The Ganymede Takeover

SEVEN

Coming in out of the bright sunlight into the dark hallway Joan Hiashi could hardly see where she was going.

The guard said, “This way, Miss Hiashi,” and opened a door for her. The room she entered through this door seemed even darker than the hallway had been, but she could make out the figure of a bearded, slightly overweight and balding man who walked up to her and thrust out his hand.

“Balkani is my name, Miss Hiashi, he said in a businesslike way. “Dr. Rudolph Balkani. The depth analyst.” They shook hands and Balkani offered her a chair. It turned out to be a psychiatrist’s couch, but she did not lie down; she sat watching the dim shape of the psychiatrist with suspicion. “What is your religion, Miss Hiashi?” he asked as he casually filled his pipe.

“Neeg-part, she said defiantly. “If I wasn’t Neeg-part I wouldn’t be here.”

“But on all the forms you have ever filled out before now you’ve listed your religion as Buddhism. Have you abandoned Buddhism?”

“There were no Ganys on Earth when Buddha lived,” Joan answered. “Now a person is either a Neeg-part or nothing.”

“I tend to take a different view, Miss Hiashi.” He paused to light his pipe, “I don’t regard Neeg-partism as a religion at all, but rather as a mental disease, a subtle form of psychic masochism.”

“And you intend to cure me of it, is that right?”

“With your cooperation.”

“I’m sorry,” Joan said, “but cooperation is one thing you’re not going to get.”

Balkani raised his eyebrows. “How hostile you are, Miss Hiashi. You have nothing to fear from me; after all, I’m a doctor.” He allowed a stream of fragrant smoke to drift from his mouth. “Do you feel guilty, Miss Hiashi?”

“No,” she said. “Not particularly. Do you?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “For being alive. We should all be dead, every man, woman and child on this planet; we should have given our lives down to the last person rather than surrendering to the Ganys. Don’t you think that’s true, Miss Hiashi?”

She had not expected to hear something of this sort from a wik psychiatrist. For a moment it occurred to her that this man might be her friend, might really be someone she could trust.

“We’ve been bad, Miss Hiashi,” Balkani continued. “And so of course we should be punished. We yearn for punishment; we need it; we can’t in fact live without it. Right, Miss Hiashi? So we turn to a futile cause like Neeg-partism and that fills this deep and fundamental need in us all, the need for punishment. But there is, in us, an even deeper need. It’s for oblivion, Miss Hiashi. Each of my patients, each in his own way—they all want to cease to be. They all want to lose themselves.

“And how is that possible, Miss Hiashi? It’s impossible, except in death. It’s an infinitely receding goal. And that is why it produces addiction. The seeker after oblivion is promised by drugs, by drink, by insanity, by role-playing, the fulfillment of his dream of nonbeing . but the promise is never kept. Only a little taste of oblivion is permitted; only enough to rouse the appetite for more. Participation in a lost cause, such as the Neeg-part movement, is only one more, slightly more subtle, form of this universal lemming-like drive for oblivion.”

At the end of his tirade Dr. Balkani had become panting and sweating; his face shone with unnatural redness.

“If you really believed all that,” Joan said, “you wouldn’t have to shout it so loud.” And yet he frightened her. And what he said next frightened her even more.

“Wouldn’t you like to know the new .therapy which I have planned out to cure these oblivion addicts?” Balkani demanded. “The new technique which I’ve spent so many years perfecting—which I am at last ready to test?”

“No,” she said; the fanatical glow in the doctor’s eyes filled her with alarm.

“I’m going to give them, he said softly, “just what they want, what they most desire. lm going to give them oblivion” He pressed a button on his desk; two wheeled attendant robots entered. Carrying a restraining suit. She screamed and fought. But the robots had too much strength, too much weight, to be retarded by even her most violent efforts.

Balkani watched, breathing heavily, his hands, as he grasped his now unlit pipe, shaking slightly.

Most of the locks in the Psychedelic Research prison were combination locks, though they had taken the trouble to install a key-operated lock on Percy X’s room. By the end of the first week Percy had read the combinations to all the locks in his area from the minds of the guards and memorized them. The fact that all the guards thought in Norwegian had stopped him for a while, until he hit on the trick of simply watching what they did through their own eyes whenever they dialed a combination.

Escape posed difficulties even for a telepath. But not impossible ones, he reasoned. True, he would have to make a try at getting Joan Hiashi out, too but there had to be a way; theoretically a way existed by which to accomplish everything.

