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Title: The Bryd

Author: Noel Loomis

Release Date: December 17, 2020 [EBook #64063]

Language: English

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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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The BRYD

By NOEL LOOMIS

Being immortal, the Bryd was a very wise and
resourceful Thing—but even so, the problem of
saving Dale Stevenson was a dilly. So much
had to be done in one-fourth of a second!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories May 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Bryd was awakened with a rude jolt. It didn't even have time for a mental yawn. Something terrible was going on in Dale Stevenson's mind, and the turmoil there made the Bryd most uncomfortable. It shook off the lethargy of its long sleep. It knew instinctively that Dale Stevenson was about to get in trouble and make his mind unsuitable for the Bryd's occupancy.

The Bryd sighed. These humans were so unstable, so impulsive. The Bryd took a look around.

They—Dale Stevenson and he—were not on Earth. They seemed to be in space somewhere, 5,100 miles from Earth. Well, well, so men finally were breaking the shackles of gravitation. The Bryd became a little more interested.

But Dale Stevenson was reaching for a button that would fire a rocket to position the mirror and burn a path across the biggest city in Europe. Hey! what was going on here, anyway?

The Bryd had about a quarter of a second to do a lot of research. What was Dale Stevenson doing up here? What had he done with himself in the twenty-four years since the Bryd had curled up in the boy's cozy four-year-old mind and settled down for a long nap?

The Bryd could have stayed Dale's hand for a while, but the Bryd very much believed in minding its own business. It didn't like to interfere with humans; that was policy. So it decided to get busy. It had a quarter of a second to find out things and decide what, if anything, to do about them. Certainly it couldn't expect to stay comfortably in a mind as upset as Dale Stevenson's ... so it got busy.

The first thing to do was get oriented. The Bryd took a quick look around. Dale Stevenson, doctor of physics, was in charge of this sun-station, which was a man-made island in space, some three miles in diameter. The rim of the island was composed mainly of a steel framework like the rim of a wheel, with little cabins at various intervals to house a power plant, various controls, rocket berths, repair shops, and living quarters for the sun-station's crew.

The center area of the sun-station was a giant mirror, three miles across, made up of thin sheets of metallic sodium fastened to a skeleton of wire nets. The sodium was very light in weight, and being in airless and heatless space, was inert. Also it was highly reflective.

The whole business was kept at a point approximately 5,100 miles from Earth, where Earth's gravitational attraction approached neutrality and where the entire space-station could be maintained in a given position or moved at will with a minimum expenditure of energy.

Technically the station was owned by Night Sun, Inc., along with nearly a hundred others around Earth, and this particular station, No. 18, was under contract to furnish illumination at night over Paris, France, by staying out of Earth's shadow and reflecting sunlight on Paris during the night.

Management of such a station involved many mathematical factors in distance, triangulation with Paris, velocity and angulation, and control of the curve of the mirror. Normally this was a parabolic curve, but it was constantly varied with other factors to produce the desired degree of illumination.

No. 18 was under the sole control of Dale Stevenson, who had been psych-tested and certified by the United Nations licensing board.

That made the Bryd feel a little better. It looked as if he had made a mistake twenty-four years ago, but it also looked as if the licensing board had been fooled within the last year, for Dale certainly was getting ready to cause a lot of trouble in Paris. He could actuate the controls to expand or contract the rim of the station and thus vary the focal length of the sodium lens, and if he should actually concentrate the sun's rays in a small area, he could draw a flaming path of ruin through the center of Paris.

Reluctantly the Bryd checked again, and found that that was exactly what Dale Stevenson was about to do. The Bryd wondered why. It groaned. Humans were always up to something. Why couldn't they relax so the Bryd could rest?

The Bryd had been so happy back in 2250—or let's see, was it up in 2250? (This was 2045.) That was when Bob What's-his-name and that cute girl had landed on Pluto and given him a chance to get away. The long, lonely eons in Pluto's absolute zero had been quite monotonous to the Bryd, which was nothing but pure energy but which certainly had its feelings. After almost a third of a billion years marooned on Pluto it had sometimes almost wished it had not been so adventurous in its youth and hopped that stray comet as it had swept by its home on Arcturus.

For it had tired of the comet and jumped off on Pluto, and then had discovered it didn't have enough range of its own to get from Pluto to another planet. Then it was that Bob and Alys had come along on their 'round-the-system honeymoon, and the Bryd had hitched a ride to Earth (unknown to them), for it was pretty darned lonesome by that time.

