“Anything you say, Doctor.”
If only she would react to him emotionally in some way. But she never seemed even to hate him, let alone show any affection. He said, for a trial start, “Why don’t you call me Rudolph?”
“Anything you say, Rudolph.”
“That’s better.” But it was not better; as with every previous response it had an empty, listless quality to it. “Perhaps a little dip in the sensory-withdrawal tank would be nice today,” he decided. “What do you think about that?”
“Anything you say, Rudolph.” She began dutifully to undress; Balkani watched, his palms sweating. In a moment she stood nude before him, waiting for his next command.
He picked up the diving coveralls from their hook on the wall and walked hesitantly up to her. “Can I help you?” he said hoarsely.
“Anything you say, Rudolph.”
With trembling fingers he helped her into the garment, then, just before he zipped her up the back he kissed the nape of her neck, quickly and furtively. Then he led her by the hand to the tank chamber.
As the two robots lowered her into the water he looked again at the strangely mechanical patterns made by her encephalic waves on the polygraph. So unusual; unique, in fact. Unlike anything he had ever come across before. And he did not like it, not at all.
But there seemed to be nothing he could do about it; for reasons which he did not comprehend, the situation had gotten out of hand.
Paul Rivers guided the ionocraft so low that the ancient and obsolete telephone wires still used in the bale of Tennessee shot past above him. There’s no alarm out for us, he reflected. But still, as we near the mountains, it’s best that we don’t attract any undue attention from wik radar stations.
The lights on the vehicle had been turned off, except for the infrared headlights; Paul wore conversion goggles so that he could get a look at the countryside for some distance ahead—without being seen. A low overcast hung everywhere. It depressed him.
Because of the low altitude he had slowed to less than a hundred miles an hour, feeling little danger of pursuit; it therefore came as a very disagreeable surprise when the radio, which had been tuned to the local police band, suddenly sprang to life long enough to announce curtly, “Unidentified ionocraft in sector C, heading south without lights. This is police central. Repeat: unidentified ionocraft in sector C; move to intercept. May be someone trying to join the Neeg-parts.”
“Get out the laser rifles,” Paul said quietly. Percy X and Ed Newkom moved quickly to obey. Joan continued to stare out into the darkness, seemingly indifferent to the danger.
He lifted the craft to a slightly higher altitude and increased the speed to a hundred-and-fifty, then two hundred miles an hour. Yet he had it still only a little above treetop level; it seemed wiser to him to hug the earth as long as he knew that the police did not have a positive fix on him. Glancing at his own radar he saw that two fast crafts hung behind and above him, catching up fast. They’ll probably try to take us alive to begin with, he decided. “Two police vehicles approaching from the rear,” he informed Percy X.
“I can see their running lights,” the Neeg-part leader said, lifting his laser rifle to his shoulder as he stood beside the open hatch, coils of wind flapping his clothes.
“Think you can nail both of them before they have a chance to launch anything at us?” Paul asked.
“Sure,” Percy X said, and fired two short bursts. Behind them one of the police crafts exploded; the other zigzagged a moment, then plunged earthward like a streamlined brick and buried itself in a hillside.
Paul changed course, changed course again, then increased speed to a dangerous three hundred miles per hour. Trees now whipped past too fast to dodge if he should come upon a really tall one.
Now the radio blurted out, “Unidentified ionocraft definitely enemy; just shot down two of our patrol crafts. All crafts converge on sector G. Shoot to kill.”
There’s one nice aspect to consider, Paul said to himself. At least it can’t get any worse.
But he was wrong.
At that instant, out of the darkness ahead appeared a high-tension power line. At the speed which he was traveling Paul did not have a chance to react to, let alone dodge, the oncoming obstacle; he could only hang on as the ionocraft struck the wires with an impact that smashed his head forward against the wheel, almost knocking him unconscious. But, though his mentation had become dazed and confused, the habit-patterns imprinted in his subconscious by years of flying high-velocity ionocrafts under all sorts of conditions remained functioning; he fought frantically to regain control as the vehicle spun wildly and lost altitude. Another crash shuddered through him as the ship struck the top of a sandy hill and bounced once again into the air.
