Chapter X: Flight from Asylum

James Forrest Carroll was very careful in the days that followed. With meticulous care he watched those about him in the asylum, always wary of showing either too much interest or too much neglect. The other inmates did not bother him particularly nor did they irritate him. Not even the fact that he was committed to an insane asylum caused him to lose heart.

Carroll cared little for his immediate surroundings for he knew that once he made his point and carried it to the awakened Solar System, not only would all of the past suspicion be forgotten but he would receive an even greater reward for having suffered to carry on.

Then, as the flush of newness wore away, the guards and attendants let him alone more. All of them were trained in handling the insane and they treated each new inmate with considerable suspicion until the exact nature of the patient's instability was known.

Carroll's main and only argumentative period came when he was not permitted to work as he pleased. And so long as no one mentioned the word 'alien' in any way he was silent--lost in his thoughts and his plans.

As soon as they furnished him with working space, Carroll knew that his incarceration was a godsend. For--barring the chance that one of the guards might be alien--if he could not get out they could not get in. This was security.

The one off-chance worried Carroll. It would be hard enough to segregate the few humanoid aliens from the mass of humanity. But with the aliens occupying human bodies it was impossible. Just how it was done Carroll could not say but he considered the problem and arrived at a solution from sheer deductive reasoning.

It was pathologically impossible to consider surgery--the gross transplantation of a brain. For one thing--among many--there is the matter of blood supply. Incorrect blood matching causes death in a transfusion. This is not because of the mismatch in the blood stream per se, it is because the metabolism of the entire human body is not matched to the different type of blood.

To transplant a brain would require that something be done about the blood supply--if changed to match the brain the body would die, if not the brain would die. And there was no remote possibility that any alien brain would match human blood.

It is even difficult in many cases to graft skin from one part of a human's body to another, let alone grafting skin from one to another body--and the possibility of cross-grafting across the line of demarcation between Terran species was unthinkable.

Just with common skin.

The brain?

Impossible!

There was, however, the whole matrix of mental gadgets, hypnotic beams, educators and other gewgaws of the alien culture. The old thought patterns could easily be erased and replaced by a new system. That would--despite theological arguments to the contrary--result in a new person. For all beings are what their experiences and their training makes them.

A sentience produced in a humanoid body on a remote planet and mentally hurled into a human brain will change the human to an alien in thought and deed--but capable of living as a human! There is nothing in thought that is inimical as there would be in the sheer complexity of biochemistry.

Thoughts, even nasty vagrant thoughts, do not kill. But how large is the lethal dose of polio virus or potassium cyanide or unmatched blood?

* * * * *

An autopsy they might some day perform, but unless they could read her thoughts, they would find nothing! How then to identify the alien?

_Nay! How then to prove that there were aliens!_

There were both excitement and suspicion when Carroll built the teleport in his asylum laboratory. It was too much like incarcerating a man who had the ability to walk out of the place without half-trying. In fact, as one of the guards put it, that's exactly what it was.

It was Majors who smiled and shook his head. He pointed out that so far there were but two of them, one in the office of the psychologist Pollard and the other in the Wisconsin home of the inmate himself. Both were turned off.

Majors, not really understanding the principle of the things, had them both placed in a sealed room. Whether Carroll could turn on an inert machine from a remote place he did not know and he was taking no chances.

But Carroll's experiments with his new teleport seemed innocuous enough. For several days he fiddled with the tuning and synchronizing controls that were used to tune one teleport to the other.

He kept constantly 'ON' the switch that remotely operated any distant teleport that his own happened to be tuned to but his work did very little good. He found the two that were sealed in the tiny room and knew them for what they were. Carroll was seeking the teleports of the aliens.

For days he searched the--subspace?--for the alien teleports and found none. Then in a desperate measure, Carroll finally went through to the room in the Lawson Laboratory and, using some of his store of tools, broke the sealed door.

Brashly Carroll stole an automobile. Equally rash, he drove at breakneck speed along the roads that led him up into the Virginia mountains along the back-path that he had traversed only once before in a conscious condition, and then from the opposite direction with Rhinegallis pointing out the way.

It took many hours before he came to the little side-road that led like a mountain goat's retreat up into the top hills. It changed from a side-road to a mere trail and then branched from a mere trail to an unkempt, rutted footpath that jounced the automobile terribly.

Miles along this rocky path, Carroll turned into a clearing--a well-remembered clearing, and he looked across it--in surprise. The building itself was gone! No wonder he could find no teleports!

And the words of Kingallis returned to him. "You won't live long enough!" the alien had said. "The universe isn't big enough for both of us!"

The rats had deserted the doomed ship!