He lay on his cot, half-dozing, when a voice spoke in his mind. “Are you Percy X?” it asked.

“Yes.” He put himself on guard instantly, expecting a trap—even though his usually reliable intuition told him that this came from someone friendly to him. “Who are you?” he thought back in response.

“Someone who wants to get you out of there. But in case we can’t it’s best that you don’t know my name. They might find ways of making you reveal it.”

A guard passed by the cell; Percy focused on him to see if he had telepathic abilities. He did not.

“Do you know exactly where you are?” the voice in his mind continued. “You are in Norway, on Ulvöya Island, a few miles outside of Oslo. We are set up in Oslo, not far from you. While probing around Ulvöya Island, trying to locate you, I picked up rather ominous information. They plan to use Joan Hiashi against you.”

“How?” he thought back tensely.

“They’re involved in performing a psychiatric experiment on her; at least that’s what they call it.”

“Can—” Percy thought with effort. “—you do anything?”

Paul Rivers’ answer was gentle but unavoidably cruel. “We’re not ready to make our move yet. At present there’s not a thing we can do.”

Just then the doorbell jingled in Paul’s little fortune-telling parlor; he snatched the telepathic amplifier from his head and said in a low voice to Ed Newkom, who sat nearby monitoring the controls, “Ring up Central in New York on the scrambler vidphone and ask them to hurry up with that hardware I ordered when I left the States. If it doesn’t come through soon they might as well forget it. It’ll be too late.”

Ed slipped out into the back room and Paul, before opening the door, made sure that the hi-fi with its Hindu music was loud enough to drown out any stray noises his partner might make. He then passed on into the front parlor and prepared to greet a customer of their alleged enterprise—their cover while they worked here, trying to release the Neeg-part leader and Joan Hiashi.

Mekkis studied once more the faded and tattered military documents before him on the desk. Things did not look good.

“The weapons found by Gus Swenesgard,” he informed his precog creech, “are described here in the most vague terms, but appear to have some sort of effect on the mind. That might account for the strange reports we’ve been getting from the units assigned to the mopping-up operation against the Neeg-parts who still, in spite of the loss of their leader, unreasonably continue to hang on.”

“Invisible men,” muttered the precook. “Men turning into animals. Unnatural monsters that form and unform without warning and do not show up on radar. All part of the same thing—the coming darkness. Oh, sir; your time grows short. The Nowhere Girl will be born somewhere on this planet within the next few days. She is the first sign of the end.”

“Can you tell yet who she is?” Mekkis demanded, momentarily losing control of himself in his agitation. “Or where she is?”

“That I cannot say, but once she dwelt here in this bale. I no longer sense her close by.”

“She must have escaped into the hills,” Mekkis muttered. He returned, then, to the study of the documents before him. How could Gus Swenesgard, he asked himself, have been so stupid as to allow such deadly devices to fall into the hands of the Neeg-parts? That took more than ordinary dullness, the kind of stupidity that can only result from long practice and hard study.

And yet this same man had played an important part in the capture of Percy X.

“I must meet this Gus Swenesgard,” Mekkis said aloud. He had hoped to have some report from the Psychedelic Research people on Percy X long before now. What were they doing there in Norway, anyhow? Unless the Terran they called Balkani could deliver him a functioning and docile Percy X and soon, the mop-up operation against the Neeg-parts might drag on for years. Or might abruptly turn against the Gany occupation forces. Those weapons—

And this Balkani. It was he, it seemed, who had evolved the principles on which these mind-warping devices worked. And he who had worked out a technique for training the ordinarily feeble telepathic powers of certain gifted Terrans so that they almost equaled in power an experienced Ganymedian member of the Great Common.

And he to whom uncooperative Earthmen got routinely sent—to be turned into useful wiks.

“Balkani, too,” Mekkis mused aloud. “I must meet him.”

On impulse he pressed the key of his intercom with his tongue, sent an order out for a full search of nearby reference libraries for the works of this famous psychiatric figure; they might, he reflected, make highly interesting reading.

“You wished to see Gus Swenesgard?” the Oracle demanded, interrupting his meditations. “He is on his way; presently he will be here.”

Ten minutes later Gus indeed sat waiting in the outer office. He did not seem surprised when he received the command to enter; with a snappy salute he ambled in to face Mekkis, the picture of self-satisfied certitude.

