PATTERN

                       By ROBERT H. ROHRER, JR.

                         Illustrated by ADKINS

               _Sometimes the only way to fight fire is
              with fire. One can hardly stop to consider
              what the second fire may destroy. Can one?_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                     Amazing Stories October 1962.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Rahll floated, a dim pattern of electrical impulse in the void of
space. He was vaguely aware that he was dying into nothingness,
and that in a short time he would be a meaningless mass of aimless
patterning, with no consciousness and no unity. But there was nothing
that could be done about it; his flexible impulse had woven itself into
millions upon millions of varying thought-forms, and no solution to
his situation had presented itself.

His impulse writhed into remembrance of the Great Pattern of countless
centuries before. There had been thousands of impulses similar to
himself, all banded together into one huge, unified Form, standing
in this wasteland of space; thousands of impulses, all twisting in
the shaping and reshaping of their own thoughts and emotions, but all
connected by the central Great Pattern so that they stood, impulse to
impulse, in a huge, delicately crystal-like structure of electricity.

And they had given each other life, replenishing their powers within
themselves, and existing in the contentment of peace, for millennium
upon millennium.

Until the Cataclysm. There had been some impulses who tired of the
old pattern of unification, and wished to form a new one; however,
they were opposed by other, more content impulses, who stubbornly held
to the old pattern. The rebels, as they were called, formed their
carefully planned new pattern in spite of the opposition; the result
being that the two different patterns intertwined each other, fell into
antagonizing frequencies, and blew the community apart.

       *       *       *       *       *

Only Rahll's delicate impulse had escaped this Cataclysm. He had been
badly wounded, unable to move in any direction; so for thousands of
years after the explosion he had floated in darkness, waiting for a
sign of another impulse with which to make contact and create mutual
sustenance. But no sign had come, and Rahll's shape had slowly become
warped with weakness and hunger into the jagged form of a pattern which
had never been seen in the old community.

The pattern of a cannibal. The only central thought-form which
activated him now was to Find Impulse and to Absorb Impulse; to absorb
flexible impulse into his wavering frame and twist it to his own form,
so he would live, so he could exist for a while longer, so he could
branch out and find more flexible impulse to eat and twist to his
pattern.

But the long process of disintegration was now almost at an end; he
could reshape his thought-patterns only with the greatest pain and
difficulty, and branching out was out of the question. He realized
this, and slowly prepared himself for the final pattern to come; the
pattern of death.

As his faint, blue shape of line-impulse reformed within itself,
however, he became conscious of a weak, almost nonexistent impulse
beating against the outer fringe of his pattern. He stopped his
reforming process and, summoning all the power he could, glided toward
the impulse.

When he did this, the impulse became definitely stronger; slowly his
delicate, crystalloid form became more and more conscious of it; its
power rose and rose, until it reached an almost unbearable intensity.

Waves of hunger beat against Rahll, as they had for centuries; but
here, here at last, was satisfaction. His jagged cannibal's pattern
roused itself, waiting for the new impulse to come within striking
distance. And then....

It stopped. It had been there for only a moment, and now it was gone.
Rahll desperately sent out tendrils of a length he had thought he would
never attain again in search of the huge impulse, and found....

Another. This one was smaller, although still one hundred times as
powerful as Rahll's; and, oddly, it was channelled into five separate
spokes of impulse which functioned around a large central hub-impulse.
The impulses in the five channels were exactly alike, but they were
interpreted differently by the central hub due to the different
channels through which they came. Rahll sorted and distinguished these
five interpretations, his pattern weaving into one of curiosity and
vague dismay as he did.

One channel of impulse was evidently devoted to the sensing of forms
and colors, something which Rahll found unnecessary; a second was
one which sensed vibrations in--in something, a substance Rahll was
unfamiliar with, one with more substance than the void he lived in and
yet unsolid enough to carry vibrations easily; a third existed to sense
odors in this unsolid substance; a fourth to sense some things which
Rahll did not recognize, bitter, salt, sweet, and sour; and a fifth
to sense heat and cold. All these impulses transmitted their sensings
to the central hub, which seemed to be a completely flexible mass of
unpatterned, vari-frequencied electrical impulses that was almost
overpoweringly strong.

Yes, these were food for Rahll; but two factors held him from consuming
all six branches of impulse together.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first was that he was so weak that any more than one of the
spoke-impulses absorbed at a time would have shattered his frail form.

The second was that this collective impulse operated on a frequency
altogether different from Rahll's. Try as he might, Rahll could not
emulate this frequency; it was too alien, too far removed from his own,
and he was too weak. But this impulse's frequency was flexible; if he
could make it become harmonious with his own frequency, then he could
easily absorb it, branch by branch.

