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 technicians 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 blueeyed 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 wlio 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.
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 Ganyme- dians. 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 unimpared. 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 ofaweapon,” 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 funcions trough 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 stiliness. 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.
