More Than Superhuman Read online

  (E-book Version 1.0 — first release. Scanned, Spellchecked & Checked against D.T. July 2003)

  (The HTML Version of this e-book is best used as source for a e-book reader convert such as MobiBook or ReaderWorks)

  * * *

  (Back Blurb)

  A lone scientist working against time to speed evolution so that man will have one desperate chance against the conquerors from space.

  A man and woman attempting to retain their humanity in a world where the war between the sexes has become a struggle to the death.

  A future civilisation that commands its citizens to be happy or be destroyed.

  A desperate plan of rebellion against the all-powerful dictatorship that has taken over Earth.

  This book provides yet further evidence of the original ideas and delightful stories to come from A. E. van Vogt, already established as a master of the science fiction genre.

  * * *

  MORE THAN SUPERHUMAN

  Also by A. E. van Vogt and available from New English Library:

  QUEST FOR THE FUTURE

  THE SILKIE

  THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER

  THE WEAPON MAKERS

  CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

  BATTLE OF FOREVER

  THE FAR-OUT WORLDS OF A. E. VAN VOGT

  EMPIRE OF THE ATOM

  THE WIZARD OF LINN

  * * *

  More Than Superhuman

  A. E. VAN VOGT

  NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY

  TIMES MIRROR

  * * *

  First published in the United States of America by Dell Publishing Co. Inc. 1971© 1971 by A. E. van Vogt

  *

  FIRST NEL PAPERBACK EDITION SEPTEMBER 1975

  *

  Condition of sale: This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior Consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on me subsequent purchaser.

  NHL Books are published by

  New English Library from Barnard's Inn, Holborn, London E.C.1.

  Made and printed in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd., Aylesbury, Bucks.

  45002571 3

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  'Humans Go Home!' by A. E. van Vogt. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction. Copyright © 1969 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation.

  'Reflected Men' by A. E. van Vogt. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction. Copyright ©1971 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation.

  'Laugh, Clone, Laugh' by A. E. van Vogt and Forrest J. Ackerman. Copyright © 1969 by Forrest J. Ackerman.

  'Research Alpha' by A. E. van Vogt and James H. Schmitz. Published in Worlds of IF Science Fiction. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation

  'Him' by A. E. van Vogt. Copyright © 1968 by Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc.; by arrangement with Wm. L. Crawford and permission of the author and his agent, Forrest J Ackerman.

  * * *

  Contents

  Humans, Go Home! by A. E. VAN VOGT

  The Reflected Men by A. E. VAN VOGT

  All The Loving Androids by A. E. VAN VOGT

  Laugh, Clone, Laugh by A. E. VAN VOGT and FORREST J. ACKERMAN

  Research Alpha by A. E. VAN VOGT and JAMES H. SCHMITZ

  Him by A. E. VAN VOGT

  * * *

  Humans, Go Home!

  A. E. VAN VOGT

  I

  'Each morning,' Miliss said, 'is the dawn of nothing.'

  So she was leaving.

  'No children, no future,' the woman continued. 'Every day like every other, going nowhere. The sun shines, but I'm in darkness —'

  It was, Dav realized, the beginning of the death talk. He tensed his perfect muscles. His blue eyes — they could observe with a deep understanding on many levels — misted with sudden anxiety. But his lips and his infinitely adaptable tongue — which in its time, and that time was long indeed, had spoken a hundred languages said no word.

  He watched her, made no move to help her and no effort to stop her as she piled her clothes onto a powered dolly, to be wheeled into the east wing of the house. Her clothes, her jewels from a score of planets; her special pillows and other bedroom articles; the specific furniture — each piece a jewel in itself — in which she stored her possessions; her keys — plain and electronic, pushbutton-control types for energy relays and tiny combination systems for entry into the great Reservoir of the Symbols — all now were made ready to be transported with a visibly growing impatience.

  Finally she snapped, 'Where is your courtesy? Where is your manliness — letting a woman do all this work?'

  Dav said evenly, 'It would be foolish of me to help you leave me.'

  'So all those years of politeness — I merely bought them with unalienated behavior. You have no natural respect for a woman — or for me.'

  She yelled accusations at him. Dav felt a tremor stir inside him, not from her words but from the meaning of the anger that accompanied them, the unthinking automatic quality of that anger.

  He said flatly, 'I am not going to help you leave me.'

  It was the kind of answer one made to a stereotype. His hope had to be that these preliminaries of the death compulsion could be headed off.

  His words, however, were far from effective. Her blond cheeks gradually turned to a darker color as the day — unlike other days, which were often so slow as forever — devoured itself, digesting hours in great gulps. And still her possessions, more numerous evidently than she had realized, were not shifted from the west to the east wing of the long, big house.

  Late in the afternoon Dav pointed out that her act of withdrawal was a well-known phenomenon of internal female chemistry. He merely wanted from her the analytical consciousness of this fact — and her permission to give her the drugs that would rectify the condition.

  She rejected the argument. From her lips poured a stream of angry rationalizations.

