'Can't be done,' said Pepper. 'Let's turn to more constructive lines of thought. What did you say Fersen did?'
'Psychology, like us. He experiments. Last thing he did was a study of engramatic impulses.'
'Do tell. What are they?'
'It's really the old 'group unconscious' idea in false face. Engrams are memories of previous lives stamped into the chromosomes. They carry compulsive force sometimes. If you hear a low-pitched, growling musical note, your tendency is to shudder and draw away. If you're drunk you'll try to run like hell, because that note, if rightly delivered, means feline carnivores in misty Tertiary jungle.'
'I see,' mumbled Pepper. 'When did Fersen publish this, and from where?'
'Oslo, eight years ago,' said Marty.
'And what I've done then and up to now would sorely tax your limited understanding,' said a full-throated whine.
Pepper slowly swiveled his chair around. The face that he saw was thin and keen, the hair an ashy blonde. But more to the point than hair and face was the blued steel tube that was in the speaker's hands.
'If I read your gaze aright,' said the aristocrat, 'you're wondering about this thing. Wonder no more, for it is a new development on the old-style chiller. It will congeal the blood of a turtle. What's more it is absolutely noiseless. I could kill you two where you sit and walk out and away to my very comfortable flat in Residential. My name is Fersen and I got here by bribing your janitor. Does that answer all your questions?'
'Doesn't even begin to,' grunted Pepper sourly. 'What now?'
'Now you are coming with me.' He herded them from the room at the point of his weapon. As they came out into the open he hid it under his cloak.
'Stroll casually,' said Fersen. 'Be gay and lightsome. You're going to Residential to watch the beautiful women walk down the beautiful streets. Sorry I bungled that attempt last night, Pepper. It must have been irritating to both of us. You weren't going to be killed at all.'
Nervously, Fersen went on talking. 'You'll be interested to know that I was summoned to this continent by a grand conclave of Optimus. They propose to settle the unhappy question of the coming election once and for all time.'
'By committing mass suicide?' suggested Marty.
Fersen was pleased to laugh briefly, like the snapping of a lock in a death-cell's door. 'By no means,' he chuckled. 'By that gentlest of all arts, psychology. Whereat, enter Fersen. Get in, please.' He gestured at the open door of a car that had pulled up beside them, silent and grim.
'Cest bon, children,' smiled Fersen. 'Romp if you wish.' The two Lowers were staring in awe at the incredible battery of instruments racked on the walls, piled on the floors, hanging from the ceiling everywhere.
'For a lab, not bad,' finally admitted Pepper. 'All psychological?' He stared hard at some electronic equipment—ikonoscopes, tubes and coils—that was sparking quietly away in a corner.
'All,' said Fersen proudly. 'Now be seated, please.'
The two were shoved into chairs by bruisers, then buckled in securely with plastic straps. The bruisers saluted Fersen and left.
'Now,' said the psychologist, carefully locking the door, 'you poor scum think you know things about the human brain?' He paced to their chairs and stared contemptuously into their faces.
'You think,' he spat, 'that the incredible, contorted caverns of the mind can be unraveled by base-born apes of your caliber? Forget it. I'm going to show you things about behavior you won't believe even after you see them. I'm going to make you say that you love the Optimus Party and that you'll fight to the death anybody who doesn't.
'I'm going to leave you in such a state of cringing, gibbering bestality that you're going to betray your friends and cut your children's throats and know that you're doing a noble thing.'
'Hypnotism won't work that far,' said Pepper matter-of-factly.
'I don't use hypnotism,' grunted Fersen. 'I'm turning to the classics.
What good would an isolated case or so be? We've got to have a mass movement, a movement that will spread like wildfire. Look at that!' He held up a book.
'Odes of Anacreon,' read Pepper from the title-page. 'So what?'
Fersen grinned slowly. 'I know,' he said irrelevantly, 'an arrangement of lines that would make you beat your brains out in despair. I know a sound that will make you so angry that you'll tear your own flesh if there's nobody else around. I know a certain juxtaposition of colored masses that would turn you into a satyr—drive you mad with insatiable lust.'
'I see,' said Marty slowly. 'I see that you weren't quite finished with the engram in Oslo.'
'I had barely begun. I am now able—once I've sized up the psyche of the subject—to deliver complex commands in a compulsion-language that cannot possibly be disobeyed.'
'Go on,' snapped Pepper, catching Fersen's eye. He had seen something at the edge of his vision that made his heart pound. He relaxed deliberately. 'Go on!'
'This book,' said Fersen, smiling again, 'will be released to the general public very shortly—as soon as I've completed copy for a definitive edition. Picture this scene:
'A bookseller receives a shipment of the Odes. 'How now!' says bookseller. He is amazed. He is distressed. He did not order the Odes.
He does not want to pay for them; they look like a slow-moving item. He picks up a copy from the crate so as to get a better idea of what they are.
'What's this?' demands bookseller excitedly. For it seems to be a foreign tongue which he does not understand. Printed plainly on every page in large type is a brief message. Always the same, always legible.
'Bookseller than scans one page, very briefly. Some strange compulsion holds him; he reads further and the mysterious language is as plain as day. The message says: 'You are loyal to the Optimus Party. You will always be loyal to the Optimus Party. You will show the Odes to everybody you see. Everybody must read the Odes. You will always be loyal to the Optimus Party.'
' 'How now!' says bookseller again. 'Uncanny!' And he sees a woman on the street. He seizes her. She screams. He twists her arm and shoves her into his shop. She sits quietly while the Odes are shoved under her nose. She reads, lest this madman damage her. They then join forces and distribute copies of the book far and wide. It's like a prairie fire—
people read and make others read.
'Pepper, there are twelve thousand booksellers in New York Sector. As soon as I've probed somewhat into your minds to determine whether a vowel or a diphthong would serve better to break down the resistance of a determined spirit opposed to the Optimus, I shall give orders to the printers, who've been immunized by a temporary hypnosis.
'Pepper, two hours after I have sent in copy the crates of books will arrive simultaneously in every one of the twelve thousand shops. Now relax. You're going to be investigated.'
He turned to select instruments from a cluttered board. With a faint intake of breath Marty slid from the chair in which he had been strapped, from which he had been working himself free with desperate speed while Pepper held the psychologist's gaze.
Marty launched himself at Fersen's back, snapping an arm about his throat. The psychologist snatched a scalpel from the board before the two reeled away into the center of the cluttered room. With his other hand Marty grabbed frantically at the wrist that held the blade, closed with crushing force about it. The knife dropped, tinkling, to the floor.
The two of them fell; Marty, shoving a knee into the small of Fersen's back, wrenched at his arm.
The psychologist collapsed shuddering in a heap. Marty warily broke away from him and picked up a casting, then clubbed Fersen carefully on the side of the head.
As he unbuckled Pepper he snapped: 'Thank God that door's locked.
Thank God he didn't make enough noise to get the guard. Thank God for so damned many things, Pepper. This is the chance of a lifetime!'
'I don't understand,' said Pepper.
'You will,' smiled Marty airily. 'You probably will. Now where in the bloody dithering hell does he keep his notes—?'
Jay Morningside, bookseller, wearily said: 'I'm sorry, ma'am; I'm in trade. I can't afford to have any political