Now, miraculously, Paul managed to get the ship under control and, still swerving erratically, to regain a little altitude. He glanced briefly at Joan, Ed and Percy X. All seemed stunned, perhaps unconscious. The ion grids of the ship had suffered severe damage and threatened to break off at any moment; the ship appeared to be losing power. He realized with reluctance that he would be able to keep it in the air only a few minutes more. I guess, he thought bitterly, we’ll have to get out and walk.
Just then the radio spewed forth another message. “Unidentified ionocraft surrounded! Close in, all patrol craft, and shoot on sight!”
“It has become time,” said the Timekeeper, “to key into the Common Mind broadcast from the home world, sir.” The nervous little creech gestured toward the surge-gate amplifier in the corner of the Administrator’s office.
“Eh?” muttered Mekkis in response.
“Sir, this is the third time this month that you have failed to join the fusion. How will you know what is happening back home?”
“I have more important matters to attend to. Anyhow I know what is occurring back home. My enemies are enjoying themselves at my expense. Why should I plug in just to empathize with their gloating?”
The Oracle chimed in gloomily. “It is not from the home world that the darkness approaches.”
The Timekeeper slunk off in silence and Mekkis returned to his “more important matters.” This consisted of a reading of the entire published works of the brilliant but verbose Terran psychiatrist, Doctor Rudolph Balkani; Mekkis had secured microfilm copies of all the books available through the channels of the Bureau of Cultural Control and had devoted virtually his complete attention to them. Never before had he encountered a thinker that so obsessed him. The very first sentence of the initial book had passed through him like a shot.
“The number of men on this planet is great but finite. The number of potential men within me is infinite. I am, therefore, greater than the entire human race.”
This thought would never have occurred to a being accustomed to the telepathic melting together of the Great Common, and yet there was something about it, a certain incredible yet plausible egotism, a fantastic daring that seemed to speak to a deep, hitherto untouched part of Mekkis’ spiritual mind. It seemed somehow to explain the painful state of affairs existing between himself and the other members of the Ganymedian ruling class. They all, every last one, he thought, are against me; yet I know I am right—that in fact I’ve been right all along. How can such a condition occur unless Balkani is correct; unless one being really can be greater than the entire race from which it comes?
Balkani’s method struck him as outrageous. Instead of performing systematic experiments, cautiously moving the boundary of knowledge forward inch by inch, Balkani simply looked within his own unique mind and described what he saw, brushing aside whole schools of psychiatry with a single snide remark, making not even a feeble attempt at politeness, let alone scientific fairness. Yet his theories produced results. Balkani, the master, lurched drunkenly into the unknown, carelessly tossing off dogmatic statements as if they were proven facts simply because they seemed to him, intuitively, to be true. Then others could follow behind him, picking up his ideas and testing them scient
ifically, and produce miracles.
A method of training latent telepathic ability that really worked.
A type of psychotherapy that seemed to be a brutal, all-out attack on the patient’s ego, yet which cured in weeks supposedly impossible-to-cure mental illnesses such as drug addiction and far-advanced schizophrenia.
An electromagnetic theory of mind function that opened the way for partial or complete control of the mind by electromagnetic fields.
A way of measuring the presence of Synchronicity generated by schizophrenics—an acausal force which, by altering consistently the patterns of probability, made the objective world appear to collaborate with the psychotic in the creation of the half-real world in which his worst fears would, against impossible odds, come true.
Was it these results that impressed Mekkis, or was it the example of Balkani the man? The latter. Mekkis had begun to see himself in the Terran psychiatrist, feeling at one with this man who had set himself up in opposition to his entire race.
It would be interesting, Mekkis mused, if I turned into a Ganymedian Doctor Balkani.
