Author: Charles V. De Vet
Category: Science
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of disorientation did not pass withfull wakefulness. He achieved no understanding, but the strangeness didnot leave as he sat up.
He gazed about him. The room did not seem to be his own. Thefurnishings, and the clothing he observed in a closet, might havebelonged to a stranger.
He pulled himself from his blankets, his body moving with mechanicalreaction. The slippers into which he put his feet were larger than hehad expected them to be. He walked about the small apartment. The placewas familiar, but only as it would have been if he had studied it fromblueprints, not as though he lived there.
The feeling was still with him when he returned to the psychoanalyst.
The scene this time was more kaleidoscopic, less personal.
A village was being ravaged. Men struggled and died in the streets.Zarwell moved among them, seldom taking part in the individual clashes,yet a moving force in the conflict.
The background changed. He understood that he was on a different world.
Here a city burned. Its resistance was nearing its end. Zarwell wasriding a shaggy pony outside a high wall surrounding the strickenmetropolis. He moved in and joined a party of short, bearded men,directing them as they battered at the wall with a huge log mounted on amany-wheeled truck.
The log broke a breach in the concrete and the besiegers chargedthrough, carrying back the defenders who sought vainly to plug the gap.Soon there would be rioting in the streets again, plundering andkilling.
Zarwell was not the leader of the invaders, only a lesser figure in therebellion. But he had played a leading part in the planning of thestrategy that led to the city's fall. The job had been well done.
Time passed, without visible break in the panorama. Now Zarwell wasfleeing, pursued by the same bearded men who had been his comradesbefore. Still he moved with the same firm purpose, vigilant,resourceful, and well prepared for the eventuality that had befallen. Hemade his escape without difficulty.
He alighted from a space ship on still another world--another shift intime--and the atmosphere of conflict engulfed him.
Weary but resigned he accepted it, and did what he had to do ...
Bergstrom was regarding him with speculative scrutiny. "You've had quitea past, apparently," he observed.
Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment. "At least in my dreams."
"Dreams?" Bergstrom's eyes widened in surprise. "Oh, I beg your pardon.I must have forgotten to explain. This work is so routine to me thatsometimes I forget it's all new to a patient. Actually what youexperienced under the drug were not dreams. They were recollections ofreal episodes from your past."
Zarwell's expression became wary. He watched Bergstrom closely. After aminute, however, he seemed satisfied, and he let himself settle backagainst the cushion of his chair. "I remember nothing of what I saw," heobserved.
"That's why you're here, you know," Bergstrom answered. "To help youremember."
"But everything under the drug is so ..."
"Haphazard? That's true. The recall episodes are always purely random,with no chronological sequence. Our problem will be to reassemble themin proper order later. Or some particular scene may trigger a completememory return.
"It is my considered opinion," Bergstrom went on, "that your lost memorywill turn out to be no ordinary amnesia. I believe we will find thatyour mind has been tampered with."
"Nothing I've seen under the drug fits into the past I do remember."
"That's what makes me so certain," Bergstrom said confidently. "Youdon't remember what we have shown to be true. Conversely then, what youthink you remember must be false. It must have been implanted there. Butwe can go into that later. For today I think we have done enough. Thisepisode was quite prolonged."
"I won't have any time off again until next week end," Zarwell remindedhim.
"That's right." Bergstrom thought for a moment. "We shouldn't let thishang too long. Could you come here after work tomorrow?"
"I suppose I could."
"Fine," Bergstrom said with satisfaction. "I'll admit I'm considerablymore than casually interested in your case by this time."
A work truck picked Zarwell up the next morning and he rode with a techcrew to the edge of the reclam area. Beside the belt bringing ocean muckfrom the converter plant at the seashore his bulldozer was waiting.
He took his place behind the drive wheel and began working dirt downbetween windbreakers anchored in the rock. Along a makeshift road intothe badlands trucks brought crushed lime and phosphorus to supplementthe ocean sediment. The progress of life from the sea to the land was amechanical process of this growing world.
Nearly two hundred years ago, when Earth established a colony on St.Martin's, the land surface of the planet had been barren. Only its seasthrived with animal and vegetable life. The necessary machinery andtechnicians had been supplied by Earth, and the long struggle began tofit the world for human needs. When Zarwell arrived, six months before,the vitalized area already extended three hundred miles along the coast,and sixty miles inland. And every day the progress continued. A largepercentage of the energy and resources of the world were devoted to thatessential expansion.
The reclam crews filled and sodded the sterile rock, planted bindinggrasses, grain and trees, and diverted rivers to keep it fertile. Whenthere were no rivers to divert they blasted out springs and lakes in thefoothills to make their own. Biologists developed the necessary germ andinsect life from what they found in the sea. Where that failed, theyimported microorganisms from Earth.
Three rubber-tracked crawlers picked their way down from the mountainsuntil they joined the road passing the belt. They were loaded with orethat would be smelted into metal for depleted Earth, or for othercolonies short of minerals. It was St. Martin's only export thus far.
Zarwell pulled his sun helmet lower, to better guard his hot, dryfeatures. The wind blew continuously on St. Martin's, but it furnishedsmall relief from the heat. After its three-thousand-mile journey acrossscorched sterile rock, it sucked the moisture from a man's body,bringing a membrane-shrinking dryness to the nostrils as it was breathedin. With it came also the cloying taste of limestone in a worker'smouth.
Zarwell gazed idly about at the other laborers. Fully three-quarters ofthem were beri-rabza ridden. A cure for the skin fungus had not yet beenfound; the men's faces and hands were scabbed and red. The colony hadgrown to near self-sufficiency, would soon have a moderate prosperity,yet they still lacked adequate medical and research facilities.
Not all the world's citizens were content.
Bergstrom was waiting in his office when Zarwell arrived that evening.
He was lying motionless on a hard cot, with his eyes closed, yet withhis every sense sharply quickened. Tentatively he tightened smallmuscles in his arms and legs. Across his wrists and thighs he feltstraps binding him to the cot.
"So that's our big, bad man," a coarse voice above him observedcaustically. "He doesn't look so tough now, does he?"
"It might have been better to kill him right away," a second, lessconfident voice said. "It's supposed to be impossible to hold him."
"Don't be stupid. We just do what we're told. We'll hold him."
"What do you think they'll do with him?"
"Execute him, I suppose," the harsh voice said matter-of-factly."They're probably just curious to see what he looks like first. They'llbe disappointed."
Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to observe his surroundings.
It was a mistake. "He's out of it," the first speaker said, and Zarwellallowed his eyes to open fully.
The voice, he saw, belonged to the big man who had bruised him againstthe locker at the spaceport. Irrelevantly he wondered how he knew nowthat it had been a spaceport.
His captor's broad face jeered down at Zarwell. "Have a good sleep?" heasked with mock solicitude. Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge that heheard.
The big man turned. "You can tell the Chief he's awake," he said.Zarwell followed his gaze to where a younger man, with a blond lock ofhair on his f
orehead, stood behind him. The youth nodded and went out,while the other pulled a chair up to the side of Zarwell's cot.
While their attention was away from him Zarwell had unobtrusivelyloosened his bonds as much as possible with arm leverage. As the big mandrew his chair nearer, he made the hand farthest from him tight andcompact and worked it free of the leather loop. He waited.
The big man belched. "You're supposed to be great stuff in a situationlike this," he said, his smoke-tan face splitting in a grin thatrevealed large square teeth. "How about giving me a sample?"
"You're a yellow-livered bastard," Zarwell told him.
The grin faded from the oily face as the man stood up. He leaned