It was so pat--so perfect! Now they would say that there never had been any aliens. At every turn Carroll was blocked and stopped and frustrated. How long the aliens had been guarding Terra he did not know. Perhaps about the time that the Lawson Radiation was discovered, or perhaps even before.

No matter how good they were at intercepting things, the aliens could not keep some things from leaking out. They might have been here for centuries awaiting the man Lawson who was the discoverer.

They might have been covering information that would have led to the discovery until they could no longer stop it. At that point in the rise of any culture the discovery of such a factor would be almost automatic....

Taking any science as a parallel, civilization makes its discoveries as it is ready for them. The discovery of radio would have been impossible before the knowledge of electricity. Nuclear physics would have been impossible without a working knowledge of simple chemistry.

Each science stood upon the shoulders of the other. Electronics aided astronomy, mechanics aided electronics and chemistry aided mechanics. Physics gave men more information about chemistry and chemistry was a foundation stone for electronics.

* * * * *

How long that had been here Carroll did not care. The pertinent thing at present was the simple fact that _now they were gone_!

Gone because they dared not stay!

Carroll cursed. It was his fault. Whatever was being done to eliminate Terra as a threat to the aliens' ideas of aggrandizement was being done because James Forrest Carroll had been instrumental in uncovering their schemes. Had he remained in ignorance there would have been no reason for their latest plan--conquest for aggrandizement does not include extermination.

To exterminate an enemy spells economic failure. There is little glory in being the Lord of All when _All_ consists of burned planets, dead cultures and the hollow grinning skulls of a billion billion intelligences.

Homage comes not from a skull.

There, in the moonlight of the clearing where once stood a large alien edifice, Carroll took from the back seat of his stolen car the knocked-down teleport and set it up alongside the road. He stepped into it and emerged in his asylum laboratory.

He ignored the fact that both car and teleport were stolen and abandoned. The only thing of importance now was the safety--the personal safety--of all Terrans, whether they believed or not. That he alone had good reason to believe in the threat was unimportant. There have been many cases in the world of history when one man alone stood against the world and was right.

Let them scoff.

Yet Carroll felt the full impact of helpless frustration. He was pitted against an alien culture capable of scientific marvels such as the teleport and interstellar travel and other things. They were capable of destroying the solar system while the only man who stood against them was incapable even of discovering how they intended to do it.

He threw himself into his work and the days sped past as he built and experimented and planned--and all too occasionally failed. When his cohorts came to him with the announcement that the first sixty-foot paraboloid of revolution was to be initiated that day at the Lunar Observatory Carroll merely nodded and returned to his work.

He cared not at all that the new observatory was to be called the Carroll Observatory in honor of the man who made possible the perfect reflector. At that time, Carroll was busy with his invisible fields of force and spacial planes of stress and did not want to be bothered with trivia--especially trivia that he had really had no hand in inventing.

A lot of good the Carroll Observatory would be to mankind if the Solar System were destroyed!

* * * * *

Majors entered Dr. Pollard's office with a large glossy photograph in one hand. Pollard looked up amusedly as Majors said, "I'm getting psycho, I guess."

"Yes? And what makes you think so?"

Majors laughed. "Because every time I get a problem I seem to come to you instead of going where it can be answered by theoreticians and physicists."

Pollard smiled. "I think you come here because this is one place where you can hold your own with another man who can hold his own with you," he observed.

"Well," admitted Majors, "you don't understand theoretical physics as well as I do and psychology is over my head. Anyway, what do you make of this?"

The photograph was of a patch of sky. Pollard shook his head.

"Is this a test question?" he asked. "Remember, I'm the psychiatrist and I'm supposed to hand the patient strange items and ask them what they see in them."

Majors laughed. "This is a section of Boötes."

"Boötees," murmured Pollard irrelevantly, "are knitted gadgets you put on babies' feet."

"All right, I'll leave quietly," chuckled Majors. "Seriously, though, look at this." He pointed out a tiny smudge among the myriad of stars.

"Well?" asked the doctor.

"It shouldn't be."

"Maybe a flaw?"

"Nope," objected Majors. "It persists through twenty-seven photographs made one minute apart--each exposed for one minute."

"Um. What is it?"

"Don't know," replied Majors. "But it is darned interesting."

"Boötes is the region from whence comes the Lawson Radiation, isn't it?"

Majors nodded. "That's why they sent it to me. It was taken by the Carroll Telescope on Luna, a sort of tribute to Carroll that the first photographs and work done by his invention be directed at that portion of the sky he worked so long on--to his own downfall."

"Tell me, Majors, do you often get these kind of smudges?"

