Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; War stories
He forced them down, and this time he was ready when his brain tried to
black out on him. The compulsions that acted on him to make him pass on
his information to the Aliens were partly under his control.
He managed to sidetrack his thoughts before blacking out, and to keep
his arms down. He lay there, cursing himself and the things which had
created him, fighting his battle silently, until he knew he had won.
His legs were unsteady when he finally stood up. The effort of will
had shocked even his motor control impulses, but the damage was not
permanent, and by the time he passed Miles' darkened doorway, he was
moving smoothly enough again. He saw surprised looks exchanged by his
guards as they followed him back to the laboratory.
"You might as well come in," he told them. "I'll be here all night, and
there's nothing secret about my work now. I think there's a deck of
cards in the desk over there."
One of them looked and came back, holding the deck and grinning.
"Thanks, Doc," he said. "You're all right."
For a second, Norden experienced a warming glow as he turned into his
office. He could find some acceptance among men now. Then he grimaced
bitterly, as he realized what they'd think of him if they knew the
truth about him. It was one thing to ape humanity, quite another to
belong.
The article on speculative spectra by the Japanese scientist was still
on his desk, and he began poring over it. Almost at once, his mind
swerved away on a flight of curiosity about the card game the men had
been playing. He pulled it back, and his imagination started in on
hatred of the Aliens.
He fought against that too, tempting as it was. He'd licked the
compulsion to communicate with them in two hours. There was hope that
he could lick the taboo against investigating into a forbidden field.
The fact that it was forbidden made it doubly worth studying.
Bit by bit he traced down the mathematics, but in the end the taboo
threw him. It required all the effort he could bring to the problem to
follow the tricky formulae, and it couldn't be done while fighting the
treachery of his own mind. He gave up in disgust, and turned to the
computer.
He'd seen Pat use it often enough, and apparently his robot mind
was good at memorizing. He searched through the available tapes of
information until he came to one that covered the more vital aspects of
Einstein's unified field theory.
He fed it in, and began adding the spectra relation data from the
books, carefully storing them in the memory circuits of the machine.
The mathematics of the article went in next. He made sure the material
they had used to locate the screen was still active, and brought it up
to date.
Finally he set the machine to deriving all possible extensions of the
mathematics he couldn't handle himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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