It lived very happily with them until they got old, and then it decided to go back in time to 1950. There it found a nice friendly mind in Joe Talbott, and after it saved Joe from blowing up the Lithium Mountain and half the earth with it, it had settled down to snooze in Joe's mind and hadn't awakened until Joe died of old age. Then the Bryd had hunted a nice, stable mind and had finally picked Dale Stevenson, who was four years old, and had curled up for another long, quiet snooze. But now it was only twenty-four years later and Dale was in a bother.

The Bryd went deeper into Dale's mind to see what was going on. Dale was worried about something. In fact, he had worried so much it had upset his normal mental balance. It seemed to have started back about twenty years ago, a few years after the Bryd had entered Dale's mind.

It seemed that Dale's parents had been killed in an atomic blowup, and Dale, eight years old, had been taken care of by his older sister.

"Don't you worry, Dale," she had told him stoutly. "I'll take good care of you. And I'll buy your clothes and your school-books and everything. You won't have to go to a home. I won't let them take you."

That's what Dale had been scared of—going to a home. He was happy with Marillyn. She took good care of him, and somehow managed to keep the authorities from finding out that a thirteen-year-old girl was supporting a small boy.

Dale had understood all those things later, when he started to the university and they became curious about his background. He realized then what she had done.

"I'll remember all those things," he told her in the first fullness of young maturity and his sudden realization of her loyalty. "You've practically devoted your life to me. I appreciate it. You'll see," he said, embarrassed in this new knowledge, but humbly grateful.

He got a chance to show her; for six months after his graduation, while he was being trained at Station No. 18, he insisted that she should come to visit his new post. Marillyn never had ridden a rocket because she was afraid of them, but she recognized the honor he was conferring on her, for very few persons but employees had ever set foot on a sun-station. She agreed to go. Dale arranged passage. Then she was severely injured in the take-off.

Dale was devastated. He called in specialists, consultants, diagnosticians.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "I'll take care of everything. You'll be all right in no time."

But she wasn't. She was badly crippled, paralyzed from the waist down, and she became pitifully thin.

Dale spent most of his salary on her. Doctors told him it was useless, nothing could help, that a part of her brain cells had been destroyed and could not be rebuilt, that she might live fifty years but she would always be helpless.

Dale refused to believe it. "She's got to get well," he said. "It isn't right—after all the things she did for me. When she was just a kid and should have been skating and dancing and going with boys, she was working to keep me from going to a home. She's entitled to some fun now."

But she didn't have a chance. Her recovery would have been contrary to all medical experience.

Dale's salary grew until he was getting twenty-five hundred a month, but most of it he spent on Marillyn—largely against her wishes.

"Dale, I wish you wouldn't insist on trying every new-fangled cure that comes along. I know what the situation is. I can read. I know I won't get well. I can't. When that brain-tissue is destroyed, it's gone forever. You go out and have some fun. Please."

But Dale, worried but stubborn, said, "Do you remember that winter you sold papers on the street so I could have skates and a sled? Do you think I can forget that?"

"I didn't mean it to become a burden to you," she said softly.

He smiled. "It isn't a burden. I'm doing these things because I want to—because I want to see you active and pretty again. I'll do it, too. You'll see. Next month you're going to the spa at Carlsbad."

She tried to dissuade him, but next month she was bundled up and carried to the train to go to Prague.

It was in Prague that Dale met Ann Wondra, last daughter of a long line of Polish nobility. Ann was dark-haired, quick-eyed, and she could laugh in a way that warmed a man's blood. At any rate, she warmed Dale Stevenson's.

They went hunting together. They ate dinner together. They rode together. They visited Marillyn together, and after they came away from Marillyn in her wheelchair, Ann said, when he stopped the car on the top of a high hill in the moonlight from where they could see her ancestral castle, "You're determined that she shall get well, aren't you, Dale?"

"Of course," he said.

"What will you do if she doesn't?"

He refused to consider that. "She will," he said confidently.

By that time Dale's arms were tightly around her. So, for that matter, were Ann's around Dale.

"You are quite sure," Ann said cautiously.

"I suppose," he said, in an abrupt humbleness, "it's a fixation by now. It's something I recognize as a problem, and the best way to cure it is to cure Marillyn. When I go out on a party, or when I am extravagant, it nicks my conscience, because Marillyn made all these things possible for me in the first place."

"It isn't your fault that she's an invalid, is it?"

"Not directly, no, although she didn't want to take that trip. However, I don't think it's that as much as it is the feeling that if I get too much interested in other things I might neglect her—that is, I might be somewhere else doing something for fun just at the time when the opportunity would come to get her cured. Do you see what I mean?"

