Come Home From Earth

They will be condemning Doctor Dixon's experiment, by now. He'll be blamed for what happened to me. The newspapers will yelp, "Young Scientist Loses Mind As Result of Rash Experiment!"

They will be wrong. I didn't lose my mind. It would be much truer to say that my mind lost me.

Let me go back. I was Fred Ellis, thirty years old, instructor in psychology at Midwestern University. At least, that's who I thought I was!

Doctor Francis Dixon, head of our department, was a dark, keen, brilliant man who was out of place in those poky classrooms. But he and John Burke, the assistant professor, carried on much private research.

Dixon's work was usually way over my head. His ideas were brilliant, if unconventional. Burke, a blond young giant with a strong faculty of imagination, understood him better than I did. I was the plodding, patient type of scientist, I'm afraid.

But I intensely admired Dixon and listened with deep interest to his theories and suggestions. One night, talking with Burke, he came out with the most daring suggestion of all.

Burke had made the trite remark that "mind is just a function of the physical body, after all."

"How do we know it is?" Dixon demanded. "All good little modern psychologists repeat that, but how do we know? It may be that mind and body are wholly different individual entities."

Burke gaped at him. "But that's going back to old-fashioned nonsense. How could mind and body be different entities?"

"Ever go deep-sea fishing?" Dixon asked him unexpectedly.

"Fishing?" repeated Burke.

"Down off Florida you catch big sharks and sea-bass that have remoras, or sucker-fish, a foot long solidly attached to their sides. The remora is part of the shark, yet they're different entities.

"Termites have flagellates in their body who digest the wood the termites eat. Leguminous plants live in mutually profitable partnership with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the plants fixing carbon and the bacteria nitrogen."

"I'm not a sophomore," Burke said a little resentfully. "You can mention symbiosis without defining it for me."

Dixon laughed.

"All right, I'm talking about symbiosis—the ability of two entirely different species of creatures to live in closest conjunction, one inside or attached to the body of the other."

He lighted a cigarette and looked at us.

"Suppose the mind and body also are two different species of living creatures, two utterly different species, living together in symbiosis?"

Of course the idea seemed a little crazy to me at first, and so it did to Burke.

"That's a wacky theory, Dixon. You can see and handle a remora, but who ever saw or handled an individual human mind?"

"Who ever saw or handled a radar beam?" retorted Dixon. "But we know it's there. Maybe your mind falls into the same class. A living, individual creature, not of ordinary matter but of non-material photons."

I became so interested I ventured a question. "If my mind and body are two different creatures, how come I don't know it?"

"Don't you know it?" he said. "You do know it, Ellis. How many times has your reasoning mind urged you to do one thing, while the instincts of your body led you to do another? Mind and body are always at strife in all of us—it's been so in all human history."

He seemed to kindle to his own idea.

"Why is it that of all animals, only homo sapiens had what we call a conscious mind? The explanations of the biologists are pretty hazy, for they don't really know the answer. Suppose the answer is that the human body is the only one in which the individual, living mind can live in symbiosis?"

Burke was still unimpressed. "That's just the old dualistic theory of Descartes, at bottom."

"The old has a habit of becoming the very new, in science," retorted Dixon. "Doctor Alexis Carrel was a pretty modern and famous scientist. And Carrel, speculating in one of his books on the riddle of mind, suggested that a mind might be an immaterial being that somehow inserts itself from outside into the human brain and dwells there."

I was deeply interested.

"Is there any way you could prove or disprove the theory, doctor?" I asked.

Dixon shrugged. "How are you going to prove it? Forcing the living mind temporarily out of its comfortable symbiotic partnership in the body might prove it. But how can you force out a thing of immaterial photons? Nothing but electric force could do it...."

That moment, as it turned out, was the beginning of the stunning events that followed.

Until then, Dixon had been merely hypothesizing. But now his dark face changed, and he was silent in intense thought.

"I believe," he said finally, "that it might be done, by amplifying the electroshock treatment used on psychotic patients by Cerletti and Bini in nineteen thirty-nine. You remember their patients could remember nothing of elapsing time while under shock? Their minds must have been out of their bodies for a moment!

