The Ganymede Takeover

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 began 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 Bal- kani’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?”