It would be a relatively simple matter to make the impulse
harmonize with him, Rahll knew; all he had to do was make the
flexible-frequencied impulse accept his own impulse as something
un-alien and natural, by taking a form the impulse would not suspect;
something which blended with the impulse's environment. As soon as a
branch of the alien impulse accepted Rahll's own impulse as natural,
Rahll would move blocks into the channels of that branch and absorb it.

First he examined the branch devoted to sensing odors. Yes, it would be
child's play to cause an impulse to transmit through the odor channels
to the central hub, where it would be interpreted as an odor....

       *       *       *       *       *

Brenner sat hunched over the controls of the spaceship. Damm! How had
he gotten so far away from Base? There weren't any planets here for
millions of miles in all directions; only blackness. He couldn't make
connection with Base; he couldn't make connection with anything.

His small, three-compartmented ship sped swiftly along toward nothing.
In the tail compartment, the atomic and the electrical generators
hummed serenely; in the nose compartment, Brenner continued to curse.

Something in the mechanism of his directional equipment was fouled up.
That must be it. He decided to cut power and think for a while.

He closed off the atomic generator, stopping the rockets, and, as an
afterthought, shut off the electrical generator also. Sitting in the
darkness, he tried vainly to make out some light in the void beyond
the nose observation window. But he could see nothing. No stars, no
planets. Nothing at all. Base had been built in deep space; all light
from other suns was cut off here by time and distance.

He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Hale at Base was
probably tearing his hair out. Brenner could hear the old man now:
"That blasted Brenner! Here we are, a space station a million miles
from anywhere, and he has to lose our best craft for us! I knew that
blinkety-blank halfwit would pull some lame-brained stunt like this. I
knew it, I knew it, I...."

Brenner cut Hale off and began to think about Earth. And home. And
Barbara. And the nameless little thing who must have come months ago,
and whom he would have seen within a year if he hadn't been so Godawful
stupid as to lose himself out here.

Well, at least he had the radio. And a good supply of food. And the
knowledge that Hale would be keeping all channels clear for a call from
him.

He frowned. He should have been able to make radio contact with Base
long before this. Perhaps his trouble was in the radio....

Suddenly a strange odor touched his senses. Brenner frowned,
sniffing. He'd never smelled anything like that before. It was rather
metallic--almost like a short circuit. But not quite.

And then, gradually, the odor became that of coffee. Hot Coffee,
percolating somewhere in the ship. He had put some coffee on,
hadn't he? He frowned, and then went back to his former thoughts of
self-disparagement, accepting the odor as normal, as part of his
natural environment, "forgetting" about it.

The first block moved in.

Brenner hardly noticed that he had lost his sense of smell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rahll exulted. This was the first impulse he had ever tasted--his
jagged cannibal's pattern contracted itself in ecstacy as he twisted
the absorbed impulse into his own thought-form. He was still hungry,
yes--and that hunger was hardly on the way to being satisfied--but at
least this was a beginning. It fired him on--he must have more impulse,
more, until he could branch out and find even more....

The hunger rushed over him in waves, deep, welling up from the pit of
his thought-pattern, almost overcoming his form with its intensity.
Yes, he would have more. Taking the first impulse had been simple; as
soon as this other being had accepted the bogus odor as being normal,
his frequency had become harmonious with Rahll's, and Rahll had moved
a block into the channels through which the impulse flowed and absorbed
the impulse. Now the block remained in those odor-channels, preventing
other impulses from travelling in them.

Rahll turned his attention to the satisfaction of his hunger.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brenner sniffed. That's funny--hadn't he smelled coffee a minute ago?

Wait a minute--he couldn't have smelled coffee. There wasn't any coffee
on. But there must have been, because he'd smelled it.

He sniffed again. He couldn't smell anything now. Odd. He leaned back
in his chair and listened as the atomic and electric generators hummed
in the background....

The second block moved in.

The sound of the generators disappeared.

Brenner started. But he couldn't have heard the generators--they were
off! He rose. All was silent in the ship. He banged on the control
panel with his fist.

He heard no sound.

Panic set in.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rahll's cannibal-pattern contracted and protracted in the black void.
The faint blue lines of his form glowed a bit more strongly now than
they had before, although the great hunger still shook his frame.

His thought-forms wove in and out in visions of power, a power he had
never thought of possessing back in the time of the Great Pattern, a
power with which he could absorb everything, every--

And then Rahll's thought-form twisted into a totally unfamiliar shape.
And he thought of Hale.

