems where we are having some difficulty raising the right housing. In fact, we were just debating the correct form of grain to transmit to feed the housings on. They are in the awkward stage of having sufficient minds to exist, but insufficient nerve cortex to enable us to enter them. Our local representatives—whom we mistook you for—have been having a very difficult time for several hundred years, but we will soon find the answer. Now, we will be glad to receive an envoy from your system. We are always glad to receive representatives from our successful colonies. As to the type of envoy, anyone with a broad galactic viewpoint will do. We will, of course, be glad to offer housing and the usual facilities."

"When you say housing, you mean bodies?"

"Naturally. Bodies such as these Senators' or my own are the most adaptable for this climate. If you go in to our Ganymede or out to Jove you would have to use a local—er—body, because these human types would melt or suffocate respectively. But the local housings in silica and in ammonia crystal have proved quite adequate for normal locomotion and physical work there. The normal facilities of the sport planets would be available, to be sure. We are quite proud of our slither bodies, I suppose you would call them, in the snow worlds—quite a recent development. I fear we are not too luxurious here, but galactic opinion forces us to make our housings do almost everything they are capable of doing—walk, drive, cook and other such menial tasks. But then at least everyone knows we are not spending the revenue on our own housing—er—our own bodies. Only last century we barely averted a political threat to make all Senators' bodies sleep out in the open weather. But obviously it is much more expensive to keep breeding new bodies than build a shelter such as this one. Even taxpayers can see that."

The Speaker's mind echoed general agreement from the Senators.

"It will come as a surprise," Pat said clearly, "but our system believes we colonized yours."

This met polite and general laughter in which the Speaker joined.

"Perhaps," he said, "you would care to communicate direct with the Senators who were in charge of your system during the developmental stages. Will the Senators please come forward for contact?"

Seven of the minds above the floor of the Senate drifted over to touch peripherally against each other and against Pat and Fred.

"When we first undertook that project," one or all of them said, "your system was entirely unpopulated. On the third planet, we found, however, roughly humanoid apes in isolated caves and by selective breeding we succeeded in making that species into a housing identical with those we use on this planet. Unfortunately, only the less stable minds of the Galaxy were prepared to live quite so far out and we eventually lost touch. Is the same housing still used?"

"So much so," Pat told them, "that we cannot normally detach ourselves."

"You mean you send bodies from place to place?"

"Yes. The radio signals you received were from a spaceship containing men in their own bodies."

"Remarkable. Naturally, we accept your statement. But this implies considerable technical skill—and a prodigious disregard for the taxpayers' money. You mean there were actually men out there in bodies sending energy transmissions, instead of visiting us in the mind from Earth?"

"Yes."

"Remarkable. Very remarkable. Can you spare the time to tell us more about this? We can accommodate you with a double housing or separate housing, whichever you prefer."

"May I withdraw to consult with my colleague?" Pat asked.

"Of course. We will continue our debate."

The Senators returned to their forms and the Speaker, sinking back into his body, recalled the assembly to their discussion of agricultural problems.

Over the dome, Pat slipped inside Fred Williams' mind again. They thought of the enormous space-ships developed over many centuries and at uncounted cost to give men favorable odds in an unfavorable environment. And of the hazardous shifting of power based on bomb-satellites, and the fence upon fence of security precautions on which Earth and the Solar System depended. Or rather, when they considered it, on which their local population depended. It was not a problem for two Divers but for a team of specialists.

They returned to the Speaker.

"We would like to consult with the original Earth Senators again and perhaps borrow two—housings—for a a short while."

"With the greatest pleasure."

The Senators concerned quitted their housings and floated across the assembly to join them. They all rose together to the outside of the dome, where they would not disturb the debate below.

"One of the questions," Fred said, "is what happens if we died—by accident, for example—while in a borrowed housing."

"You imply a question as to what happens to any of your people, since they have lost the power to detach themselves, or do not make use of it."

"Yes."

"Unfortunately," one or all of the Senators replied, "we do not know. It is said there is a continual production of new minds in the universe, which appear here and there, wherever there are suitable housings. Others disagree but have no real answer. If we lend you housing—a panther-style body for personal racing on the grass steppes, say, or a vast whale-style body for enjoying some of our oceans, and so on, there is some risk. Among certain cultures, we find a return of the mind to a similar vacant housing. In other places, we have found an obscuration of the mind. We think there are parallel universes differing from this as mind-form differs from substance. And we believe each mind continues in these further dimensions. This would be practical if you were unable to leave a dying housing. Our advice is not to get caught in any accidents.

"Should it be advantageous to you, we will keep housings ready for you here. One male and one female, of course. Ah—on one question which you did not ask—you will find our guest housings are a uniform breed which became popular on your Planet among the Greeks and Romans as ideal godlike forms, shortly before we returned here.