Glancing up for a moment he discovered that one of his wik secretaries had been trying, for almost a minute now, to attract his attention. “Gus Swenesgard is here, Mr. Administrator,” the secretary declared.
“I haven’t time to see him. What does he want? Did he say?”
“He wishes more fighting units in his Neeg hunt in the mountains. He claims he can clean out the whole lot of them if he just has a little Gany first line hardware.”
He did not want to think about the Neegs; he was struggling to understand a particularly fine point in the illogical logic of Dr. Balkani’s “Centerpoint, Action at a Distance and ESP.” Aloud he said, “Give him what he wants. Keep an eye on him though. And don’t bother me about it.”
“But—”
“That’s is all.” Mekkis flicked the switch with his tongue, the switch that turned the microfilm viewer to the next frame.
With a shrug the wik departed. Mekkis instantly forgot the exchange as he buried himself once again in the twilight world of “Centerpoint Paraphysics.”
When Gus Swenesgard heard the Administrator’s decision, as relayed to him by the wik secretary, he said rapidly, “Mekkis says I get anything I want?”
“That’s correct,” the secretary said.
“First off,” Gus said with an expansive smile, “I’d like all the Gany fighting units in the bale transferred to my command. Then—” He pondered a moment, dreamily. “—I’d like to do a little reorganization in the governmental structure.”
“Who do you think you are?” the wik secretary said dryly.
Gus chuckled, slapping the somewhat annoyed secretary on the back. “I’m the Kingfish around here now, sir. That’s who I am.” He then left the Gany HQ building. Whistling contentedly; he knew exactly what he had—for reasons unknown to him—achieved.
There, up ahead, Paul Rivers made out a highway, and on the highway a huge trailer-truck zoomed through the night. He hauled back gently on the controls of the ionocraft and thought, Why not? The craft responded sluggishly…but he found himself swinging down behind the truck, approaching it, as he intended, from the rear.
Now, he said to himself, and cut the grids. On the last dying power he sailed in through the open upper half of the trailer and settled on its cargo with a crash. The driver spun around, startled, and gazed back through his cab window as Paul took aim with a very mean-looking laser rifle. “Keep driving,” Paul said, over the roar of the truck engine.
“You’re the boss, man,” the driver said with a sheepish grin; he turned his eyes back on the road. He must think, Paul realized, that we’re hi-jackers; the first chance he gets he’ll try to signal the law. And the law, of course, would be here in a second.
The driver, however, appeared to be a Negro. “Percy,” Paul Rivers said urgently. “Pull yourself together and tell the driver who we are. Quick!”
Beside him Percy blinked, then read Paul’s mind and the driver’s with two swift probes, then yelled at the driver, “Hey, dad, you know who I am?”
The driver, studying his rearview mirror, said, “Yeah, I know who you are; I do believe you’re Percy X. I would have joined you in the hills except I got a wife and kids to think about; I gotta stick around and keep them from killing each other.” He laughed. Mockingly.
“You going anywhere near Gus Swenesgard’s plantation?” Paul asked. We’re headed, he thought hopefully, in the right direction.
“Goin’ through the northern end,” the driver answered.
“Fine,” Percy X said, with palpable relief. “From there I’ll be able to get back to my men on my own.” To Paul he said, “Are you coming with me?”
Paul glanced at Joan Hiashi and said, “No. Ed and I will be parting company with you there.”
“You want to take Joan with you?”
“She’ll be safer with me.”
“Nobody is safe nowhere these days,” Percy X said bitingly.
“Do you want her to stay the way Balkani has made her?”
After a pause Percy X said, “You’ll keep me posted on how she’s doing? With that amplifier of yours?”
Just then an ionocraft whooshed overhead, then another and another. “Where’d they go?” demanded a voice on the police radio. “They’ve vanished!”
Another radio voice crackled out with resignation. “The Neegs have those new weapons. I heard about it on TV; they can make themselves invisible.”