  'The woman is always to blame. The fault is in her, not in the man. The things that I have had to put up with — they don't count —'

  Long ago, when she was still in her natural state, before the administration of the first immortality injections, there might have been genuine cause for accusations which attacked male subjectiveness. But that was back in a distant time. After the body had been given chemical aids, all things were balanced by a diet of understanding drugs.

  * *

  Dav located the relevant book in the library and abandoned his initial attempts to keep from her the seriousness of her condition. He walked beside her and read paragraphs detailing the emotional affliction that had led to the virtual destruction of the human race. The dark thoughts she had expressed — and was now acting on — were described so exactly that abruptly, as he walked beside her, he bent in her direction and held the book up to her face. His finger pointed out the significant sentences.

  Miliss stopped. Her eyes, a deceptive gray-green, narrowed. Her lips tightly compressed, unmistakably resisting what he was doing. Yet she spoke in a mild tone(

  'Let me see that.'

  She reached for the book.

  Dav surrendered it reluctantly. The sly purpose he detected in her seemed even more automatic than the earlier anger. In those few hours she appeared to have become a simpler, more primitive person.

  So he was not surprised when she raised the book above her head and, with a wordless vocalization, flung it to the floor behind him.

  They had come to within a few yards of a door which led to her part of the house. Dave resignedly stooped to pick up the hook, aware of her walking rap
idly to that door. It opened and slammed shut behind her.

  After silence descended, after the coming of the brilliant, purple Jana twilight, when the sun finally sank out of sight behind the slickrock mountains to the west and the sweet, soft darkness of the shining, starlit night of Jana settled, Dav tested the connecting doors between the two wings. All four resisted his pull with the rigidity of unbreakable locks.

  * *

  The following morning.

  The sound of a buzzer precipitated Dav into the new day. For a meager moment the hope stirred in him that Miliss was calling. But, he rejected that possibility even as he formed the image in his mind that triggered the nearest thought amplifier. His dismissal of the idea turned out to be correct. The buzzing ceased. A picture formed on the ceiling screen. It showed a Jana tradesboy with groceries standing at the outer door.

  Dav spoke to the boy in the Jana tongue and glided out of bed. Presently he was accepting the bag from the long-nosed youth, who said, 'There was a message to bring this to another part of the house. But I didn't understand clearly — '

  Dav hesitated with the fleeting realization that the ever-present Jana spy system was probably behind those words. And that if he explained, the information would be instantly relayed to the authorities. Not that he could ever tell these beings the truth. Their time for immortality was not yet.

  Nor was it their time to learn the numerous details of the final disaster — when, in a period of a few months, virtually the entire human population of the galaxy rejected life, refused the prolongation drugs. People by the billion hid themselves and died unattended and uncaring.

  A few, of course, were captured by appalled survivors and had treatment forced on them. A wrong solution, it developed.

  For the people who sympathized and helped, by those very desperate feelings, in some manner attuned themselves into the same deadly psychic state as the naturally doomed.

  In the end it was established that the only real survivors were individuals who felt a scathing contempt for people who could not be persuaded to accept help. Such a disdainful survivor could sarcastically argue with someone — yes, for a while. But force him, no.

  Dav stood at the door of the great house in which he and Miliss had lived these several hundred years. And he realized that this was the moment.

  To save himself, he had to remember that what Miliss was doing deserved his total disgust.

  He shrugged and said, 'My wife has left me. She is living alone on the other side of the house. So deliver these to the door at the far east side.'

  He thrust the bag of groceries back into the hands of the Jana and motioned him away.

  The boy took the big sack and backed off with visible reluctance.

  'Your wife has left you?' he echoed finally.

  Dav nodded. In spite of himself he felt vaguely regretful at the revelation. To these Jana males, pursuit of females began early and continued into late life, terminating approximately at the moment of death. Until now the human woman had been a forbidden and unapproachable female. But no question — there had always been a perverted Jana male interest in Miliss.

  With an abrupt dismissal Dav suppressed such thoughts. What they represented was unimportant It did not matter.

  * *

  Later that day he saw her in her part of the garden, lissome, still beautiful, showing no signs of immediate deterioration. Apparently — even on this second day — she was still an immortal blond woman. Seeing her, Dav shrugged and turned away, his lip curling, and in his mind the thought that she was not really human.

  She could not reason.

  Still later, darkness had fallen when, after testing with the various keys the Blaze Points of the Great Reservoir of the Symbols, he came to the summit of the hill from which he could see her long, white house.

  Its night lights showed the garden and the glint of the river on the far side. But around it nothing moved. Silent stood the old house, familiar, a centuries-old landmark.

  Something about the stillness below disturbed him. He had a sudden feeling that no one was there. The house itself was dark — both wings.

  Puzzled but not alarmed — because he was safe and Miliss did not count, for she was doomed anyway — Dav hurried down. He tried first a door to her wing. It was unlocked.

  An amplified thought hit him. Miliss speaking mentally.

