A half hour later Gus sat rocking himself in the shack of one of his trusted Toms, a blaring transistor radio in his hand.
“Don’t mind the music,” Gus said. “It’s just to cover up our voices in case this little house of yours happens to be bugged or somebody happens to be covering it with a long-range listening snout.”
“What you want to talk about that has to be so secret, Mr. Swenesgard?” Little Joe asked, a short, thin Tom; a good Tom who “knew his place.”
“I want you to go up to the hills, Little Joe,” Gus said, placing a fatherly hand on the Negro’s shoulder.
“Me? Go up there with those wild men?”
“I want you to talk to whoever is in charge up there, now that the Gany worms have got Percy X. I want you to tell them I’d like to make a deal with them. Tell them I intend to join forces with them—with me, of course, in charge, but them forming maybe a sort of council to back me up. Tell ’em I think—Christ, I know—we can lick the Ganymedians. With my leadership and their weapons and troops.”
“Do I have to do it, Mr. Swenesgard?” Little Joe’s voice shook.
“Yes, you got to do it,” Gus said emphatically.
“Okay, Mr. Swenesgard. I guess I’ll go right ahead and do it next week for sure.”
“Not next week, Joe.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Today, Little Joe. Right now.”
“Well, okay, Mr. Swenesgard. If you say so.” Little Joe nodded miserably.
In the front room of Dr. Rudolph Balkani’s apartment near Oslo, Norway, Major Ringdahl paced restlessly. “You worked on some sort of electronic mind-warping device for the UN, didn’t you?” he said.
“It was a good weapon,” Balkani said. “Too good; they couldn’t use it.”
Ringdahl said, “It seems that shortly before we captured Percy X his followers got their hands on this hell-weapon; it had been buried in Tennessee, near the Smoky Mountains. The Gany Great Common is worried about it. What, specifically, does this weapon accomplish?”
“The result of its operation is peculiar. Each person continues to perceive reality, but it comes to him as a hallucination, a private vision which can’t be related to the shared vocabulary of images. From this arises a swiftly-developing encapsulation. The person affected is not, strictly speaking, isolated; he experiences the ‘real world’, but he cannot make head nor tail of it. The delightful aspect of this mechanism is that it attacks only the percept-portion of the neurological structure; cognition, the functioning of the frontal lobe, continues unimpaired. The victim can still think clearly; it is just that now the data received by the undamaged higher brain-centers cannot be fathomed or made into—” Balkani rambled on and on; history, however, does not record the rest of his tirade.
Winded at last, Balkani paused to take a pill from the square, silver pill-box which he carried in his vest pocket.
“You say,” Ringdahl said, “that the operator of this weapon is as much impaired as—”
“The basic quality of a weapon,” Balkani said, “is not that it destroys but that it acts to defend its owner. With this item the operator becomes as disoriented as the target-individual. It functions through the centerpoint at which all minds in a given Synchronicity field are connected; therefore it would very likely take out every thinking being on this plane, and probably all those on Ganymede as well, since they have telepathic representatives here.”
Ringdahl said, “The Neegs might not mind the suicidal aspects of this hell-weapon.”
Smiling, Balkani selected another pill—at random—from his chaste and ornate pill box.
Snow yet remaining.
The mountain slopes in haze. Evening.
Such stillness. The cries of crickets sank into the rocks. On a withered branch a crow alighted, peered down into the long grass and weeds. The breeze ruffled his feathers but still he sat, silent and watching, as the light of day slowly faded.
In the grass something flowed, seemingly black in the dimness. It flowed slowly, draining into the dust. It was blood.
A dead man lay there, half-hidden in the weeds, waiting to be found the following morning. A thin short dead Negro man face down, spread-eagled in the weeds, naked. Little Joe.
On his back, carved with laser beams, carved in cooked flesh and drying blood, a message to Gus:
WE DON’T NEED YOU, WHITE MAN
XI
“NEEG-PARTS proceeding through pine forest, grid line 27-39,” said the tracking turret mechanically. “About seven of them. Confirm, seven.”
