packing his suitcase.
VII
Coming in out of the bright sunlight into the dark hallway Joan Hiashi could hardly see where she was going.
The guard said, “This way, Miss Hiashi, and opened a door for her. The room she entered through this door seemed even darker than the hallway had been, but she could make out the figure of a bearded, slightly overweight and balding man who walked up to her and thrust out his hand.
“Balkani is my name, Miss Hiashi, he said in a businesslike way. “Dr. Rudolph Balkani. The depth analyst.” They shook hands and Balkani offered her a chair. It turned out to be a psychiatrist’s couch, but she did not lie down; she sat watching the dim shape of the psychiatrist with suspicion. “What is your religion, Miss Hiashi?” he asked as he casually filled his pipe.
“Neeg-part, she said defiantly. “If I wasn’t Neeg-part I wouldn’t be here.”
“But on all the forms you have ever filled out before now you’ve listed your religion as Buddhism. Have you abandoned Buddhism?”
“There were no Ganys on Earth when Buddha
lived,” Joan answered. “Now a person is either a Neeg-part or nothing.”
“I tend to take a different view, Miss Hiashi.” He paused to light his pipe, “I don’t regard Neeg- partism as a religion at all, but rather as a mental disease, a subtle form of psychic masochism.” “And you intend to cure me of it, is that right?” “With your cooperation.”
“I’m sorry,” Joan said, “but cooperation is one thing you’re not going to get.”
Balkani raised his eyebrows. “How hostile you are, Miss Hiashi. You have nothing to fear from me; after all, I’m a doctor.” He allowed a stream of fragrant smoke to drift from his mouth. “Do you feel guilty, Miss Hiashi?”
“No,” she said. “Not particularly. Do you?” “Yes.” He nodded. “For being alive. We should all be dead, every man, woman and child on this planet; we should have given our lives down to the last person rather than surrendering to the Ganys. Don’t you think that’s true, Miss Hiashi?”
She had not expected to hear something of this sort from a wik psychiatrist. For a moment it occurred to her that this man might be her friend, might really be someone she could trust.
“We’ve been bad, Miss Hiashi,” Balkani continued. “And so of course we should be punished. We yearn for punishment; we need it; we can’t in fact live without it. Right, Miss Hiashi? So we turn to a futile cause like Neeg- partism and that fills this deep and fundamental need in us all, the need for punishment. But there is, in us, an even deeper need. It’s for oblivion, Miss Hiashi. Each of my patients, each in his own way—they all want to cease to be. They all want to lose themselves.
“And how is that possible, Miss Hiashi? It’s impossible, except in death. It’s an infinitely receding goal. And that is why it produces addiction. The seeker'after oblivion is promised by drugs, by drink, by insanity, by role- playing, the fulfillment of his dream of nonbeing . but the promise is never kept. Only a little taste of oblivion is permitted; only enough to rouse the appetite for more. Participation in a lost cause, such as the Neeg-part movement, is only one more, slightly more subtle, form of this universal lemming-like drive for oblivion.”
At the end of his tirade Dr. Balkani had become panting and sweating; his face shone with unnatural redness.
“If you really believed all that,” Joan said, “you wouldn’t have to shout it so loud.” And yet he frightened her. And what he said next frightened her even more.
“Wouldn’t you like to know the new .therapy which I have planned out to cure these oblivion addicts?” Balkani demanded. “The new technique which I’ve spent so many years perfecting—which I am at last ready to test?”
“No,” she said; the fanatical glow in the doctor’s eyes filled her with alarm.
“I’m going to give them, he said softly, “just what they want, what they most desire. I’m going to give them oblivion.” He pressed a button on his desk; two wheeled attendant robots entered. Carrying a restraining suit. She screamed and fought. But the robots had too much strength, too much weight,
to be retarded by even her most violent efforts.
Balkani watched, breathing heavily, his hands, as he grasped his now unlit pipe, shaking slightly.'
Most of the locks in the Psychedelic Research prison were combination locks, though they had taken the trouble to install a key-operated lock on Percy X’s room. By the end of the first week Percy had read the combinations to all the locks in his area from the minds of the guards and memorized them. The fact that all the guards thought in Norwegian had stopped him for a while, until he hit on the trick of simply watching what they did through their own eyes whenever they dialed a combination.
Escape posed difficulties even for a telepath. But not impossible ones, he reasoned. True, he would have to make a try at getting Joan Hiashi out, too but there had to be a way; theoretically a way existed by which to accomplish everything.
He lay on his cot, half-dozing, when a voice spoke in his mind. “Are you Percy X?” it asked.
“Yes.” He put himself on guard instantly, expecting a trap—even though his usually reliable intuition told him that this came from someone friendly to him. “Who are you?” he thought back in response.
“Someone who wants to get you out of there. But in case we can’t it’s best that you don’t know my name. They might find ways of making you reveal it.”
A guard passed by the cell; Percy focused on him to see if he had telepathic abilities. He did not.
“Do you know exactly where you are?” the voice in his mind continued. “You are in Norway, on Ulvцya Island, a few miles outside of Oslo. We are set
up in Oslo, not far from you. While probing around Ulvцya Island, trying to locate you, I picked up rather ominous information. They plan to use Joan Hiashi against you.”
“How?” he thought back tensely.
“They’re involved in performing a psychiatric experiment on her; at least that’s what they call it.” “Can—” Percy thought with effort. “—you do anything?”
Paul Rivers’ answer was gentle but unavoidably cruel. “We’re not ready to make our move yet. At present there’s not a thing we can do.”
Just then the doorbell jingled in Paul’s little fortune-telling parlor; he snatched the telepathic amplifier from his head and said in a low voice to Ed Newkom, who sat nearby monitoring the controls, “Ring up Central in New York on the scrambler vidphone and ask them to hurry up with that hardware I ordered when I left the States. If it doesn’t come through soon they might as well forget it. It’ll be too late.”
Ed slipped out into the back room and Paul, before opening the door, made sure that the hi-fi with its Hindu music was loud enough to drown out any stray noises his partner might make. He then passed on into the front parlor and prepared to greet a customer of their alleged enterprise—their cover while they worked here, trying to release the Neeg-part leader and Joan Hiashi.
Mekkis studied once more the faded and tattered military documents before him on the desk. Things did not look good.
“The weapons found by Gus Swenesgard,” he
informed his precog creech, “are described here in the most vague terms, but appear to have some sort of effect on the mind. That might account for the strange reports we’ve been getting from the units assigned to the mopping-up operation against the Neeg-parts who still, in spite of the loss of their leader, unreasonably continue to hang on.
“Invisible men,” muttered the precog. “Men turning into animals. Unnatural monsters that form and unform without warning and do not show up on radar. All part of the same thing—the coming darkness. Oh, sir; your time grows short. The Nowhere Girl will be bom somewhere on this planet within the next few days. She is the first sign of the end.” “Can you tell yet who she is?” Mekkis demanded, momentarily losing control of himself in his agitation. “Or where she is?”