"Suppose I increased the electroshock strength to force the mind out a little longer? The subject, when he came back to normal, might then remember his sensations as a disembodied mind."

Burke slowly nodded. "Sounds possible. But you'll never find out. You've no one to test the idea on, and never will have."

I don't know why it was that I didn't hesitate a moment in speaking up. I had not the slightest doubt.

"You can use me as your subject, doctor," I said.

I believe now it was my vain desire to emulate Dixon, my consciousness of my own lack of brilliance, that made me seize a chance to distinguish myself in an epochal experiment.

"You, Ellis?" Burke looked shocked.

But Dixon didn't. A little light leaped into his eyes as he looked at me.

He liked me, I think. But that liking meant not a straw when compared to the intensity with which he pursued any research.

"You know, of course, that it would be dangerous?" he warned. "The object would be to force your mind free of your body for all of a few minutes, then let it return so you can describe your sensations.

"This body-mind partnership, if it really exists, must be about the closest symbiosis in existence. Tampering with the partnership might have disastrous results."

Dixon didn't mean to do it, I'm sure. But just such solemn discouragement as that was exactly what would add to the eagerness of a young enthusiast like myself.

That very night, I wrote out a letter volunteering myself as subject in the experiment and freely exonerating Dixon and Burke of any possible unpleasant consequences.

Two nights later, Dixon had his preparations made. I think he rushed things lest I lose my nerve. But I was more keen on the thing than ever. Even if things did go wrong, I saw my name in the books as a haloed martyr of science.

He had set up a simple generator whose output could be graduated between 70 and 100 volts. I lay down on a table, and he and Burke attached two rubber pads faced with copper to my temples, as the electrodes.

Dixon repeated his final instructions.

"At the slightest crook of your finger we'll cut the current, Ellis. If you feel any dangerous sensations, don't hesitate."

He called, then, "All right, Burke—the switches."

"I feel more like an executioner than a scientist," Burke growled.

The generator was already humming. Dixon fed the current so weakly at first that I could feel only a tingle in my nerves.

"It'll take more than that," I told him, grinning.

He jumped his rheostats a little. The tingling in my nerves and brain became much stronger.

I felt an odd, dizzy sensation. It got more pronounced as Dixon let me have the current in stronger and stronger jolts.

The whole laboratory seemed to dim around me, even Dixon's dark, watchful face blurring to my eyes.

For a moment, I felt panic. After all, there was something gruesome about trying temporarily to dissociate my mind from my body!

Dixon's voice came through the blur.

"All right, Ellis?" he asked.

Pride made me conquer my panic.

"Go ahead," I murmured.

"Go ahead," I murmured from the table, for pride had made me conquer my terror.

All consciousness of bodily sensation vanished in a whirling blur as the jolts of current came faster and faster. I had a ghastly sensation of freedom.

Can freedom be terrible? Freedom from your own body can—at least at first. That was what I was feeling.

I seemed to float in a whirling, throbbing haze. Then my strange sensations cleared a little.

I was still in the laboratory. But now I was floating several feet above the table and the limp body of Fred Ellis!

I couldn't see, or hear, or use any other ordinary bodily sense. Yet I felt my surroundings as clearly as though I saw them, by means of unguessable senses in my immaterial being.

I was still I, but somehow it was now a different "I." I felt connected to the limp form of Fred Ellis below me only by a tenuous thread.

Dazed, bewildered by the change, as I hovered there I sensed a sudden clear question from close by.

"Has your host died, comrade?"

I didn't hear that, and it wasn't in words. It was in thought or thought-force that I automatically received.

In the same way, I was conscious now of another immaterial being like myself hovering close to me. He couldn't be seen, any more than I could, but he was there. And he was completely free, not connected as I was to a lax human body.

"Has your host died?" he asked again.

Dazedly, without realizing what I said, I answered in thought.

"No, he is not dead. I am still linked to him."

