“You can’t shoot everybody, Percy” Lincoln said grimly. “And since you’ve started using those illusion projectors quite a few men have gone over the hill.. .and if you don’t stop, a lot more will follow.” “I can’t stop,” Percy said. “With these weapons I can finally really make a dent in those stinking wiks; I can really hurt them. Without these weapons it would only be a matter of time before we’d be finished.”
“Then.” Lincoln said stoically, “you’d better use them full force and use them now. While you still have a man or two left.”
The defectors drifted into Gus Swenesgard’s plantation by ones and twos at first, then in larger groups. Gus, suspecting some trick, had the first ones shot, but then, when he began to understand what was going on, started routing them into a hastily- constructed prison compound and set about personally interrogating them in the lobby of his hotel.
One fact became clear almost from the outset. Every one of the defectors was at least somewhat mentally disturbed—some seeming to be full-blown hallucinating paranoid schizophrenics.
Their most frequent delusion was that Percy X had not been captured but still led them, up in the mountains, or that he had escaped by some miracle and returned to them. Just to make sure, Gus phoned
Oslo and talked directly to Dr. Balkani; the psychiatrist assured him that both Percy X and Joan Hiashi remained safely under lock and key.
“Just wishful thinking,” Gus muttered as he hung up the phone.
The other delusions were remarkable for their variety and lack of consistent pattern. If one could speak of a “typical” case one might take Jeff Berner, a one-time captain in Percy’s rag-tag army, as representative.
Gus did not need to be a mind reader to tell instantly, when Jeff was brought into the lobby for questioning, that here stood a very, very scared Neeg.
“You Jeff Berner?” Gus asked, lighting a cigar and settling back comfortably in an overstuffed chair. Jeff, of course, remained standing.
“That’s right.” The unhappy black man nodded.
“That’s right, sir,” Gus corrected sternly. You don’t get nowhere with these Uhangis, he said to himself, unless you get them to show you the proper respect.
“Sir,” Jeff said lamely.
“Now tell me; what made you leave the Neeg- parts?”
The ex-Neeg-part shifted nervously from one foot to the other and answered, “Them thought projectors. They did things to my mind.”
“What kind of things?” Gus made his voice kind and sympathetic; the best results came from treating Neegs as the simple children they were. Let them look on me, Gus said to himself, as a sort of father.
“Well, any kind. You turn on the machine, imagine something, and what you imagine, well, it seems to sort of come true. Only—sometimes, when you turn off the machine, the illusion doesn’t go away. You go on seeing it maybe for days.”
“And in your case what did you imagine?” This was the part of the interviews which Gus had come to enjoy the most. Each story seemed more grotesque than the last.
“Well, sir,” began the Neeg uncertainly, “it began when me and two other troops made a little raid for supplies and food, on a home on the outskirts of your plantation. We were having a hard time, see, because they, the fanner and his wife and two sons, they were keeping us off with lasers, and we thought that your troops would be on us in a few minutes with iono- crafts, so I figured I’d rustle up some reinforcements with the illusion machine, just a few extra men to throw a scare into the farmer. Well, the gadget zapped up twenty-four men and they all fought like veterans, then helped us to carry the supplies we captured up into the mountains. That was fine, I guess, except I don’t see how an illusion can lift a boxful of real canned food. The catch was that when I turned off the gadget the twenty-four men didn’t go away. They stayed with me in the hills and ate like horses, sir, like horses. But I didn’t mind. I kind of got to liking one of the guys. He was a real pal; we used to spend hours talking, and he seemed to know all kinds of things. Never met such a smart fella in all my bom days. Mike Monk was his name, and he had been bomed and raised in New York. Said he joined Percy X because he had a hard time getting a job; which was sort of a joke, but has some truth in it.
Lots of men joined Percy because nobody else wanted them.