  Dav, I have been arrested by Jaer Dorrish and am being taken to a military prison. I have the impression that this is a Dorrish clan takeover scheme and that it is connected with the fact that Rocquel has now been gone for a year. That's all...

  The account was succinct, as impersonal as his own receipt of it. She had left him a communication of facts. In her message was no appeal, no request for help.

  Dav stood silent. He was evoking a mental picture of the sardonic Jaer Dorrish and, more vaguely, the image of Rocquel, the hereditary leader of the Janae, who had disappeared slightly more than one Jana year ago. A year on Jana was three hundred ninety-two and a fraction days long.

  He felt opposed to Jaer, of course — in a way wished the steely-minded Rocquel were back. Usurpations usually meant trouble and unrest. But if it had to be, it had to. The Janae constituted a problem for him as Guardian of the Symbols. But individuals among them were not, in one sense, important. Though he had liked Rocquel, and still liked Rocquel's — widow?

  Nerda.

  In the morning, I'll look into this...

  II

  Rocquel's senses blurred in arriving. He lay down for a few seconds on the shadowy grass. It was already day — fairly early morning; he noticed when he climbed to his feet. He could see the palace, visible among the trees of the vast garden which surrounded the building.

  Rocquel stood for a moment, head thrown back, breathing deeply of the air of his native planet. A year had seemed a long absence. So much had happened. Yet the sky of Jana and these hills that he had known in his lost youth so intimately seemed unchanged. Here, during all those tremendous days of his absence, time had sculptured with a slow and exacting chisel. A gentle wind blew in Rocquel's face as he started slowly toward the road beyond the near trees, the winding road that would take him to the palace.

  Incredibly, he made it to within a hundred yards of the sprawl of building before a Jana male came suddenly from around some trees, saw him, and stopped. Rocquel recognized the other at once: Jaer Dorrish. Jaer was a big fellow, bigger than Rocquel, good-looking in a swarthy way. His eyes narrowed. He seemed to brace himself.

  He said arrogantly in the tone of one addressing an intruder, 'What are you doing here — stranger?'

  Rocquel walked forward at a deliberate pace. He had been cautioned to take up his old position before he revealed the new facets of his personality. He didn't need the warning — it was implicit in the sly act of a person who knew him, pretending not to.

  The problem of what one of the Dorrish men was doing in the Rocquel grounds so early in the morning — or ever — he would come to later. Right now the denial of his identity was surpassingly significant.

  Rocquel said, 'Jaer, consider — do you want me for an enemy?'

  This time Jaer Dorrish showed his understanding of the situation.

  'By Dilit,' he said exultantly, 'I've caught you unarmed.'

  He drew his sword in a single, continuous movement and began to circle Rocquel, apparently not quite believing that he need merely rush in and slash. His eyes speculatively sized up Rocquel's condition.

  * *

  Rocquel backed and simultaneously turned. He paused where Jaer had been standing. It took him moments to locate consciously the symbol made by the invisible Tizane energy, which he had directed to the spot the instant he saw Jaer. He kicked it cautiously, leaning backward so that his body would not be attracted by the symbol. His foot tingled unpleasantly — it was a feeling of something grabbing at him, something very powerful that did not quite reach him but only clawed the outer threads of his clothing, failing to get a good hold. Twice he pu
lled clear of it. Presently he was able to step over the broken ground without experiencing a reaction.

  He was already out of danger when Jaer laughed and replaced his sword.

  The big male said arrogantly, 'If one does not threaten, one cannot show mercy. You see, Rocquel, I expected that you would return today. I have had observers watching the grounds all night so that I could have this confrontation with you.' He grimaced triumphantly. 'I analyze that you owe your return to me. Because yesterday I arrested the human woman, Miliss, and here you are this morning, exactly as I anticipated. It was a sudden intuition of mind. You have a lot of explaining to do — sir.'

  Jaer was visibly jubilant. He waved at somebody behind Rocquel. Rocquel was wary of the gesture. In his careful defensive maneuvering he had gotten his back to the buildings. Finally he glanced carefully around and saw that Nerda was walking toward them.

  As she came near, she said, 'You were not really in danger, were you? It showed in your manner.'

  Rocquel said, 'Not from one person.'

  He walked to her, and she did not resist his kiss. She might as well have. His lips were cool and unresponsive. Her passive body did not welcome his embrace.

  Rocquel drew back, scowling. An old anger against this defiant young female rose to gall him.

  'Damn you,' he said. 'Aren't you glad to see me?'

  Nerda merely gazed at him coolly.

  'I forgot,' said Rocquel, stung. 'It was a welcome period of rest for you. It's difficult for a male to remember that Jana females do not have feelings.'

  His wife shrugged.

  Rocquel stared at her, curious now rather than hostile. Like all Jana females, she was icily aloof. He had married her in the usual fashion by having her father bring her to his house. She had subsequently borne him a son and a daughter, but in the Jana female tradition she continued to treat him like an intruder in her life — whom she must tolerate but did not particularly care to have around.