"I think so," she said gently.

"For instance," he went on, very much concerned with making her understand, "if I should spend a lot of money on other things—say, for instance, that I should marry you and we'd build a home and all—that would take a lot of money and it would make me unconsciously less eager to find a cure for Marillyn because deep down I'd know I might not be able to pay for it."

Ann drew back in her arms. Her black eyes reflected the starlight. "Dale, what did you say? Did you say 'if I should marry you'?"

He looked back at her. "Uh-huh."

"You've never even said you loved me."

He kissed her very tenderly on the lips. "I do," he said.

Then they kissed so fiercely that the Bryd, listening in solely to get an angle on this whole business, got excited and very nearly got stuck crosswise in the time-stream.

But two weeks later Dale went to his post on sun-station No. 18, and started making Paris days last all night. Six months later he was back for a visit, and Marillyn said, "I'd like to go home, Dale. After all, you've done your part and much more. And this isn't helping me. It's pleasant and all that, but it won't make me walk. I could go to the sanatorium in Florida and it would be just as pleasant and much less expensive. Then you could pursue a normal course of life."

Dale pretended to bristle. "What do you mean by that?"

Marillyn smiled. "Ann is in love with you, Dale. She visits me often, and you should see her eyes sparkle when we mention you. Dale, will you see her tonight?"

"Maybe I will," he said, "but there won't be any marriage until you are well."

"You've been apart six months now," Marillyn said softly. "Maybe if you see her you will change your mind."

Ann would be a wonderful wife. She was much like Marillyn—dark-haired, quick-moving, dignified but warm, affectionate, and loyal. His wife would have to be loyal, of course, like Marillyn. That was essential.

He hired a car that afternoon and drove out to the castle to surprise Ann. He reached the grounds just before dark, so he parked the car on the hill where Ann and he had been that last night. Maybe she and he would walk back there later.

He started to walk through the grounds, and when he reached the flower garden it was almost dark. He walked along the cinder-path by the roses, then cut across the grass. He heard murmuring voices, and a moment later he saw Ann walking in the garden. With her was a man, and his arm was around her. The man stopped to snap off a rose. He turned to Ann with a graceful, almost feminine gesture, and she smiled. Then with elaborate and intimate motions he pinned the rose in her hair.

Dale was hurt. He went back quietly to the car. Of course he had not asked her to marry him, but then he had mentioned it—and couldn't she be loyal to his memory? Dale was filled with unexpected jealousy.

After a restless night he had just about rationalized the entire situation. He knew the scene in the garden did not necessarily mean anything. He would phone Ann, mention last night, and of course she would explain. Then he picked up the morning telepaper from London and read in the gossip column that Ann Wondra, the Polish beauty, might soon announce her engagement to Georges Raoul Dumont, son of the French ambassador. Dale was stricken—

And was still in that state of mind, the Bryd saw, when a man came to his hotel room that afternoon. "You are in charge of sun-station No. 18, over Paris, I believe."

This was very interesting to the Bryd, because it saw that the man was cleverly masked with a plastiform shell that did not at all appear to be a mask.

"Yes," Dale said glumly.

The man's eyes looked speculative. He glanced at the telepaper on Dale's bed, and the Bryd, figuratively speaking—for of course the Bryd was nothing but pure energy—opened its eyes. For the Bryd knew the man's thought, and was astonished to learn that Dale had been closely watched for some time. Following the scene in the flower garden, the item in the telepaper had been especially arranged to produce a certain reaction in Dale Stevenson without Ann Wondra's knowledge.

"You know, of course," the man said, "that France is about to disturb world peace by invading Spain."

Dale sat up and frowned. "No, I didn't know it."

"It is true," the man said, watching him intently.

"Why are you telling me?"

The man cleared his throat significantly. "You might be in a position to save the world from an atomic war."

Dale stiffened. "You must know," he said coldly, "what my position is. I am in the employ of the United Nations, and any attempt to control my actions is coercion and the penalty is death."

The man did not back away. He moved closer, and his eyes became black points of force. The Bryd saw that the man had mental powers unusual for that period of Earth's history.

"Look at me, Dale Stevenson."

Dale fought against it, but the man's will was powerful. Dale's resistance weakened. The man's eyes never wavered from Dale's. He moved still closer and spoke in a low tone. "Our information is that France will drop atomic bombs on Spain's principal cities at three a.m. one week from today. Suppose—just suppose—that some other nation—some nation powerful enough to do so—should be in a position to warn France at two-thirty that France would not be permitted to attack. Suppose this warning were backed up with a show of force to prove the warning meant business."