He could picture Hale only vaguely; a big man--man; that was a new
term--a big man, whatever a man was, with a deep voice--voice, another
new term--and a great temper--temper....

Rahll slowed his pattern in confusion. Man, voice, temper, Hale--all of
these; he had never been aware of them before, nor of things like them.
Why was he aware of them now?

       *       *       *       *       *

And then he realized why.

This alien being's patterns, even though scattered and unmethodical,
were influencing Rahll's patterns as Rahll came into close contact with
them during the process of absorption. Just as Rahll's patterns must be
influencing this alien being's.

Rahll formed and reformed thoughts for a moment, and then decided that
this was a good thing. For now he would have new weapons with which to
trick this other electrical impulse; new and better weapons. Hale, man,
voice, temper.

At that moment, Brenner was experiencing much the same phenomenon as
Rahll was.

Brenner's panic died suddenly as he searched his thoughts and found,
with a shock, that he knew why he could not hear. He could see the
answer only dimly, but it was there; something completely alien to him,
something outside the ship, a crystal-like pattern of electricity--of
electrical impulse--was--was doing something else alien to him which
had caused him to lose his sense of sound.

He sat down and concentrated on this answer. There must be more to
it, he thought, more to it than.... Yes, there was more to it. He
received jumbled thoughts concerning frequencies alien to each other,
and then pulled out the one totally clear impression he had. Illusions
were being used to dupe him. He wasn't quite sure of exactly how they
were being used--something to do with alien frequencies cropped up
again--but he did know that the alien being outside his ship was using
illusion to slowly destroy him. But wasn't there a way out?

Yes, there was. If he didn't _accept_ the illusion, whatever it was, as
being normal, he could not be touched by this creature outside. If he
did not accept the illusion as being normal....

Brenner turned on the electric generator. The room flooded with light.

Rahll tensed when he felt the other, larger impulse that he had first
felt rise up again. The impulse was far too huge to absorb; and,
furthermore, there was something about it that almost repelled Rahll.
It was impulse, yes, but it was a different kind of impulse, of a type
Rahll had not run across before. If he had been strong enough he could
have consumed it, but he was not sure that he would have wanted to.

He steeled himself against the overpowering sense of the presence of
that impulse, and carefully searched out the other, smaller one. When
he found it, he began to think. Certainly this being's impulse had
picked up the pattern which Rahll was following; therefore this being
would be on his guard against Rahll's simulations of his environment.
Rahll had to sneak under that guard, carefully, subtly, in as
unnoticeable a way as possible.

He felt that he could absorb two channels of impulse this time. He
picked the two, and began to weave rhythmically in thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brenner sat back in his chair. He was ready for the thing, whatever it
was. It would not creep under his defenses. Nothing it could do, no
illusion it could form, would take him in. He would not allow it to.
He could not allow it to; for patterns had been invoked in his mind
that suggested what the creature would do with the power derived from
Brenner's impulse if it ever absorbed it all; patterns which pictured
the absorption of all life on other worlds, and a single great pattern
of electrical current crisscrossing in spiderweb fashion throughout
the universe; a strong, unbreakable chain of intelligence, sated with
the impulse of every fish, bird, insect, and man in existence. Brenner
suppressed a shudder. What he was up against might be too much for him
to handle....

No. He had to handle it. For Barbara's sake. For Hale's sake. For the
sake of all those men back at Base, who would be the creature's next
prey if it destroyed Brenner.

Suddenly there was a clanking noise. Brenner stiffened, for he did not
hear the sound with his useless ears; it formed within his mind. The
gruff, temper-tinged voice he heard came from within his mind, too;
"Brenner, you damned fool. I knew you'd get yourself into a fix like
this. Our best craft, too." Brenner whirled around.

The tall, heavy-set figure of Hale stood by the airlock, smiling.

Brenner frowned. The alien must be a complete fool; Brenner would never
accept a bogus Captain Hale where Captain Hale could not be.

Hale's figure strode forward, saying, with that fixed smile on its
face, "I always thought you'd wind up like this: lost in deep space,
with nothing around you. Have you looked at that radio? Sure _it_'s not
what's on the blink? Oh, that's right, you wouldn't be able to hear it
even if it was in good shape," the words flowed through Brenner's head,
"wouldn't be able to. Have a cigar, while you stand there thinking.
You're going to have to think hard to get out of this one, Brenner.
Mighty blasted hard." And a deep chuckle shook Brenner's skull as the
figure of Hale opened its mouth to laugh--and opened it, grotesquely, a
trifle too far for a genuine human mouth to go.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brenner puffed at the proffered cigar. Something was wrong here--the
alien could not be this obvious in his working. Brenner's mind steadily
refused to accept the thing that stood before him.

