As Long As You Wish. John O'Keefe.

As Long as You Wish

John O’Keefe

Astounding Science Fiction, June, 1955.

If, somehow, you get trapped in a circular time system...how long is the circumference of an infinitely retraced circle?

The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand.

“Just start anywhere,” I said. “Tell me all about it.”

“As before?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, the coin clutched tightly in one hand. “I’m Charles J. Fisher, professor of Philosophy at Reiser College.”

He looked at me quickly. “Or at least I was until recently.” For a second his face was boyish. “Professor of Philosophy, that is.”

I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side I read the words: THE STATEMENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS COIN IS FALSE. The patient watched me with an expressionless face; I turned over the coin. It was engraved with the words: THE STATEMENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS COIN IS FALSE.

“That’s not the problem,” he said. “Not my problem. I had the coin made when I was an undergraduate. I enjoyed reading one side, turning it over, reading the other side, and so on. A fiendish enjoyment like boys planning where to put the tipped-over outhouse.”

I looked at the patient. He was thirty-eight, single, medium build, had an M.A. and Ph.D. from an eastern university. I knew this and more from the folder on my desk.

“Eight months ago,” he continued. “I read about the sphere found on Panay Island.” He stopped, looking at me questioningly.

“Yes, I know,” I said. I opened my desk drawer, took out a clipping from the newspaper, and handed it to him.

“That’s it.”

I read the clipping before putting it back in the drawer.

Manila, Sept. 24 (INS) Archeologists from University of California have discovered in earth fault of recent quake a sphere two feet in diameter of an unidentifiable material.

Dr. Karl Schwartz, head of the group, said the sphere was returned to the University for study. He declined to answer questions on the cultural origin of the sphere.

“There wasn’t any more in the newspapers about it,” he said. “I have a friend in California who got me the photographs.”

He looked at me intently. “You won’t believe any of this.” He pressed the coin into the palm of his hand. “You won’t be able to.”

“The photographs,” he continued, as if lecturing. “Were of characters projected by the sphere when placed before a focused light. The sphere was transparent, you see, imbedded with dark microscopic specks. By moving the sphere a certain distance each time, there was a total projection of three hundred and sixty different characters in eighteen different orderings. Or nineteen different orderings if you count one which was a list of all the characters.”

I made a mental note of the numbers. I felt they were significant.

“As I said,” he continued. “I obtained the photographs of the characters. Very strange shapes, totally unlike the characters of Oriental languages, but yet that is the closest way to describe them.”

He jerked forward in his chair, “Except, of course, ostensibly.”

“Later,” I said. I wanted to get through the preliminaries first. There would be time later to see the photographs.

***

“The characters projected by the sphere,” he said. “Weren’t like the characters of any known language.” He paused dramatically. “There was reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture. A culture more scientifically advanced than our own.”

“And the reasons for this supposition?” I asked.

“The material...the material of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as ferro-plastic. Totally unknown, amazing imperviousness. A synthetic material, hardly the product of a former culture.”

“From Mars?” I said, smiling.

“There were all kinds of conjectures, but, of course, the important thing was to see if the projection of characters was a message. The message, if any, would mean more than any conjecture.”

“You translated it?”

He polished the coin on his jacket. “You won’t dare believe it,” he said sharply.

He cleared his throat and stiffened into a more rigid posture. “It wasn’t exactly translation. You see, to us none of the characters had designation. They were just characters.”

“So it was a problem of decoding?” I asked.

“As it turned out, no. Decoding is dependent on knowledge of language characteristics—characteristics of known languages. Decoding was tried, but without success. No, what we had to find was a key to the language.”

“You mean like the Rune Stone?”

“More or less. In principle, we needed a picture of a cow, and a sign of meaning indicating one of the characters. For me, there was no possibility of finding similarities between the characters and characters of other languages—that would require tremendous linguistic knowledge and library facilities. Nor could I use a decoding approach—that would require special knowledge of techniques and access to electronic computers and other mechanical aids. No, I had to work on the assumption that the key to the sphere was implicit in the sphere.”

“You hoped to find the key to the language in the language itself?”

“Exactly. You know, of course, some languages do have an implicit key? For example hieroglyphics or picture language. The word for cow is a picture of a cow.”

He looked at the toes of his shoes. “You won’t be able to believe it. It’s impossible to believe. I use the word impossible in its logical sense.

“In most languages,” he continued, looking up from his shoes. “The sound of some words themselves indicates the meaning of the word. Onomatopoetic words like bow-wow, buzz.”

“And the key to the unknown language?” I asked. “How did you find it?”

***

I watched him push the coin against the back of his arm, then lift it to read the backward letters pressed into his skin. He looked up at me and smiled.

“I built models of the characters. Big material ones, exactly proportionate to the ones projected. Then—quite by accident—I viewed one of them through a glass globe the size of the original sphere. What do you think I saw?”

“What?” I noticed he had the boyish look again.

“A distortion of the model. But that’s not what’s important. The distortions, on study, gave specific visual entities. Like when looking at one of those trick pictures and suddenly seeing the lion in the grass. The lines outlining the lion are there all the time, only the observer has to view them as the outline of a lion. It was the same with the models of the characters, except the shapes that appeared were not of lions or other recognizable things. But they did suggest.”