Gus, riding in the lead ionocraft of a wing of ten autonomic ionocraft scout-bombers said into his microphone, “Keep low, out of direct line-of-sight of the target area.”
The other crafts responded with curt affirmations.
They must be getting careless now that Percy X isn’t around to babysit them, Gus reflected. Coming out in broad daylight. Now that was really dumb. “Surround them.” Gus said into the microphone. “I want to spread out and when you’re in position let me know. But make sure to stay at treetop level. And keep plenty of cover between you and them.” After all, he reflected, they have those weapons.
The ten scout-bombers split up, each swinging off in a different direction. Gus brought his own craft to a hover on the opposite side of the ridge from the detected Neeg-parts. With surprise on my side, Gus said to himself, I’ll have an easy kill. Pay back those bastards for what they did to Little Joe.
The whoosh of the supporting downdraft through the ionocraft grids sounded so faintly that Gus could make out the calls of birds in the forest around and just below him. He hoped the Neegs didn’t have the modern detection instruments needed to hear that faint whoosh, to separate it from the common wind noises of the mountain afternoon. It did not seem likely that they did.
The craft being on full automatic, Gus had nothing to do but lean back and sun himself, meanwhile smoking and daydreaming. One way or another, he said to himself, Gus Swenesgard is going to the top. And I mean the top. To succeed in wiping out the Neeg-parts where the Ganys themselves had failed…that alone was enough to make him the most likely choice for top position in the bale—or maybe even something higher than that. Why not head wik of the whole North American continent?
He began, in his mind, to compose the expostulation which he would make to Mekkis once the Neegs had finally been pacified. I’m a man of the people, Gus said to his imaginary Gany audience. The common man will see himself in me, identify with my aims. It’ll make people more peaceable, seeing a poor slob like themselves on the top of the heap.
That wasn’t quite right. But something like it—and Gus had plenty of time. The Neeg-parts were still alive and kicking; this, of course, was only temporary. However, one had to consider it.
At that moment the signals which he had anticipated began to float in from the other ships; when he received notice that they had all reached their positions he said into his mike, “Okay; hit ’em hard!” He then signaled his own craft to rise up above the brow of the ridge, so that he could watch; he had no intention of risking his own neck by joining in the attack. As he cleared the crest he saw the other scout-bombers sweep in from all directions to converge on a spot a mile away. Expectantly, Gus waited for the bomb burst.
But no bomb bursts came.
“What’s wrong?” Gus demanded into his mike.
The squeaky voice of a creech responded, “They’re gone!”
“What do you mean?” Gus said, glancing hurriedly at his detection gear. “I’m still picking them up from here!” But now a strange and fuzzy sensation filtered over his mind; when it had passed he looked again at the detection gear—and sure enough: no trace remained of the Neeg-parts. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, a note of panic in his voice.
As he stared fixedly in the direction of the converging, now aimlessly milling ionocrafts, he saw something else. Something far worse. An eye. A huge unwinking eye in the side of the mountain. Watching him. And then the mountain be
gan to move, like a living thing. It raised a vast arm, an octopus pseudopodium, and smashed two of the ionocraft bombers with a single whip-like motion.
As he turned his own ionocraft and fled back over the brow of the hill he had, for an instant, the distinct impression that someone was sitting in the empty seat next to him. Percy X. Laughing.
“I’m sick,” the Oracle said.
“I ask you for a forecast,” Mekkis said contemptuously, “and all you can say is, ‘I’m sick.’”
“I don’t want to look in the future,” said the creech. “Looking at the future is what makes me sick.”
Mekkis did not feel to well himself. Perhaps, he thought, I’ve been reading too much. Yet I can’t stop now; somewhere in these fantastic theories of Balkani’s is the answer. The more I read the more I become convinced of it.