The figure cocked an eye at him. "If you don't get back to the
station," it said, "you'll never see Barbara again. Or the kid. You
know that, don't you? And you want to see Barbara don't you? Don't you?"

Brenner did not answer.

The figure smiled. "Well, you can see her, if you want to. Right now."
And the figure's body and face grew smaller, softened in their lines,
and the clothing it wore changed from a severe blue uniform to a light
blue dress. "Hello, Will," said Barbara's figure.

Brenner still kept silent, staring at the woman's form before him.
It was so _like_ her--and in its arms it held a small bundle, which
gurgled softly. Brenner's eyes fell to this bundle.

Barbara's figure saw the direction of his glance. "You haven't seen the
baby yet, have you, Will?" she said, moving toward him. "Look." She
held the small bundle out toward him.

But as she did, one of her hands dug into the blankets wrapped around
the tiny form, wrenched the form from those blankets, and threw it to
the floor. Barbara's face, now covered with a too-wide grin, looked up
at Brenner as her feet stamped the small figure to a red pulp. "Look,
Will," she said, and laughed, stretching her mouth wider, wider, until
her face was distorted completely out of shape, and her black hair
streamed wildly in the air.

Brenner stood paralyzed. The laughter was filling his mind,
overcrowding everything else, becoming louder, and louder, and....

It stopped. The red pulp on the floor disappeared, as did the other
gnarled figure. All was silent, as it had been before.

Gone. The creature was gone, and it had not hurt him at all. Brenner,
still rooted in shock, took a few more thoughtless puffs on the cigar
the alien had handed him.

The third and fourth blocks moved into place.

The cigar disappeared.

Brenner could no longer feel or taste.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rahll rolled in the darkness, his blue line-form glowing more strongly
than before. His cannibal-pattern flowed into the thought of all the
impulse in the universe around him; of the time when he would be able
to branch out, find the stars which were concealed here by distance
and time, and absorb the many life-impulses living around those stars,
satisfying completely the burning hunger within him.

His third plan had worked admirably. He had shocked the other being
with obtrusive actions into a state in which he did not notice
inobtrusive actions. That would work again.

He was still bothered by the other, huge impulse which throbbed against
his pattern; it seemed strangely adamant and.... But he couldn't find
the exact word for what repelled him.

He pushed the pattern aside. Enough time to worry about that after he
had absorbed the fifth branch of impulse of the alien being nearby.

Again, Rahll's thoughts turned to a method of operation. What illusion
to form now...?

       *       *       *       *       *

Brenner sat in the nose section of the ship, his head throbbing. The
alien's visions of power were now perfectly clear in his mind, but for
some reason they did not bother him any more. He had been tricked by
that thing outside; he had to fight back somehow. That and that alone
mattered now.

And a way to fight back was slowly creeping into his thoughts; some
formless fear the being had of the impulses formed by the electric
generator. Perhaps if he could trick the alien into....

Whang! A loud noise cut through his mind.

He jumped up and turned toward the back of the compartment; just in
time to see a shadow flick through and close the door there.

He ran to the back, turned the wheel in the center of the door, pulled
the door open, and staggered into the second compartment. Whang!
Something hit him across the back of his neck. He jerked and crashed to
the floor, fighting to maintain consciousness.

With a desperate lunge, he grabbed at the wall and pulled himself to
his feet. Then he looked to the back of the second compartment, just in
time to see the shadow flick through the door.

He dashed through the doorway into the third compartment. For a second
Barbara's face grinned impishly at him from the door at the end of the
room, and then disappeared. Brenner plunged to the doorway through
which she had gone and jumped into the fourth compartment.

For a moment he stood looking around the completely empty room.

Then the fifth block moved into place.

Brenner could not see.

It was then that he remembered that his ship had only three
compartments.

       *       *       *       *       *

Somehow he made his way back to the nose compartment. He was completely
cut off from the rest of his body by Rahll's five blocks; only his seat
of thought remained. And if that were taken away....

He seemed to be able to _sense_ objects about him, although he could
neither see nor feel them; but he did not stop to try to understand
this. Instead, he sat down and began to concentrate. To concentrate on
further scraps of information that had been left with him by this last
close contact with Rahll; information which pointed toward a possible
way of stopping the thing outside.

