The Ganymede Takeover

ELEVEN

“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 often autonomic ionocraft scout-bombers said into his microphone, “Keeplow, 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. Tm 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 cant stop now; somewhere in these fantastic theories of Bal-kanVs 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 dugouts 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?”

“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 dont get nowhere with these U bang is, 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 farmer 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 ionocrafts, 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 born days. Mike Monk was his name, and he had been borned 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 disturbed. Under any circumstances.”

“The Neeg-parts are attacking in force tonight,” Gus said; he sweated visibly, even though the waiting room in which he stood was air-conditioned.

“Is that all?” the secretary said scornfully. “The Neeg-parts are always attacking something or other. Surely you can handle it.”

Gus opened and closed his mouth, turned red and then, without another word, turned and stomped out. Once in his ionocraft he took firm hold of the microphone, lifted it to his lips and began rapidly to issue orders.

Within an hour the assorted forces of Gus Swenes-gard, made up of everything from small nuclear missile launchers to Toms with pitchforks, moved in a jumble of confusion toward the great black shapes that now, in the moonless night, could be seen thundering and rumbling toward them.

The nuclear missiles were fired before the forces met, but they did not go off. The vast rolling masses of blackness seemed to swallow them up. Then the ionocraft scout bombers swept in, and they, too, disappeared.

Gus sat in his ionocraft, hovering over his plantation, and watched what took place through a bank of small TV monitors, mounted on the control panel, which received signals from various units of his motley army. One screen in particular caught his attention; it displayed a transmission from a squad of creech-operated ionocrafts that had moved nearer the enemy than any other of Gus’ units. There on the screen Gus saw, forming out of the blackness, a herd of gigantic African aardvarks as big as dinosaurs with evil, glittering eyes, huge claws and ears like circus tents, and with unbelievably long tongues that lashed out and licked ionocrafts out of the sky.

“Oh, my God,” Gus said, unable to accept the fantastic sight. “Not aardvarks!”

In the wake of the stampeding aardvarks came a battered autonomic ionocraft taxi bearing Percy X and Lincoln Shaw. “You see that?” Percy yelled. “I’ll bet they didn’t expect that.”

“It’s wild,” Lincoln said, more awestruck than enthusiastic.

“What else can you do?” asked the taxi.

“How about something really beautiful?” Percy shouted. “How about a gigantic bird all made of flame? How about a phoenix?”

“Okay,” Lincoln said. “One phoenix coming up.” He adjusted the controls on the construct in his lap and concentrated. Out of the clouds of dust that rose in the wake of the aardvarks formed an incredible winged creature, more than a thousand feet in wingspread. It seemed to be made up of burning light or perhaps electricity, and all the colors of the spectrum flickered chaotically over its feathered surfaces. Its eyes consisted of points of blindingly bright blue white light, like twin welding torches, and, as it glided majestically ahead of them, it left in the air a trail of sparks like falling stars. The two men in the ionocraft could smell the ozone caused by its electrical fire, and the wind from its wings blew the ionocraft roughly about, almost overturning it. Now and then it opened its blazing beak and uttered a hoarse cry that sounded, to Lincoln, like the scream of an ignorant and innocent thing being tortured to death.

“Isn’t it great?” Percy yelled.

“De gustibus non disputandum est,” the taxi said philosophically.

“Charge!” shouted General Robert E. Lee as he galloped into battle at the head of a troop of mounted Valkyrie. Their long blonde hair streamed in the wind as they screamed ancient runic oaths and trampled beneath the hooves of their ice cream white horses creech, white and Tom, without discrimination.

A squadron of vampires dripping blood from their fangs and wearing the insignia of Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s Flying Circus flapped by overhead, while Samson, hair and all, strode past, swinging the jawbone of a duckbill platypus.

Through the milling confusion rushed a battalion of Brownie Scouts, cracking skulls right and left with overbaked cookies, while a kosher butcher, with his vorpal meat cleaver, reduced the enemy to meat knish. Redassed baboons charged in behind him, pushing supermarket carts armed with fifty caliber machine guns. A rock-and-roll group headed by a young long-hair trumpeter named Gabriel played the “jerk” while a team of trained surgeons removed one appendix after another, throwing in an occasional lobotomy to avoid monotony.

Four squealing transvestites in silk evening gowns swung, with deadly accuracy, blue-sequined purses filled with cement, while cavemen and Pygmies hurled poisoned confetti.

A dayglow orange unicorn reared up with seven soldiers impaled on his horn like so many unpaid bills, and a man-eating plant with an Oxford accent sucked dry one spinal column after another with a sound like a rude boy trying to suck up the last drop of a milkshake. Sadistic peacocks circulated among the wounded, tickling to death the unwary with their feathers. A pregnant ten-year-old teeny-bopper, smashed on acid, mercilessly beat all comers at chess, passing the time between moves by painting pictures of her favorite celebrities, Marshal Ky, Marshal Koli and Adolf Hitler, on her naked but flat chest, with purple lipstick.

Little nude lesbians no more than one inch high scampered over the faces of the enemy removing beards one hair at a time. The Wolfman chewed contentedly on a big toe, spitting out the toenail. A brave band of lawnmowers and growling laundromat machines executed a brilliant flanking movement and attacked from the rear. Everywhere the air was filled with the ghastly sound of guttural shrieks, whoops, howls, oily laughter, gasps, grunts, lisps, drawls, yells, croaks, bellows, whines, sensual moans, brays, yaps, meows, tweets, bleats, roars and maundering.

But at the moment when it appeared as if the ordinary forces of Gus Swenesgard would be wiped out to a man, the fantastic hordes of Percy X began to quarrel among themselves. Frankenstein attacked the Wolfman. Godzilla attacked King Kong. The Boy Scouts criminally assaulted Girl Scouts.

The sabre-tooth tiger was blinded by the needles of shoe-making elves. A spikelet of Meadow Fescue (festuca elatior) was struck down by a cowardly blow from Bucky Bug, anthers, pistil, paleae, glume and all. Suddenly it became a free-for-all. Every apparition for himself.

In an instant Percy realized that if he remained in the midst of the nightmare battle just a moment too long, he and his men would fall victim to their own phantasmagoria. In fact at this very moment a carnivorous vacuum cleaner was attempting to break into the taxi in which he and Lincoln Shaw sat.

“Retreat!” Percy shouted into his mike. “Back to the mountains before it’s too late.”

At dawn the battlefield lay silent.

A mist hung over the scene, hiding the incredible carnage left behind by the night’s orgy of destruction. As the sun rose higher in the sky the mist began to evaporate, and with it the multitude of fantastic shapes and forms which the mist had hidden. Ghostly dead elephants and ruined tanks melted together, became translucent, then transparent, then faded away. Heaps of corpses, wearing the uniforms of every age and nation, blurred and shimmered and became one with the fog. Ionocrafts and creeches and Toms and Neeg-parts they, too, faded and turned to a fog, the real and the unreal meeting and blending and then vanishing together.

By noon the mist and what the mist had hidden had both disappeared without a remnant, and in the shuddering mid-day heat nothing remained but weeds and the bent, upward-poking stalks of grass.