The concept of selective awareness, for example. That could explain so much of what seems paradoxical about these reports we’ve been getting about illusions that seem real. The mind selects, out of a mass of sense data, those ones of all the possible items to pay attention to, to react to, to treat as “real.” But who knows what the mind may be rejecting, what lies unseen out there in the world? Perhaps these illusions are not illusions at all, but real things that ordinarily are filtered out of the stream of incoming sense data by our intellectual demand for a logical and consistent world. Why were they unable, previously, to hurt us? Because, quite literally, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Being unknown to us—
Doctor Balkani!
Mekkis stared in amazement at the figure of the bearded, intense-looking man sitting in the chair across from him, smoking a pipe. As the Gany Administrator watched, the figure faded and was gone.
Shaking his entire body in a tic-like whipping motion, Mekkis said to himself, I must go on. Time is growing short.
“Snap out of it, man,” Percy commanded one of his troops who seemed to have given in, for the moment, to hysteria.
“But I tell you I’m still invisible!” shouted the man.
“I turned off the projector an hour ago,” Percy said, leaning against a tree with studied casualness. “You can’t be still invisible. I can see you as plain as day.”
“But I can’t see me!” shouted the distraught Neeg-part. “I hold up my hand in front of my face and, man, there ain’t nothing there!”
“Hey, Lincoln,” Percy said, turning to his second-in-command. “You see that man standing there, don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” Lincoln said, squinting through his scratched and broken horn-rimmed glasses.
“Anybody here who can’t see this man?” Percy demanded, turning to the rest of his troops which sat and stood in a loose semicircle around him.
“We all see him okay,” they murmured.
The Neeg-part leader turned again to the “invisible” man. “Now pick up your projector and let’s march.”
“No, man. I ain’t never going to touch one of those things again. Not to save my life.”
“Are you defying my orders?” Percy picked up his laser rifle.
“Easy does it, Percy,” Lincoln said, gently pushing the rifle to one side. “I’ll carry his projector.”
Percy hesitated, then shrugged and let Lincoln have his way.
At nightfall they reached one of their forward dug-outs and there counted noses. The man who had imagined himself to be invisible was no longer with them.
“He really did disappear,” one of the men said.
“No, he didn’t,” Lincoln said. “He just left the party and headed for Gus Swenesgard’s plantation.”
“What?” Percy shouted. “And you just stood there and let him go? If you knew he was a deserter, why didn’t you shoot him?”
“You can’t shoot everybody, Percy,” Lincoln said grimly. “And since you’ve started using those illusion projectors quite a few men have gone over the hill…and if you don’t stop, a lot more will follow.”
“I can’t stop,” Percy said. “With these weapons I can finally really make a dent in those stinking wiks; I can really hurt them. Without these weapons it would only be a matter of time before we’d be finished.”
“Then.” Lincoln said stoically, “you’d better use them full force and use them now. While you still have a man or two left.”
The defectors drifted into Gus Swenesgard’s plantation by ones and twos at first, then in larger groups. Gus, suspecting some trick, had the first ones shot, but then, when he began to understand what was going on, started routing them into a hastily-constructed prison compound and set about personally interrogating them in the lobby of his hotel.
One fact became clear almost from the outset. Every one of the defectors was at least somewhat mentally disturbed—some seeming to be full-blown hallucinating paranoid schizophrenics.
Their most frequent delusion was that Percy X had not been captured but still led them, up in the mountains, or that he had escaped by some miracle and returned to them. Just to make sure, Gus phoned Oslo and talked directly to Dr. Balkani; the psychiatrist assured him that both Percy X and Joan Hiashi remained safely under lock and key.
“Just wishful thinking,” Gus muttered as he hung up the phone.
The other delusions were remarkable for their variety and lack of consistent pattern. If one could speak of a “typical” case one might take Jeff Berner, a one-time captain in Percy’s rag-tag army, as representative.
Gus did not need to be a mind reader to tell instantly, when Jeff was brought into the lobby for questioning, that here stood a very, very scared Neeg.
“You Jeff Berner?” Gus asked, lighting a cigar and settling back comfortably in an overstuffed chair. Jeff, of course, remained standing.