He had received before the impression of Rahll's half-fear of the
electrical impulses formed by the generator of the ship; now he was
fairly certain of the reasons for Rahll's reluctance to absorb these
impulses.

In the first place, they were too strong for Rahll's thus far
under-developed body.

In the second, they were inflexible. True, if Brenner turned a dial
he could change their amperage, but they were formed on a basis of
friction, not of chemical reaction, as Brenner's and Rahll's impulses
were. The generator's impulses were not stimulated by certain stimuli
at certain times, but flew from the generator in a continuous, hard,
stable stream, inflexible, unable to be woven about into thought
patterns, unable to be twisted by Rahll.

And this told Brenner how to stop the alien.

Sensing his way, he reached a medicine cabinet, and sensed out a bottle
of morphine; carefully he measured out the right amount, and set it on
a table beside the equipment that controlled the electrical generator.

Then Brenner began to slow the generator down. The lights dimmed,
becoming lower and lower....

He knew that Rahll was waiting outside, waiting to consume the last
weak impulse in Brenner's body; he also knew that Rahll would probably
automatically consume any electrical impulse of a frequency harmonious
with the creature's that was of the same level as Brenner's without
noticing that it came from a generator instead of Brenner, because of
the hunger that threatened to overpower Rahll and render him insensible
in the lust for food.

Brenner continued to lower the speed of the generator. He also knew
that Rahll would not be deceived if there were two separate impulses
on the same level to distinguish between. In that case, Rahll would
undoubtedly pick out Brenner's because of Brenner's alien frequency. So
Brenner had to lower his own impulse. He had to lower it to its most
basic function; that of causing the heart to beat.

He took a glass of water and swallowed the morphine.

As the haze began to blot out his thoughts, he continued to turn the
generator down, down....

       *       *       *       *       *

Rahll sensed the drop in the larger electrical impulse; he followed it
as it dropped, until it was on the same level as the other impulse was.
Wait! What other impulse?

Rahll's thought-patterns stopped in confusion. This current was the
_only_ impulse on the same level as the alien one. Rahll pondered for
a moment; if this was the only impulse on the right level, then he must
have confused the two impulses for a moment, and this was actually the
right one. Yes, that had to be it.

He examined the impulse, sensing around it--and his crystal-shaped
form jumped in surprise. The alien frequency which he had had to trick
by illusions into becoming harmonious with his own was gone from this
impulse. He would be able to absorb this impulse at his will. True,
there was something familiarly repulsive about it, but he was hungry,
and....

After only a short hesitation, Rahll's electric jaws opened, widened to
full size, and closed greedily on the impulse.

Too late he realized his mistake. His puny blocks were unable to
hold up against the continuous, non-chemically produced stream of
electricity from the generator. More and more impulse flowed into his
body, more and more _inflexible_ impulse, which he could not twist
into his cannibal's thought-pattern, torrents of perfectly stable
electricity, slowly influencing his own pattern as he had expected
to influence the impulse, influencing his into a frozen, stable,
inflexible pattern of continuous hunger-satisfaction.

His crystalloid jaws spread wide, Rahll floated in the black void
of space, motionless, unable to move, unable to twist into new
thought-patterns, and therefore unable to think. The inflexible current
of electricity poured steadily into his body....

       *       *       *       *       *

Slowly the effects of the morphine wore off, and the haze lifted from
Brenner's mind. As his power to think returned, he began to realize
that his plan had worked, and that the alien had been overcome; and he
was glad of this only because it removed him, Brenner, from danger. He
no longer cared that the creature might have absorbed the impulses of
every living being in existence; the thing was frozen, and he was safe
from it--that was all that mattered to him.

Of course he could not see, or feel, or hear the motionless crystalloid
pattern outside. But he knew it was there. He could _sense_ it.

He could _sense_ it because his heretofore unmethodical hub-impulse
pattern, in its close association with Rahll's, had been slowly
twisted and molded into a form very much like the alien's, giving him
Rahll's powers of sightless observation of other impulses and objects.
Brenner no longer had any need for his lost powers of sight, hearing,
taste, smell and touch.

He groped his way back to the nose seat, sensing his way as he could
not feel it. He would find Base--he would be able to sense the way
back to it as soon as it was close enough. He would go back to Base,
because, naturally, his _basic_ thought-form had also been molded into
the shape of Rahll's; and Brenner was hungry, and he knew he could find
food at Base.

Food. He pictured Hale, and the other men at the station.

Food. His jagged cannibal's pattern contracted in ecstacy at the
thought of it.

He activated the atomic generator and whirled the ship around.


                                THE END