“You can drop that saluting now, Mr. Swenes-gard,” Mekkis greeted him caustically. “The military occupation of this bale has terminated.”

“Yes sir,” Gus said, with vigor. “What I’m here for is—” He coughed nervously. “I have some information, Mr. Administrator, sir.”

A quick scan of the man’s mind proved interesting; Mekkis found Gus to be shrewd and highly cunning—qualities nobody would ever have suspected on the basis of his outward, physical appearance. If Percy X did not come through, perhaps this individual might.

“I got spies, see, among the Neeg-parts,” Gus said, wiping his nose with the back of his arm. “And they tell me a lotta funny things are going on up in the hills. Those gadgets they got out of that cave; well, they are really humdingers, let me tell you.”

“What is a ‘humdinger’?” Mekkis asked, worried.

“Well, you know, Mr. Administrator, sir, they got some mighty funny effects on people’s minds. Makes people see things that ain’t there and not see things that are there, if you know what I mean, and they’re getting kind of cocky with them. Like one of them black devils walked into my front room, invisible, and painted a black cross on my wall, right in front of my very eyes. I thought I’d been hitting the bottle a little too heavy, sir, but it was still there the next day. So I guess it must have been real.”

“What does that mean, a black cross?”

“Means they’re going to kill me if I don’t do what they say; that’s what it means.” Gus looked unhappy.

“I’ll provide you with protection,” Mekkis said shortly.

“I always heard that the best defense is a good offense. Why don’t you provide me with a little tactical force?” The drawling, rustic accent had vanished, now; the man’s tone bristled with direct intent. “Some ionocraft bombers and autonomic darts and let me go up into those hills after those rascals.”

“I already have several units in the hills. What could you do that they aren’t already doing?”

“I could win,” Gus said quietly. “Where you fellers, no offense intended, are likely to just keep batting around up there ’till hell skids over with ice. I know the hills. I have spies. I understand how the Neeg mind works. I can locate where they got those weapons hidden, those mind-warping things.”

Routinely, Mekkis glanced into the man’s mind— and started in surprise at what he found there. Absolute deception: Gus intended to find the weapons, all right—but he would keep them for himself.

For a moment Mekkis pondered. Gus could of course be bugged and even provided with some variety of remote control instant-kill device. Even though his motives were impure perhaps he could locate the weapons and defeat the Neegs, where the Gany occupation forces had failed. Then, at the instant in which Gus believed he had everybody fooled, the remote control kill-unit, hidden somewhere on his body, would take him out and leave the weapons and the victory for Mekkis.

Mekkis could never resist a gamble.

“All right,” he said to Gus. “A unit of twenty-five Creeches and their full war equipment will be placed at your disposal. Use them with wisdom.”

As Gus, amazed at his own success, turned to go, Mekkis called after him. “But if you come across something called a Nowhere Girl, destroy him, her or it immediately.”

“Yes sir,” Gus said, and saluted.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Ed Newkom anxiously.

Paul Rivers, lying on the couch in the fortune-telling parlor, with the telepathic amplifier on his head, had abruptly tensed with agitation. “My God,” he said, but he had become so absorbed in the thoughts which he received that he sounded, not like himself, but like Percy X. “She’s screaming!”

“What are they doing to her?” Ed asked.

A long silence followed. Outside, afternoon hung heavily. Ionocraft horns beeped. A churchbell tolled five o’clock, and a slight breeze moved the curtain at the window. “She’s in a restraining jacket,” Paul said at last, again in Percy X’s voice. “She’s lying on a table with wheels, going down along, unlit hallway.” A pause; then he spoke again, this time, eerily, in the voice of Joan Hiashi. “Damn it, Balkani, this is absurd! Let me go!”

Ed leaned forward, moistening his lips nervously. “Now what’s happening?”

“She’s in a room with padded walls, Paul answered, again in Percy X’s voice. Time passed and then he spoke again. Using the voice of Rudolph Balkani. “Robots one and two—take her out of the restraining jacket.” Then again in Joan’s voice. “Stop that. No! I won’t let you! It’s no use struggling, Miss Hiashi; these robots are at least ten times as strong as you are. That’s it. You see, it’s much easier on you when you cooperate. I’m not going to hurt you. After all, I am a doctor, Miss Hiashi. You’re certainly not the first unclad woman I’ve ever seen. Now, please, slip into this. No, I won’t!” The voices ebbed back and forth, as if tugging each other, conflicting in a counterpoint, with each struggling for dominance.

