The Ganymede Takeover

SIXTEEN

Gus Swenesgard stood before the cracked bureau mirror in his room, the finest in the hotel, and toasted himself in expensive pre-war Cutty Sark Scotch. To the future world ruler, he said to himself, and drained the tall cracked glass. An unnatural lighting effect began to manifest itself, a sort of tunnel vision combined with a graying of the light; Gus, however, ignored it, supposing it to be only a consequence of the liquor.

This stuff he reflected with slurred approval, has really got the old puzooml—

Then the lights winked out.

I’d better call one of the maintenance Toms, he thought with annoyance.

But when he tried to speak, nothing happened. It was as if, he realized, he had no vocal cords, or even any tongue or lips. He tried to move his hands up to touch his face—only to find that his hand, also, was missing.

And, he discovered, so were his feet and legs and body.

He listened, and heard not the slighest sound in the darkness. Not even the beating of his own heart. Good God, he thought. Tm dead!

He strained to make out something, anything, even if it consisted of nothing more than a figment of his own mind. The only item, however, which he could conjure up appeared to be a faint afterimage of that which he had been watching at the moment the darkness came: his own reflection in the cracked old hotel mirror.

Now, experiencing himself as—not a person—but a disembodied ghost, he stared at his pseudo-reflection and felt sudden and enormous aversion. All that flesh, that sweating, ugly, bloated flesh! He sprang back from it, watched with relief as it grew smaller and dimmer in the distance.

A detached feeling of freedom came over him, as if he could now, having shed his solid body, fly through space and even time without hindrance.

So this is what it’s like, he said to himself, to be an angel.

There has been a terrible mistake, Mekkis thought in the blackness.

This in no way resembled what he had anticipated on the basis of Dr. Balkani’s Oblivion Therapy. He had expected horrors, hallucinations, a variety of grotesque and fantastic images or perhaps light phenomena composed of whirling discs of pure color. All that he had read in the papers, books and monographs of Balkani, plus all that he had heard about the illusion projectors used by the Neeg-parts—

But nothing, Mekkis thought. “Nothing” is not right.

Even more painful than the experience itself was the thought that Balkani had been wrong, fundamentally wrong.

What deluded game have I been playing with myself? he wondered. I’m not Balkani, I’m not even a worm called Mekkis, I am a part, not a whole; I am just one of many organs in the great body called the Common, but I am a cancerous organ, and now I’ve succeeded in killing the entity of which I am a part.

Without the aid of creeches no Gany median of the ruling class could survive more than a few days. And in this darkness neither he nor anyone else could summon a single creech.

This is death, Mekkis thought: death for all of us. But it’s not as I imagined it would be, I thought I would be able to savor the agonies of my enemies in the Common; I believed it would be a grand and spectacular doom, like the final chords of something made of music. But it is not.

It is nothing, absolutely nothing. And I am utterly alone in it.

Somewhere in the desolation of the Ganymedian administrator’s mind a voice seemed to be saying, “Your death will be much worse.” The Oracle. And it spoke the truth.

I’ve failed, Paul Rivers thought, lying buried in the darkness. I had a grip on his throat but he was too strong for me and we were too close to the machine. Somehow he managed to reach it and turn it on. And now he’s stopped the clock at last.

However, Paul did not panic; he did not give up quite yet. He relaxed his mind and tried to think as clearly as possible. And, because of the absolute lack of interference and distraction, this proved easy to do.

It would seem, he decided, that my autonomic nervous system is maintaining my body satisfactorily, since my mind is still functioning too well to be under the influence of any difficulty emanating from my somatic body. In that case, my body, like my mind, is also perfectly functional—though I have no way of knowing if it can obey the commands of my brain.

Experimentally, he ordered his hand to move in the direction of the machine, as he remembered it, but instantly ran into a canceling factor; he did not know any longer which way was up and which was down, let alone in which direction he could find the machine. Without sensory feedback he could not act.

And yet, he thought, if I thrash at random, the odds are good that I might accidentally come in contact with the machine, hit it and possibly break it. It’s a reasonably delicate construct, as I recall from my brief glimpse of it.