"And as to the other question you have not asked—we never interfere with local cultures, for the greater the variety of each, the greater the enrichment of all. Your system is entirely safe; we propose to observe it more closely from now on. It is our impression, however, that you would be wise not to mention the galactic system we represent, when you return to your Earth. It would be too upsetting to the established pattern. We are all human beings, but we have solved the same problems in very different ways."

"We have not solved ours," Fred said.

"Oh, neither have we. But at least the few of us here, including yourselves, at any time as our guests, have achieved what you would probably call immortality."

"We are free to accept your invitation at any time?"

"Certainly."

"Then we will report that no other envoy is needed," Pat said clearly.

"That would be beneficial indeed."

"And may we send you a very limited number of friends?"

"Your guests shall be our guests. Again, we suggest you limit knowledge of us so far as possible."

"We are called Divers because we can leave our bodies. Only Divers could visit you in this way, and we will not send any others."

"Thank you. It is largely our fault. We have come across traces here and there of other colonies which we assumed were the successful result of past experiments. It occurs to us now that several of these may be in fact body-bound expeditions from your solar system. We will investigate and correct our catalogues."

"We can be of assistance there," Pat answered.

"Excellent. We wish you Godspeed and a pleasant return."

The nine minds released contact and moved apart. Fred felt Pat's mind slip into his. They rose off the dome and increased speed, soaring into the sky and out, above the ring of planets.

"Why didn't we borrow a couple of bodies?" Fred asked.

He could picture himself strutting elegantly in the body of a Greek god, with Pat to match beside him.

"Please stop that—we're zigzagging about. You're new, Fred. Every Diver goes through the same routine—a pep-talk from the President, Doctor Sprinnell's little tricks, your first Dive all over the universe, and then routine patrols. What you don't know is that whenever we Divers come into contact with another race or another form of life, we are invariably offered gifts of some sort. Primitives sense the presence of a Diver and put on a show, lay out food and their treasures. The more advanced, using trained telepaths, try to bribe us. And so on, without exception."

"Okay, so I'm new, Pat. So I don't know the pattern. A few days ago I was a slob in an automation-parts supply house and now I'm here with you at the back end of the Milky Way, or the center, whichever way you look at it. But Doc Spinner made some pretty odd cracks to me about security and I don't like the idea of being spied on all the time back on Earth."

"No Diver does. The Defense Council put us in business, but now they are afraid of us, in a way. We can go anywhere and see anything. We might have a look at their secret installations or their private files. Then we would be in trouble."

"Well, I didn't ask to come into this. But now that I'm in and a Diver, just one fancy move by Security and I'm off to get another body. That sounds odd, doesn't it? But I mean it."

"I'm glad."

"Eh?"

"I'm very glad, Fred. I wanted to see how you'd take it. I feel the same way. It's true we're always offered presents, but immortality is something larger than a present. And to get out from under the thumb of the Psis and their spying is something all of us have been longing for."

"And I'll tell you something else, Pat. From now on, if the other Divers agree, we'll do what we want. Oh, the Solar System can have its patrolling. I'll have to learn how that's done from you. We'll tell them what they want to know. But one sign of interference and we're off, and they can keep the bodies. We won't tell them they are a backward colony that has forgotten how to Dive. But we know it. We won't tell them the rest of the Galaxy is run from the center back in Sagittarius by humans who can Dive. But we know that too. If I thought at all about it, I thought we were freaks, useful nuisances. And I didn't mind being ordered about. But we're not freaks, Pat. We're the normal human beings that the Senate back there meant to create. It's the Solar System that is lop-sided, not us."

"I'm not—overinfluencing you, Fred?"

"Hell, of course you are. I can hardly think of you without looping around a star. But the facts are the same. And from today, we're not Divers. We're the Free Divers, housing where we wish to, seeing what we want...."

"And protecting the Solar System, Fred."

"Well—they're entitled to that. And we'll keep to their security regulations for our bodies on Earth, if it makes them happy. We can afford to give a little here and there."

They shot together through the nearest T-Tauri variable arch and zoomed happily. After a while, they returned to the rendezvous off the American coast on Earth. The other Divers were waiting for them.

"It's a custom," Pat told him as they approached the nine Divers, hovering in space, "to greet you as a new Diver."

They closed together as they met, within Fred's larger shell. He told them. There were no doubts among their minds.

"Sooner or later," Fred finished, "one of us was bound to meet the true Galactics we've just met. It happened to be Pat and myself. I'm new and don't know much about Diving, but I've seen enough to know that from now on I'm a Free Diver."

"So are we all," they answered.