“Once he saved my life.Shot down a homotropic dart that acted like it had my name on it. After that I stopped thinking he was just an illusion. I just took it for granted that he was real. Well, one night we were in a dugout talking when I suddenly realized that the other twenty-three men were gone. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what’s happening, man?’ and he said, ‘Nothin’, Jeff baby;’ only I happened to notice that Mike didn’t have any feet. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what happened to your feet?’ and he said, ‘My feet are okay, man;’ only then I sort of realized that I could see through his legs. ‘Hey, man,’ I said, ‘you know something? I can see through your legs,’ and he said, ‘How you talk, man,’ and I said, ‘Hey, where did you really come from?’ and he said, ‘Like I told you; I’m just a simple New York cat’; only I could see his legs were gone and I could see through all the rest of him, so I said, ‘Hey, man, where you going to?’ and he said, ‘I ain’t going nowhere. I’m going to stick with you.’ His voice was getting kind of faint and faraway, so I yelled, ‘Hey, where are you?’ and I heard him say, so faint I could hardly hear it, ‘Right where I always was and always will be, standing by your ever-loving side,’ and poof, he was gone. I never seen him since.”
“And then,” Gus said, “you defected?”
“No,” Jeff said. “That came later, after I used the illusion machine again.”
“What did you use it for the second time?” Gus asked, fascinated.
“Why, what would you do with a thing like that if
you was in my shoes, Mr. Swenesgard, sir? I made me a pretty little girl friend with it!”
“Then after the girl friend started to fade out—” “No, sir. Before the girl friend started to fade out. I tell you, sir, that little girl was the meanest, most complainin’ woman I ever did see! I’m no coward but, sir, that little girl went and chased me right out of the Neeg-parts.”
In a cave high in the mountains a figure lying in a sleeping bag stirred, sat up. “Lincoln,” Percy grated harshly, reaching out a hand to shake his sleeping comrade.
“Huh?” muttered Lincoln, “whazat?”
“I’ve made up my mind,” Percy said. “We’ve been on the defensive long enough. With the hardware we have now we stand a real chance to go on the offensive, to bust out of these mountains and really kill a few wiks.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Lincoln said sleepily. “As far as these weapons go we’ve hardly scratched the surface.”
“Pass the word along. We want all the new weapons in action, except that Big Daddy up at Summit Cave. I got to admit, goddam it, man, that that thing scares me, even me. I’ll leave one day for preparation, then we hit Swenesgard with everything we’ve got. If we can take his plantation we’ll have all the first-line Gany hardware he’s got on loan from the worms, and plenty of Toms who’ll come over to our side when they see we’re winning.
“With a little bit of luck we might even be able to step on that worm, Mekkis. From what I hear
through the network Mekkis doesn’t do anything but lie around reading. He leaves all the work of running the bale of Tennessee to Swenesgard. When we take the plantation we’ll have to keep going, spreading out as fast as we can, so that if the Gany military starts hitting with nuclear missiles we won’t be all bunched up in one place. Everything depends on speed. And,” he finished, half to himself, “on illusion.”
“The Nowhere Girl is coming!” wailed the Oracle
“Don’t shout at me like that,” Mekkis snapped. “Can’t you see I’m trying to read?” All is illusion, he said to himself. Each of us is a windowless monad, without any real contact with a world outside ourselves. Balkani proves it. Why therefore should I concern myself with meaningless phantoms such as Nowhere Girls and Neeg-parts and the Great Common? The world is a picture and if I wanted to change it, all I would need to do is imagine it to be different.
For instance, if I cared to I could imagine an earthquake and—
A vast tumbling-motion spilled through the room around him, a wave rolling through him and past, leaving a yawning fissure in the floor.
Mekkis gazed down at it with satisfaction while the Oracle babbled meaninglessly, hysterically.
Gus learned about Percy’s planned attack from a defector—two hours before sundown on the night of the attack. He drove at once to the office of Administrator Mekkis and asked to see him.
“Mr. Mekkis,” the wik secretary said with obvious relish, “has left word he does not want to be