"Not this kind but there have been other kinds."

Dr. Pollard looked at the smudge. "Let's take this to Carroll," he suggested. "Maybe it might mean something to that hidden portion of his mind that refuses to admit what it knows about the Lawson Radiation."

"Through the teleport?"

"Why not? If it's not available at the other end, we'll just meet a solid mirror and can't step through. That worried me for a long time, that idea of not having a place to go to. Just step out into--heaven knows what--because the other end wasn't connected. Come on!"

The teleport in Carroll's asylum laboratory gave the physicist warning that they were coming through. He turned as they entered with an annoyed smile on his face. Before him was a long paper record of Lawson Radiation recordings that Carroll was studying through a magnifier.

Majors handed Carroll the photo, saying, "What do you make of this?"

"It's a bad blur--like a misfocused image," replied Carroll.

"Yes--but why?"

"You've heard of the Einstein Lens?"

"Vaguely, but thought it was just a dream--a probability that never happened."

Pollard shook his head. "I don't know about it at all," he admitted.

Carroll smiled tolerantly. "Light has energy and energy has mass," he said. "Ergo light has mass. Masses attract one another according to the Newtonian Law of Gravitation. Ergo light is bent by passing close to a mass."

"I see," said Pollard leaping to the right conclusion. "Then light radiated from a very distant galaxy may pass close enough to a dark mass--with Terra, the mass and the galaxy in line--to have the distant galaxy focus itself here?"

"Yes," replied Carroll. "The mass acts as a biconvex lens because it bends all tangential light toward the center as the beam passes."

"But the Einstein Lens effect doesn't make smudges like this," objected Majors.

Pollard whistled. "You mean to say that the Einstein Lens is known to be a fact?"

"Right. Several cases are known and accepted as such!"

"Well!"

* * * * *

Carroll looked up from the smudge. "A negative lens," he said, "would cause diffusion like this."

Majors blinked. "That would mean--oh, no!"

"Negative matter," said Carroll promptly.

"Um. You postulate a negative mass in line with the light from a star?"

Carroll nodded.

Majors smiled and took out a roll of thirty-five millimeter film. He handed it to Carroll.

"I took the liberty of making smaller prints," he said. "Those are the other thirty-five pix made near that area. You'll see the initiation of the smudge on the second, and the completion of it on the twenty-eighth. The others are just spares."

Carroll looked at the smudges, one after the other.

"You'll note that the thirteenth, the twentieth, and the twenty-fifth have rather larger areas," said Majors. "Also, on the thirty-first--after the body presumably has passed out of line--there is one more faint flare-point. That was minutes after the thing passed out of line."

Carroll read the pictures carefully and then without a word he turned to the desk. He picked up the tape of Lawson Radiation recordings and handed it to Majors.

"Here," he said, "is correlation between astronomical fact and the Lawson Radiation."

There were four definite pips on the line. Four spikes that reached up, with each spike labelled as to the time of reception. Though the intrinsic time did not match by hours the spacing between the pips and the flared photographs was perfect.

"Then what?" asked Majors, and Pollard held his breath.

"A mass of negative matter passing through space," said Carroll, "would naturally be struck occasionally by meteors or small celestial bodies."

"But if negative matter is repulsive instead of attractive?" objected Majors.

"Then," said Carroll simply, "the only masses that can strike the repulsive celestial negative-mass are those other masses that possess the velocity that corresponds to the velocity of escape in normal mass!"

Majors looked thoughtful.

"I get it," said Majors. "The velocity of escape is that velocity attained by any mass in falling to the earth from an infinite distance. Converted, any mass given that velocity upon the instant of departure need have no more acceleration applied in order that the mass be driven to an infinite distance against gravity. Follow?"

"Uh-huh," said Pollard.

"In the case of a repulsive mass--negative mass--in order for any other object to strike it it must possess enough energy to overcome the repulsion. This would be the inverted equivalent of the velocity of escape!"

"Negative mass and positive mass would cancel one another?"

Carroll nodded. "Producing the Lawson Radiation!"

"Then all these years we have been following a bit of negative mass getting hit by normal meteors."

Carroll shook his head. "You check the orbit of that mass," he said, "and you'll find out that it is due to strike Sol!"

"You know?"

"I suspect," said Carroll. "The aliens must destroy us lest we destroy them. This is their way. We must stop that mass!"

"Look," said Majors. "Let's find out the course of that celestial object first!"

"It will be," said Carroll.

"Carroll," objected Majors, "why must you insist upon blaming the aliens for something that is definitely a matter of celestial chance?"

"Because it is not celestial chance," snapped Carroll. "And I'll yet prove it!"