"Isn't that the job of the U.N.?"

The man's face was only inches now from Dale's. The Bryd shivered in its figurative boots. This man was a master hypnotist. Only they wouldn't call him a hypnotist in these days. They'd call him a psyche-man. Psyche-control was much more powerful than hypnosis. Psyche-control touched the moral inhibitions, which hypnosis never had been able to do.

Dale was lost. In the end he agreed, for a cash-on-delivery fee of one hundred thousand dollars, to concentrate his sodium mirror beam on Paris at two-thirty of the morning designated, and thereby, with a smoking path of fire and ruin, help the other nation to warn France that she must keep hands off Spain.

Perhaps Dale's jealousy of Georges Raoul Dumont had a bearing on the agreement.

Dale had been so much under the foreign agent's influence that he had not considered the ethics of the idea at all until time to press the button that would concentrate the sun-energy into a consuming column of fire. The time was now ... and it was only now, with the hypnosis just beginning to wear off at the edges, that he found himself wondering vaguely about angles of the situation that previously had not occurred to him.

Who was the man who had talked to him? Whom did he represent? Why hadn't he gone to the U. N. if he knew so much?

But then it was true, as the man had said—if France planned to start dropping atomic bombs at three o'clock, it would be too late to appeal to the U.N. Dale didn't like Frenchmen anyway.

Altogether, the Bryd concluded, Dale Stevenson was pretty muddled up in his mind. The man needed a rest, but that could be worked out later. Right now his finger was on the firing-button, and the psyche-control, though weakened, was pushing him to finish the job.

Dale Stevenson's finger was just starting to move the button....

Oh dear, these humans certainly could muddle things.

The Bryd decided to have a look at Ann Wondra's mind. And there it got somewhat startled, for Ann's, which previously had been all warm and cozy as toast, was very low indeed. She was looking at a snapshot of Dale, and it wasn't even a very good picture, but it exhilarated her and at the same time it depressed her, because she wanted Dale but couldn't have him.

Ann was sitting cross-legged on a thick rug, drinking Darjeeling tea, and talking to her mother.

"I'm glad M. Dumont has gone back home," she said, and the Bryd noted that there wasn't any jump in her blood-pressure when she mentioned Georges' name—well, not much, anyway.

"He's very handsome," said her mother, knitting busily. The old lady's blood-pressure jumped more than Ann's.

"But he isn't as nice as Dale Stevenson."

"My sakes, Ann, I hope you don't grow to be an old maid, mooning over that tongue-tied—"

"Mother!" Ann got to her feet. She was long-legged and clean-limbed. The Bryd approved of her. It could imagine by now what she had done to Dale's mind. It didn't see how it had slept through it.

So the Bryd took a quick transition back to America and had a look at the mind of the doctor who took care of Marillyn Stevenson. The physician was having lunch with a consultation expert.

"You know," the doctor said, fingering a Manhattan—"I don't know what to do about young Dale Stevenson. He's still trying to cure his sister."

"Maybe there's a reason."

"Sure there's a reason. He has this feeling of gratitude and loyalty and all. That's all there is to it, but he's butting his head against the infinite inertia. He's spending two thousand a month on that girl—and the worst of it is, she doesn't want him to. She knows what the score is and she's resigned to it."

"Well, loyalty is a wonderful thing, but I suppose it can go too far, and over-shadow reason, especially in the young. Is there any chance at all for the girl?"

"No possibility. Progressive degeneration of the brain-tissue." He tossed off the Manhattan and the Bryd shuddered—it preferred Martinis, itself. "The only thing would be a miracle, and you know how scarce they are in the medical world." He smiled. They both smiled. The Bryd mentally snorted. Who were they, to laugh at miracles? They thought they were pretty damn' smart, didn't they?

The Bryd decided it had better look in on Marillyn.

It found her in a glassed-in porch of the sanatorium, with her reclining chair facing south, and the sun pouring down through the magnolias. The Bryd liked this. Everything was restful and peaceful and pleasant—

But something was wrong as hell in Marillyn's mind.

She had a small bottle of something in one hand under the light blanket, and she was lying back running over everything in her mind. Dale loved Ann and Ann loved Dale. But they couldn't get married because of Dale's exaggerated sense of duty.