Ed Newkom listened with repugnance, almost unable to believe what he saw and heard; the personality of Paul Rivers had vanished completely.

Doctor Rudolph Balkani handed Joan Hiashi what looked to her like a pair of loose-fitting coveralls made from black plastic. She put them on and one of the robots zipped her up from the back. Only her head remained showing, she discovered. The coveralls had been lined on the inside with some material so soft that she could hardly feel it.

“You are no doubt familiar, Miss Hiashi,” Balkani said, “with the practices of certain mystic hermits; I refer specifically to the practice of sensory withdrawal. We possess now, thanks to contemporary science, and improved version of the hermit’s cave. It is called the sensory withdrawal tank.” He pressed a button and a sliding panel opened in the floor to reveal a pool of dark, still water. Balkani picked up a helmet with no windows in it.

“The most successful method of sense withdrawal is an immersion tank where the subject floats on water at blood temperature, with sound and light absent. When you put on this helmet and are lowered into the pool you will see nothing, smell nothing, touch nothing and, thanks to the sensory blocking drug with which we have injected you, there will not remain even the experience of your body, its pains and motions and chemical alterations. Put on the helmet, Miss Hiashi.”

She did not. The robots, however, did it for her.

Seemingly calm now, Joan said to Balkani, “Have you ever been in the tank yourself?”

“Not yet,” Balkani answered. At his command the two robots lowered her into the pool, uncoiling the air-hose that led to the helmet; watching, Balkani lit his pipe and puffed on it thoughtfully. “Give my regards to oblivion, Miss Hiashi,” he said softly.

A knock sounded on the door. Rudolph Balkani glanced up from his notebook, frowning, then ordered one of his robots to open the door. His superior, Major Ringdahl, stepped into the room, his eyes alert.

“Is she still in the tank?” Ringdahl inquired.

Wordlessly Balkani gestured toward the dark pool in the floor. The major peered down and saw the top of Joan Hiashi’s helmet just breaking surface and her body, distorted by ripples, floating motionless under the water. “Not so loud,” Balkani whispered.

“How long has she been in?”

Balkani examined his wristwatch. “About five and a half hours.”

“She’s so still; is she asleep, Doctor?”

“No.” Balkani removed the pair of headphones he had been wearing, detached one and handed it to Major Ringdahl.

“Sounds like she’s talking in her sleep,” Ringdahl said, after listening intently. “Can’t make out what she’s saying, though.”

“She’s not asleep,” Balkani repeated; he pointed to a rotating drum lodged within a bank of instruments; tiny pens traced irregular lines on graph paper. “Her brain wave pattern indicates exceptional activity, almost at the satori level.”

“The satori level?”

“That’s the state in which the barrier between the conscious and subconscious mind disappears; the focal point of consciousness opens out and grows tenuous and the entire mind functions as a unit, rather than being broken up into a multitude of secondary functional entities.”

Ringdahl said, “Is she suffering?”

“Why do you ask that?” The question surprised him.

“I believe that Percy X is continually following her thoughts. If he sees that she’s going through a period of discomfort maybe it’ll put a little more pressure on him to listen to our side of the story.”

“I thought you wanted a cure,” Balkani snapped. “I’m a doctor, not a torturer!”

“Answer my question,” Ringdahl said. “Is she suffering or not?”

“She may have been for a while. In a certain sense she passed through the experience of losing the outside world and then her body—an experience a great deal like death. Now, however, I would venture to say that she’s happy. Perhaps really happy for the first time in her life.”

Space did not exist.

Time did not exist.

Because Joan Hiashi had vanished; no infinitely small point where space and time could intersect remained. And yet the work of the mind continued. The memory still maintained itself. The near-perfect computers wandered over the problems which they had been studying before, even though a great many of these problems had become phrased in such a way as to be unsolvable. The emotions came and departed, though the earlier dizzy pendulum-swing between anguish and ecstasy had now ceased almost completely. Here and there a ghostly semi-personality half-formed, then faded out again. Her roles in life hung empty in the simplicity of her mind, like costumes in a deserted theater. It had become night on the stage of the world and only one bank of worklights remained on, dimly illuminating the canvas-and-stick flats that only a short time earlier had stood for reality.

Balkani had been right, or at least half right. Happiness did exist here, the greatest happiness possible for a human being.

Unfortunately, no one remained to enjoy it.