"Have you been here long, comrade?" came the question. "I am Klon, and I am newly-come from Aarl."

Aarl? That name was like a trigger in my hovering mind, unloosing a strange dim flood of memory.

"I am T'Shal, and I came from Aarl ages ago," I exclaimed. "Only now do I remember! There is horror here—"

Crash!

It all ended suddenly. I was Fred Ellis, dazedly opening my eyes on the table. The thunderous crash had been merely the click of a switch.

"Ellis?" Dixon was sweating as he chafed my wrists. "Ellis, are you all right?"

I stared at him in a frozen fashion.

"You brought me back into my body?"

"And just in time, I'd say!" exclaimed Burke. "You were in a ghastly coma—I insisted we cut it short."

Dixon had seized eagerly on my words. "You mean, you were really out of your body? Your mind was free for those moments?"

"Only partly free," I mumbled. "I was still linked to it. But even so, I was just beginning to remember something—"

It was fading in my mind, even as I tried to tell about it. Frantically, I sought to grasp those vague, vanishing memories.

"Something about a place called Aarl! And I thought my name was T'Shal, and—and I can't remember, now."

"Ellis, try to remember!" Dixon urged. "Think hard, man!"

The harder I tried, the more swiftly receded those fast-fading memories. It was all gone already from my brain.

We talked it over for hours that night, after I had recovered from my shakiness.

"We've stumbled onto experimental proof of the most revolutionary theory in scientific history," Dixon said. "Proof that the mind is a wholly different species and entity from the human body, and is merely a symbiotic partner of that body.

"Good Heavens, think of all the things that it would explain! If you could only remember more, Ellis! Think again—what was it about Aarl?"

Aarl? The name vibrated in my thoughts like something faint, far away, heartbreaking.

Did you ever try to remember something and couldn't, yet the very thing you couldn't remember made you feel sad? It was that way with me.

I knew that Aarl meant something to me, something wonderful and terrifying. But I couldn't remember what it was.

"There's a possible explanation of your quick forgetfulness," said Dixon finally. "The mind-entity, once it is inhabiting the human brain, is so far overcome by the human animal's rudimentary nervous currents that it is drugged, inhibited.

"That would explain why young children, whose human brains are not yet fully developed, continually have strange, fanciful 'memories' of other things, of queer places that they call fairylands."

Burke nodded thoughtfully.

"You mean that in infancy the mind-partner of the symbiosis is not so inhibited and can still remember its own past? Maybe Wordsworth was right:

"Something like that," Dixon affirmed, pondering. "And when the mind gets almost free of the body-partner, as Ellis did, then it can remember."

I told him, "If you had used a little stronger electroshock, if I'd been free altogether, I know I could remember more."

Burke looked doubtful.

"What good would it do you, since you'd forget it all again when you came back into your body?"

Dixon quickly figured an answer.

"If the free mind is a group of photons as we believe, it could interrupt a sufficiently sensitive photoelectric beam and actuate a relay to a telegraph-sounder. Ellis could signal us that way by the Morse code. He could tell us right at the moment what he remembers, before he returns to his body and forgets."

"If you'll fix up such a device, I'll try the thing again!" I promised.

It was crazy of me to make that offer, I felt. The dim unearthliness of my experience should have been enough for me.

But I was haunted by that most maddening of feelings, by a vain desire to remember something forgotten.

Somehow, I felt that Aarl, where I had been T'Shal, was so vastly important as to overrule any danger to my life as Fred Ellis. I had a premonition of beauty and wonder and horror all waiting to burst upon me—if I could only remember them!

So the next night, when I again took my place on the table, it was with increased eagerness. Dixon had showed me the beam of photoelectric force now crossing the room just above the table.

"You said that as a mind you were aware of locations and could move, Ellis. Well, if you can move into this beam, it will actuate the telegraph-sounder and signal us.

"Send us, if you're able, an exact description of just what you feel and remember. We'll take it down—and when you return to your body, it won't matter if you immediately do forget everything again."

He turned on the electroshock current, and I felt again that sharp tingle in body and brain.