“That’s right.” The unhappy black man nodded.
“That’s right, sir,” Gus corrected sternly. You don’t get nowhere with these Ubangis, he said to himself, unless you get them to show you the proper respect.
“Sir,” Jeff said lamely.
“Now tell me; what made you leave the Neeg-parts?”
The ex-Neeg-part shifted nervously from one foot to the other and answered, “Them thought projectors. They did things to my mind.”
“What kind of things?” Gus made his voice kind and sympathetic; the best results came from treating Neegs as the simple children they were. Let them look on me, Gus said to himself, as a sort of father.
“Well, any kind. You turn on the machine, imagine something, and what you imagine, well, it seems to sort of come true. Only—sometimes, when you turn off the machine, the illusion doesn’t go away. You go on seeing it…maybe for days.”
“And in your case what did you imagine?” This was the part of the interviews which Gus had come to enjoy the most. Each story seemed more grotesque than the last.
“Well, sir,” began the Neeg uncertainly, “it began when me and two other troops made a little raid for supplies and food, on a home on the outskirts of your plantation. We were having a hard time, see, because they, the farmer and his wife and two sons, they were keeping us off with lasers, and we thought that your troops would be on us in a few minutes with ionocrafts, so I figured I’d rustle up some reinforcements with the illusion machine, just a few extra men to throw a scare into the farmer. Well, the gadget zapped up twenty-four men and they all fought like veterans, then helped us to carry the supplies we captured up into the mountains. That was fine, I guess, except I don’t see how an illusion can lift a boxful of real canned food. The catch was that when I turned off the gadget the twenty-four men didn’t go away. They stayed with me in the hills and ate like horses, sir, like horses. But I didn’t mind. I kind of got to liking one of the guys. He was a real pal; we used to spend hours talking, and he seemed to know all kinds of things. Never met such a smart fella in all my born days. Mike Monk was his name, and he had been borned and raised in New York. Said he joined Percy X because he had a hard time getting a job; which was sort of a joke, but has some truth in it. Lots of men joined Percy because nobod
y else wanted them.
“Once he saved my life. Shot down a homotropic dart that acted like it had my name on it. After that I stopped thinking he was just an illusion. I just took it for granted that he was real. Well, one night we were in a dugout talking when I suddenly realized that the other twenty-three men were gone. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what’s happening, man?’ and he said, ‘Nothin’, Jeff baby;’ only I happened to notice that Mike didn’t have any feet. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what happened to your feet?’ and he said, ‘My feet are okay, man;’ only then I sort of realized that I could see through his legs. ‘Hey, man,’ I said, ‘you know something? I can see through your legs,’ and he said, ‘How you talk, man,’ and I said, ‘Hey, where did you really come from?’ and he said, ‘Like I told you; I’m just a simple New York cat’; only I could see his legs were gone and I could see through all the rest of him, so I said, ‘Hey, man, where you going to?’ and he said, ‘I ain’t going nowhere. I’m going to stick with you.’ His voice was getting kind of faint and far-away, so I yelled, ‘Hey, where are you?’ and I heard him say, so faint I could hardly hear it, ‘Right where I always was and always will be, standing by your ever-loving side,’ and poof, he was gone. I never seen him since.”
“And then,” Gus said, “you defected?”
“No,” Jeff said. “That came later, after I used the illusion machine again.”
“What did you use it for the second time?” Gus asked, fascinated.
“Why, what would you do with a thing like that if you was in my shoes, Mr. Swenesgard, sir? I made me a pretty little girl friend with it!”
“Then after the girl friend started to fade out—”
“No, sir. Before the girl friend started to fade out. I tell you, sir, that little girl was the meanest, most complainin’ woman I ever did see! I’m no coward but, sir, that little girl went and chased me right out of the Neeg-parts.”
In a cave high in the mountains a figure lying in a sleeping bag stirred, sat up. “Lincoln,” Percy grated harshly, reaching out a hand to shake his sleeping comrade.