A. E. Van Vogt - More Than Superhuman.pdf - A. E. Van Vogt - borsukomiks

Table of Contents

More Than Superhuman

Humans, Go Home!

IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIII

The Reflected Men

IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIV

All The Loving Androids

Laugh, Clone, Laugh

Research Alpha

IIIIIIIVVVIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXV

Him

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(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

T IMES MIRROR

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

Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation.

Publishing and Distributing Corporation.

Ackerman.

'Research Alpha' by A. E. van Vogt and James H. Schmitz. Published in Worlds of IF Science Fiction.

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

'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 rapidly 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.'

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