Paul Rivers could not resist smiling faintly when he heard one of the police mutter under his breath, “Never can find a Neeg when you really want one.”
X
IT HAD BEEN a long climb up to the mountain cave where the most enigmatic of the weapons captured by the Neeg-parts from Gus Swenesgard’s excavation had been hidden. Everyone felt acutely tired.
Percy X, seated in the shade, examined a manual which had come with a rather ordinary-looking device, something which resembled a high-frequency oscillator. “Look at this,” he said to a group of his men who lounged near him, staring absently into space.
The ’parts passed the manual back and forth, examining it; then one of them said, “Doctor Balkani.”
Lincoln strolled up and dropped languidly to sprawl beside Percy X; he took the manual and leafed through it. “I didn’t want to use this baby,” he said. “There seems to be a good reason why it wasn’t used during the war.”
“Those white worm-kissers might have thought it was a good reason,” Percy said broodingly; he wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm.
“Maybe, maybe,” Lincoln said, taking off his battered horn-rimmed glasses and gesturing nervously with them. “I might agree with you about the other gadgets we got in this haul. They’ve turned out to be useful—but a little scary.”
“Scary?” Percy said with annoyance.
“Well, you know these constructs are supposed to produce illusions.” Lincoln frowned. “But there’s something wrong. Did you ever see an illusion that left footprints? That could kill a man?”
“No,” Percy said. “And I never will.”
“That’s what you think. I tell you, man, there’s something about these weapons that just isn’t right; you use one, just once, and you are never quite the same again. You begin to wonder what’s real and what isn’t, or if anything is real.”
“But you’ve been using them anyway, right?” Percy said.
“All but this baby; this is something else. The manual says it never got tested, that it couldn’t be tested. Nobody, not even the guy who built it, knows exactly what it’ll do, but from the looks of what the other constructs do—”
“If I have to use it,” Percy said grimly, “I’ll use it. There’s no such thing as a weapon that’s too powerful.” Even, he thought, if it’s one of Balkani’s inventions.
It took a while for good-natured, doddering old Doc Burns to locate, by X-ray, the instant kill device which the Gany technician
s had inserted under the skin of Gus Swenesgard’s arm. But once it had been found, it was quite easily removed.
“That sure is a load off my mind,” Gus said, lighting a cheap grocery-store cigar and inspecting the organic bandage on his arm with interest. “You’re sure there isn’t another one of those little fellers on me somewhere?”
“Not a chance,” Doc Burns declared as he placed his operating tools in the sterilizer and turned on the heat.
Gus took a long drag on his cigar, trying, without consciously being aware of it, to drown out the hospital smell, the smell of disinfectant that permeated the atmosphere of Doc Burns’ operating room. “You know, Doc,” Gus said thoughtfully, “you may not know it but you are looking at a rising star in the political firmament.”
“Hmm,” Doc Burns said.
“That’s right, sir.” Having the instant kill remote control device removed had given him a powerful expansive feeling. “Take it from me; that worm administrator has got himself all wrapped up in book reading, and he don’t pay no attention to what’s going on in this bale. You know who is really running things around here?”
“Who?” Doc Burns said, humoring Gus.
“Me,” Gus said with satisfaction. “That’s who. And I got big plans. What would you say if I told you I wasn’t going to root out those Neegs? What if I told you I was going to make a deal with ’em?”
“I’d say you were out of your ever-loving blue-eyed pea-pickin’ mind,” Doc Burns said laconically.
“Listen, Doc. Those Neegs got hold of some gadgets they stole from me, real strange doodads left over from the war, and they been doing something with them, but those Neegs are too ignorant to know it but with hardware like that they just might be able to really give those Gany worms something to think about. Maybe they just might be able to take Earth back from them. And, Doc, the man who controls those weapons will be the man who controls this planet.”
“You just mind your own business, Gus. Don’t get too big for your breeches.”
“Don’t get nowhere without taking risks,” Gus said, slapping him on the back.