Returning across America in the one shell, they scattered confusion and headache throughout the psi-watching stations in their path by the scramble of eleven sets of thoughts. Then they separated and left Fred to go down to his body while they returned to theirs in the different places Security had put them. Pat followed him down as a precaution.

This time, Fred Williams' body fitted his mind with a greater feeling of strangeness but less muddling. The smaller consciousnesses of his body did not obscure his perceptions; he was aware of it as a housing for his mind.

He looked at Dr. Howard Sprinnell, who had listened to him so far in silence, uncommenting and unmoved, a mild, friendly face in the small medical room.

"So, Fred. I warned you, Pat warned you. You go out on two Dives, a few days after discovering that such things exist, and you come back to give me an ultimatum for the Solar Government. A lifetime here in the drabbest, almost medieval surroundings of the city and, after a few days, you come back announcing you're a Free Diver, owing nothing to anyone. Is that right? Do you still stick to that?"

Fred nodded.

"You realize what we can do to you, Fred? Dammit, on your first Dive you almost went out of space-time altogether, only you didn't know what you were doing. Do you know what you're doing now? Do you think I've spent twenty years searching for negative Psis for government service so that you can turn them against the Solar System?"

"Hold on, Doc. No one said anything about being against the Solar System. If there's work to be done, we'll do it. But in our own way and without being spied on."

"Just give me one reason why the government should trust you, with the entire Security system."

"Because," Fred said carefully, "you may have my body, but in my mind I am a Free Diver."

"And nothing anyone can say will change that, eh?"

"No."

"You know," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said reflectively, "you're talking as if you had another body cached away somewhere."

"Whoever heard of that?"

"Lots of people, Fred. Voodoo zombies, certain Mahayana religious leaders, prehistoric Egyptians—there's quite a well documented tradition. But the great problem has always been to find a leader with the courage to do it scientifically and in the interests of all the people, not just the members of some sect. Give a man the universe to play in and he doesn't mind a few rules as long as he's allowed to play. Finding negative Psis and creating the Divers as an organized official body was easy compared with the task of completing the experiment—by making one of them revolt! Nine of the ten before you were too easily satisfied. Diving according to the rules and regulations was enough for them."

"Who was the tenth?"

"Pat. She was the prettiest and most discontented. I thought I could stir up some fire."

"You did."

"Ah, good. I am high-Psi, by the way. I seem to feel she's somewhere around here. However ... I can never be a Diver myself, but years ago I formed the theory that a lot of phenomena could be explained by minds reaching out beyond their bodies. Now be careful, Fred. I don't want to know. The Security Psis are very real and there are a lot of things I cannot afford to know. I'm a Solar Government servant, remember. But it seemed to me there might conceivably be a life-form somewhere in the universe which used the body as a vehicle for its convenience. I hoped one day the Divers would find such a life-form, and if I made the regulations stiff enough and supplied one or two other irritations, one Diver might decide to make the jump, to revolt and stand on his own feet. Free Divers, you called yourselves, eh? A good name. I don't want to know where your base—your other base—is, Fred. I only want to know there is a group of people willing to serve the Solar Government regardless of time, theoretically for eternity—that's what it amounts to when you work it out. As I say, I'm just a government servant. And thanks, Free Diver."

He held out his hand and shook Fred's. "From now on, Fred, you can all come and go as you wish. If you feel like keeping to the security regulations, fine. But I'll make it clear to the Defense Council that there's nothing they can do about it if you don't. Men who don't mind losing their bodies have always been somewhat beyond the power of a government."

"On that basis, Doc, I don't mind continuing the way you planned."

"Laryngeal transmitter, continue your cover-job and the rest?"

"Don't see why not."

"Come along then. You're due to be released from jail."

Fred followed the doctor into the operating room.

He remembered the beer this time. Elsie lay back on her bed, drinking from the can, one of her scuffs dangling from a bare toe.

"The trouble with you, Fred, is you can't even rob an office."

"I didn't."

"That's what I mean. See? You just can't do anything."

He lay back on his own bed and looked at her. There were a lot of things you didn't mind putting up with, voluntarily. You married her, so you'd look after her, trudge to the shipping room to work and trudge back. The tireder you got, the better.

For evening came every day, and with the evening came sleep for his housing and eight hours for patrolling the Galaxy. And beyond the system, out beyond the dark lanes, there were endless forms of life ... and the two great developments of men, one stemming from the other in different ways, but each expanding, colonizing, growing ... all with problems for the Free Divers he led.

"Wouldja get me another beer, Fred?"

"Sure."

He remembered to slouch into the kitchen, as if he did not care. And when you considered it, he didn't care at all. This was one path of human developments the Senators never thought of.

"Trouble with you, Fred, is you're just a negative character. You weren't when I married you, but you are now."

Well, she was certainly entitled to a beer for that.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Divers, by James Stamers

the Divers

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