Again, my senses blurred. The laboratory swam about me, I was whirling through dimness.

The pressure of the jolting current mounted and mounted. I felt an intolerable sense of strain—then a sharp, sudden release.

I was completely free of Fred Ellis' limp body now! I, T'Shal the Aarlan, who had inhabited Ellis' body for thirty Earth years!

"Comrade, is it you again?" I recognized instantly the mental voice of Klon, who had said he was newly-come from Aarl.

From Aarl? Memory began to rush over me, memory that was heartbreakingly vivid.

I remembered Aarl! I remembered our world of supernal beauty and splendor that lay far, far across the cosmos from this drab, heavy little world Earth.

Aarl, world not of solid matter but of free electrons, floating like a glorious sphere of light in the glare of a great white sun! Aarl, wondrous globe of ever-shifting color, light and beauty!

And I was an Aarlan! I was one of the race that had evolved there as individual, intelligent photon-groups—immaterial photon-beings living immortally in our radiant, ethereal world!

"Comrade, I sense your trouble of spirit!" came the cry of Klon. "What is wrong?"

"You have just come from Aarl, you say?" I cried. "You must go back there, back to Aarl before you are trapped on this world!"

"Are you mad, comrade?" he asked wonderingly. "Why should I leave when I have come to gather new experiences on this world?"

To gather new experiences? Yes, that was the passion of all us immortal Aarlans. For ages, beating our way out through the cosmos on streams of light, we had visited other worlds. We had entered the bodies of their material creatures and had lived there with them in peaceful symbiosis, garnering many rich new experiences.

And that was why we had come to this planet Earth, long ago. How well I remembered now that I, T'Shal, had been one of that very band of Aarlans who first had visited this planet!

"This world Earth must yield fascinating experiences," Klon was saying. "For no Aarlan who came here has ever yet returned."

"You do not understand!" I cried. "When we came here first, we picked a species of ape-creature as the most suitable symbiotic partners and entered their brains in the usual way. We intended only our customary temporary stay.

"But we were disastrously entrapped! This ape-species has no true intelligence, but they have instincts of surpassing nervous intensity—instincts of greed and lust and hatred. And that bestial nervous influence warped the symbiosis we intended, distorted our own intelligence, inhibited our thinking until we forgot all about Aarl!

"Yes, we forgot Aarl, forgot our own identities and thought of ourselves only as the minds of these ape-like creatures! And each of us, when his symbiotic partner died, remained so dazed and drugged that he merely drifted on to another ape-host, another partner."

Klon's horrified thought came. "But then why is it that you are able to remember now, T'Shal?"

"Because the shock of force that released me from my ape-host dissolved the inhibiting effect and made full memory return to me!" I told him.

"What are we to do?" cried Klon. "Always, we have supposed that symbiosis with these Earth-creatures must be richly rapturous, since no Aarlan ever returned from here. Aarlans have come here in millions for that reason, and more will come!"

"No more must come!" I told him. "You and I will return at once to Aarl to warn all our race of the horrible trap of Earth. At least we will be able to prevent any more of our race from coming here."

I added, "And before we leave, I will make an effort to save all the millions of us who remain trapped here in the dazing symbiosis with the ape-creatures. If I could make them all remember their true identity, they might be able to break free of this bondage."

That is why I, T'Shal of Aarl, am utilizing the photoelectric signaling device to send back this last message before I leave Earth forever.

You who are listening to my signals, Dixon and Burke! You others who will read this account when it is published to the world as I beg them to do—all of you, heed my plea!

You are not Earthmen, as you think. Your brute bodies belong to Earth, but that within you which is the real "you" has no connection with this planet.

You are Aarlans, members of the greatest and most glorious race in the cosmos, immortal individuals trapped by chance in the bodies of brute beasts here!

Try to remember, you who read these words! Try to remember Aarl, our glorious world of ethereal radiance from which you yourself came long ago.

Break free from this sordid symbiosis and come home! Come home from Earth! Come home across the cosmos to the undying beauty and wonder and peace of your own native world!