He pressed the coin against his forehead, closed his eyes and appeared to be thinking deeply. “Yes, impossible to believe. No one can believe it.”

“In addition to the visual response, the distortions gave me definite feelings. Not mixtures of feelings, but one definite emotional experience.”

“How do you mean?”

“One character when viewed through the globe gave me a visual image and, at the same time, a strong feeling of light hilarity.”

“I take it then that these distortions seemed to connote meanings, rather than denote them. You might say that their meaning was conveyed through a Gestalt experience on the part of the observer.”

“Yes, each character gave a definite Gestalt. But, the Gestalt was the same for each observer. Or at least for thirty-five observers there was an eighty per cent correlation.”

I whistled softly. “And the translation?”

“Doctor, what would you say if I told you the translation was unbelievable; that it couldn’t be seriously entertained by any man? What if I said that it would take the sanity of any man who believed it?”

“I would say that it might well be incorrect.”

He took some papers from his pocket and laughed excitedly, slumping down in the chair. “This is the complete translation in idiomatic English. I’m going to let you read it, but first I want you to consider a few things.”

He hid the papers behind the back of his chair; his face became even more boyish, almost as if he were deciding on where to put the tipped over outhouse.

“Consider first, doctor, that there was a total projection of three hundred and sixty different characters. The same number as the number of degrees in a circle. Consider also that there were eighteen different orderings of the characters, or nineteen counting the alphabetical list. The square root of three hundred and sixty would lie between eighteen and nineteen.”

“Yes,” I said. I remembered there was something significant about the numbers, but I wasn’t at all sure that it was this.

“Consider also,” he continued. “That the communication was through the medium of a sphere. Moreover, keep in mind that physics accepts the path of a beam of light as its definition of a straight line. Yet, the path is a curve; if extended sufficiently it would be a circle, the section of a sphere.”

“All right,” I said. By now the patient was pounding the coin against the sole of one shoe.

“And,” he said. “Keep in mind that in some sense time can be thought of as another dimension.” He suddenly thrust the papers at me and sat back in the chair.

I picked up the translation and began reading. The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand.

“Just start anywhere,” I said. “And tell me all about it.”

“As before?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, the coin clutched tightly in one hand. “I’m Charles J. Fisher, professor of philosophy at Reiser College.”

He looked at me quickly. “Or at least I was until recently.” For a second his face was boyish. “Professor of philosophy, that is.”

I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side I read the words: THE STATEMENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS COIN IS FALSE.

The patient watched.

End

Sometimes a reader gets to the end of a story and then they feel bad because it's over. With this story, it is, as the title says, as long as you wish. All you have to do is to read it over and over again. Ad infinitum, if one so desires.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Chapters/Indigo, many of which are free.

Thank you for reading.

Keep Out. Fredric Brown.

(Wiki Commons,)

Keep Out

Frederic Brown

With no more room left on Earth, and with Mars hanging up there empty of life, somebody hit on the plan of starting a colony on the Red Planet. It meant changing the habits and physical structure of the immigrants, but that worked out fine. In fact, every possible factor was covered—except one of the flaws of human nature...

Daptine is the secret of it. Adaptine, they called it first, then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt.

They explained it all to us when we were ten years old, I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars.

“You’re home, children,” the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.

And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe.

His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet.

“Children,” he said. “You are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors.

“Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians. It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.”

Then he told us.

Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them, he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.

***

For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away.

It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable, if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others.

And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given, but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation.

It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually.

Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs, they had borne a litter of five. By placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results.

When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have killed one of its parents within minutes.

Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those conditions.

“Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us. “You children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions. From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants, when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater. Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you. In another ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air, its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you. It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the

Children of Earth but you are the first Martians.”

Of course we had known a lot of those things already.

***

The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way, I was right.

Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the

Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet.

Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day.

And tomorrow is the final day.

Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.

We have dissimulated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them.

They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins.

We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too.

If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.

This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep out!

End

Note.

From the editor’s point of view, stories of Mars colonization are a lot more credible than the colonization of Mercury or Venus, that’s for sure. Considering modern medical science, the biology isn’t so far-fetched anymore. The Moon, in our opinion, runs only a close second to Mars, that’s because Mars has an atmosphere that not only has water vapour in it, but raw materials that could be used to make rocket fuels and even air for any potential colony. 

‘Traces of oxygen’ might sound daunting, but it sure beats cracking moon-rocks with an even lower concentration of this precious resource. The Moon’s only real draw is that it is so much closer. It’s also strategic in terms of terrestrial warfare, and don’t let anyone tell you any differently. The Moon is a two or three-day trip, where Mars might be anywhere from six months to two years or more—one way. That’s the real difference. Now, in terms of scientific observation of the cosmos, the Moon probably does have its advantages—mostly in terms of the fact that it has no atmosphere to interfere with telescopic observation. It’s nice and close, but the International Space Station is even closer, and isn’t subject to quakes and other seismic phenomena.

In terms of solar flares and cosmic rays, it is true that a couple of feet of moon-dirt would make a pretty good, and relatively cheap shield for long-term habitation. The same is of course true on Mars.

Also, the second image is from Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs, (1912).

>>> 

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