Marillyn didn't want to keep them apart. She could adjust herself to a very pleasant life in a place like this, but Dale wouldn't let her. As fast as he could save some money, he'd dream up some new scheme to get her cured.

Well, Marillyn reasoned, she wasn't of any use to anybody. Why should she stay in Dale's way? The Bryd was puzzled. What did she think she could do?

She had the little bottle under the blanket, she was thinking. A few drops of that and—the Bryd was positively flabbergasted. The girl was getting ready to kill herself. The Bryd probed into her mind for an instant and discovered that she wasn't being a martyr and had no complexes; she was just trying to straighten things out for Dale and Ann.

Oh, beans, thought the Bryd. If humans weren't the dumbest beings ever! It watched Marillyn raise the bottle to her lips. It simultaneously took the form of a nurse, standing there at Marillyn's side, and Marillyn gasped and said, "Oh, nurse, I didn't know you were there."

"I am," said the Bryd in its best contralto voice. "Did you wish something, Miss?"

The hand with the bottle of poison fell back under the blanket. "No, I didn't call."

"May I move your chair out of the sun, Miss?"

"It isn't in the sun," Marillyn said.

The Bryd raised its eyebrows. It did some quick work on the wind, and there was the sun, shining steadily through an opening in the magnolia trees.

"Perhaps it is too bright," said Marillyn. "If you'd just move it over there—"

The Bryd was delighted. In the process of moving the chair, it got its figurative hands on the bottle and disintegrated it. Then it said, "Miss, don't you think you will get well?"

Marillyn said calmly, resignedly, "There's no chance. None whatever. When brain-tissue is gone, there is nothing medical science can do. They can't build tissue, you know."

"Oh?" said the Bryd.

"Only a miracle," said Marillyn. "And miracles don't happen in medical science."

The Bryd almost snorted aloud. Oh, they didn't, hey? It—

The head nurse came striding up, her leather heels clacking on the tile floor. "Miss—" She looked puzzled. "Who are you, anyway?" she demanded. "I've never seen you before."

These women! Maybe the Bryd was getting peevish in its old age, but why couldn't people mind their own business for a change?

It resolved itself into a doctor, and it was gratified to watch the head nurse's eyes shoot open.

"Madam," the Bryd said in its best baritone, "were you addressing me?"

"I—" The head nurse swallowed. "No, sir, I—I beg your pardon, sir." She recovered slightly. "Have I seen you before, sir?"

Oh, bother! Details, details! Humans wouldn't be happy if they weren't tied up in details all the time. The Bryd dematerialized and went inside the sanatorium by the simple process of flowing through the spaces around the nuclei of the atoms in the wall. Then, on second thought, it went back and erased some memories from the mind of the head nurse; then it took Marillyn through the wall into the sanatorium. It went into her mind and did some repair work that would have amazed the finest brain surgeons on Earth. In a few months Marillyn's paralysis would be gone and she would be well and happy. Miracles, did they say? Well, they'd asked for it.

The Bryd was somewhat irked with itself for having interfered—but it had been for the best.

It got on a tight beam and went back to sun-station No. 18. Dale Stevenson's finger was just starting to move the button. There was maybe a fiftieth of a second left.

The Bryd carefully implanted the knowledge of Marillyn's cure in a corner of Dale's brain and sat back to await results. But in the next hundredth of a second there was no response. Dale still was about to turn the sun on Paris.

So the Bryd, now thoroughly disgusted, implanted the knowledge of Ann's love in another corner of Dale's mind and then to its astonishment had to jump fast to get out of the way.

Did that ever get results! Dale held his finger. He got up and rubbed his forehead a moment. Then he went to the radio-phone. "Get me the U.N. police headquarters in London," he said.

He stood there beating his brains to figure out what had gotten into him, so the Bryd just felt around and erased a few memories, and everything was all right. Then the Bryd climbed into its favorite cozy spot in Dale's mind. The spot was still warm and snuggly. It began to settle down—but then it remembered something.

It got up. It went back to Earth and hunted up the minds of the men who were flying atom-bombs over France. The Bryd knew by now, of course, that France herself had never had any atom-bombs.

The Bryd went into the minds of the foreign fliers and sent them back to drop the atom-bombs on their own cities. After all, they had those bombs and they apparently were the kind who wouldn't be satisfied until they could drop them. The Bryd dusted off its hands and headed wearily for sun-station No. 18. It hoped for many restful years ahead with Dale and Ann.

If it didn't get them, the Bryd thought disgustedly, it had better try to hitch a ride back to Pluto. At least it had had rest and quiet there.

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