For a considerable time Paul Rivers sent out signals to his body, commanding that it gyrate, then to kick, then flail its arms. Nothing, as far as he could determine, happened; he could not even sense ground under his feet—gravity, that fundamental ubiquity, seemed to have become suspended. He noticed, then, a slight feeling of dizziness. It might be an indication of exertion, he thought with a flash of hope—and redoubled his efforts. Still nothing happened. The longer that device stays on, he realized, the more damage it will do; the effect must be radiating concentrically and God knows where it will weaken and hence terminate, I’ve got to think of something. A stray thought drifted into his mind. According to Balkani’s theories, Joan Hiashi, because she had been detached from the shared reality by Oblivion Therapy, must be immune to the impulse of the machine. That means, he realized, that Joan could turn it off—

He instructed his voice to shout and his lips to form words. “Joan! Turn off the machine!” Again and again he sent out the orders to his body, having no idea whether or not he was actually inducing a palpable sound. He kept it up for what subjectively seemed at least an hour but still the blackness continued.

Again he paused to think. The key, if one existed, lay in Balkani’s theories somewhere. But where? I wish, he said to himself, I had studied Oblivion Therapy and Centerpoint Theory more intensively, instead of merely skimming them as I did. Centerpoint Theory. That might be it.

According to Balkani’s Centerpoint hypothesis, a shortcut existed through which contact would be possible between any particle of matter and any other particle, no matter how distant. It was through this Centerpoint that the aural vibrations passed in long range telepathy. Hence, on the basis of this theory, Balkani had managed to train quite a number of people—such as Percy X—to penetrate minds at a considerable distance. But actually the theory implied that anyone, under the proper conditions, might be capable of creating telepathic contact. After all, everyone held a relationship to the Centerpoint.

That means, Paul realized, that I might function as a telepathy at least theoretically. Assuming Balkani was correct.

Again his thoughts turned to Joan Hiashi. He could not be, of course, certain that she had remained unaffected by the machine, but, if she was unaffected, that meant that, at this moment, she might be the sole person in the system worth contacting. To contact anyone else would simply be to share his blindness, to merge it with theirs.

How had Balkani claimed that individuality was established? By selective awareness. I am Paul Rivers, he realized, because I am unaware of the sensations being experienced by someone else, say by Joan Hiashi. Ordinarily my own direct sensations would drown out anything I might pick up from her. But now, when I have no sensations, even faint impressions that she may be undergoing will be infinitely stronger than my own.

He began by imagining himself to be a woman.

I am small, delicate, vulnerable, he told himself. I perceive reality in the yin mode, rather than the yang. I am sensitive, flowing, graceful.

It was not hard, he discovered, to hallucinate all these sensations with perfect conviction, since no real sensory impressions existed to counter them.

And now, he decided, that I am a woman, I must individualize, become a specific woman. And I know which major character trait it is that delineates Joan. It is detachment. She is the most detached woman on the planet. So I, to become her, must also be detached. . but I must not become so detached that I, like her, am indifferent to the fate of mankind.

How easily my personality splits, he discovered. He had always thought that only a schizophrenic could achieve it, but actually it appeared to be the most simple act in the world—at least in this world that surrounded him now.

On the other hand, he thought with grim amusement, perhaps I am a schizophrenic and just never knew it.

Then, abruptly, he felt something. A very faint, yet somehow vital sensation; he could tell instantly that its source did not lie in his own imagination. Cold. And pressure. He was seated on something. Something hard. The sensations came too intense to be forced mental constructs; he was a woman. And, opening his eyes, he knew that the woman was Joan.

There, in the dirt before him, wandered ants, completely disorganized, some on their backs kicking their feet helplessly in the air, some scrambling blindly, aimlessly about. The sky had darkened considerably, which meant that some time, probably hours, had already passed. Joan sat listening to the ebb and fall of a great throng of animal screams and moans and wails that echoed and reechoed from the surrounding woods, and Paul, through her ears, heard their travail, too. He felt her pleasure at the sound, her enjoyment of it as music, her indifference to the suffering that it represented. In his revulsion to this obliqueness he almost drew back from contact with her, almost broke the delicate link between their two minds.

It’s is not my job, he realized, to judge her. And with this understanding he found himself once again fully aware of all that she sensed. And thought. That, to him, constituted the strangest part; her thoughts could have been those of a creature which had evolved on another world entirely: they seemed so alien. Yet there was something familiar about them.

There’s been a part of me like that, he reflected. A part of me that only wants to watch, never to act.

All right, Joan, he thought. Watch this. He sent a mental command to the girl’s right hand, telling it to rise. It fluttered a little but remained where it was.

Let it happen, Joan, he thought strongly, with all his will in fact.

She let it happen; slowly her hand rose to hang before her face, while she gazed at it in wonder and delight, thinking that it had moved all by itself. No resistance existed in her; whatever he willed her body to do, that it did, while she simply enjoyed the sensation of being possessed by a spirit which was not herself.

He told her body to get up. It got up. He told her body to walk toward the cave; it walked toward the cave.

How strange it feels, Paul thought, to experience reality through another persons body and percept-system. I need to make constant allowances for her smaller size and lighter weight, as well as for the special feminine swing that comes from her differently jointed pelvis. He now entered the cave—and stopped, trying to penetrate the deep blackness ahead. As his pupils dilated he saw something that shocked him more than anything else he had seen during these last days. He saw himself.

The body of Paul Rivers lay next to the body of Percy X. But the body of Paul Rivers breathed. The body of Percy X did not.

Can that be me? Paul asked himself. Both bodies were covered with still-wet blood, and Paul, after the first shock, was able to piece together what had happened. When the machine had gone on, Paul had been hanging onto Percy X; when Paul began thrashing, trying to break the machine, he had instead beaten and kicked Percy viciously—had in fact brought about his death. Without either of the two men being aware of what was happening.

His own body had not escaped unharmed; Paul, making use of Joan’s body, bent over to take a close look. Every finger had been broken and the arms were a mass of cuts and abrasions where Paul had smashed them futilely against the rough-stone floor of the cave.

Carefully making his way forward he reached out and switched off the machine.

And exploded in pain!

The instant the machine sank into silence he found himself once again in his own damaged body, his mind bombarded by pain-signals from a thousand sources at once.

Mercifully, he fainted after only a few moments.

“They’re dead,” the medical creech said with a sigh. “Every single member of the limbless elite is dead.” He gazed out the porthole at the other ships of the line that drifted aimlessly in space nearby. In the distance hung the planet Earth, still green; still, seemingly, a plum ripe for the picking, if anyone happened to wish to conquer a planet.

“But why?” timidly asked one of the navigator creeches.

The medical creech shrugged. “Something came through the Great Common. When it reached Marshal Koli I was currently in telepathic contact with him; I saw it, the great darkness without end. Of course I broke contact immediately; it would have destroyed me as well.”

“Why did not Marshal Koli break contact?” a second navigator creech inquired. “He also might have saved himself that way.”

The medical creech propelled itself away from the porthole. “The ruling elite does not do that; in times of danger it merges into the porencephalic mode. In this case, the more frightened they became the more they tried to lose themselves in unity—and thereby exposed themselves to whatever malignant force it was that came flowing through the Common to them.”

“It is a weakess we shall not have,” asserted a junior officer creech solemnly.

The medical creech smiled at the note of self-assertiveness in the younger creech’s voice; he would never have spoken in that tone while Marshal Koli lived. The young ones, the medical creech realized, will adjust and rebuild. But let us hope that they will not turn their thoughts to interplanetary conquest. That mistake has already been made once—and once is sufficient.

“Let us return home,” the medical creech said, and the others moved off to prepare the huge ship for the return voyage.

Now, thought the medical creech somberly, we are responsible for ourselves.

This odd and novel idea appealed to him, attracted him; yet at the same time it filled him with dread. Now that we have freedom, he thought, I hope it does not prove a burden too great for us.