“No, no!” Mr. Aquila said sharply. “Let us understand ourselves. My carelessness was the key that unlocked the door. But you fell into a chasm of your own making. Nevertheless, old beer & skittles, we must alter same.” He removed the speculum and shook his finger at Halsyon. “We must bring you back to the land of the living. Auxilium ab alto. Jeez. That is for why I have arranged this meeting. What I have done I will undone, eh? But you must climb out of your own chasm. Knit up the ravelled sleave of care. Come inside.”
He took Halsyon’s arm, led him down a paneled hall, past a neat office and into a spanking white laboratory. It was all tile and glass with shelves of reagent bottles, porcelain filters, an electric oven, stock jars of acids, bins of raw materials. There was a small round elevation in the center of the floor, a sort of dais. Mr. Aquila placed a stool on the dais, placed Halsyon on the stool, got into a white lab coat and began to assemble apparatus.
“You,” he chatted, “are an artist of the utmost. I do not dorer la pilule. When Jimmy Derelict told me you were no longer at work, God damn! We must return him to his muttons, I said. Solon Aquila must own many canvases of Jeffrey Halsyon. We shall cure him. Hoc age.”
“You’re a doctor?” Halsyon asked.
“No. Let us say, a warlock. Strictly speaking, a witch-pathologist. Very highclass. No nostrums. Strictly modern magic. Black magic and white magic are passe, n’est-ce-pas? I cover entire spectrum, specializing mostly in the 15,000 angstrom band.”
“You’re a witch-doctor? Never!”
“Oh yes.”
“In this kind of place?”
“Ah-ha? You too are deceived, eh? It is our camouflage. Many a modern laboratory you think concerns itself with science is devoted to magic. But we are scientific too. Parbleu ! We move with the times, we warlocks. Witch’s Brew now complies with Pure Food & Drug Act. Familiars 100 per cent sterile. Sanitary brooms. Cellophane-wrapped curses. Father Satan in rubber gloves. Thanks to Lord Lister; or is it Pasteur? My idol.”
The witch-pathologist gathered raw materials, consulted an ephemeris, ran off some calculations on an electronic computer and continued to chat.
“Fugit hora,” Aquila said. “Your trouble, my old, is loss of sanity. Oui? Lost in one damn flight from reality and one damn desperate search for peace brought on by one unguarded look from me to you. Helas! I apologize for that, R.S.V.P.” With what looked like a miniature tennis line-marker, he rolled a circle around Halsyon on the dais. “But your trouble is, to wit: You search for the peace of infancy. You should be fighting to acquire the peace of maturity, n’est-ce-pas? Jeez.”
Aquila drew circles and pentagons with a glittering compass and rule, weighed out powders on a micro- beam balance, dropped various liquids into crucibles from calibrated burettes, and continued: “Many warlocks do brisk trade in potions from Fountains of Youths. Oh yes. Are many youths and many fountains; but none for you. No. Youth is not for artists. Age is the cure. We must purge your youth and grow you up, nicht wahr?”
“No,” Halsyon argued. “No. Youth is the art. Youth is the dream. Youth is the blessing.”
“For some, yes. For many, not. Not for you. You are cursed, my adolescent. We must purge you. Lust for power. Lust for sex. Injustice collecting. Escape from reality. Passion for revenges. Oh yes, Father Freud is also my idol. We wipe your slate clean at very small price."
“What price?”
“You will see when we are finished.”
Mr. Aquila deposited liquids and powders around the helpless artist in crucibles and petri dishes. He measured and cut fuses, set up a train from the circle to an electric timer which he carefully adjusted. He went to a shelf of serum bottles, took down a small Woulff vial numbered 5-271-009, filled a syringe and meticulously injected Halsyon.
We begin,” he said, the purge of your dreams. Voila!”
He tripped the electric timer and stepped behind a lead shield. There was a moment of silence. Suddenly black music crashed from a concealed loudspeaker and a recorded voice began an intolerable chant. In quick succession, the powders and liquids around Halsyon burst into flame. He was engulfed in music and fire fumes. The world began to spin around him in a roaring confusion…
3
And he drifted alone in space, a martyr, misunderstood, a victim of cruel injustice.
He was still chained to what had once been the wall of Cell 5, Block 27, Tier 100, Wing 9 of the Callisto Penetentiary until that unexpected gamma explosion had torn the vast fortress dungeon — vaster than the Chateau d’lf — apart. That explosion, he realized, had been detonated by the Grssh.
His assets were his convict clothes, a helmet, one cylinder of O2, his grim fury at the injustice that had been done him, and his knowledge of the secret of how the Grssh could be defeated in their maniacal quest for solar domination.
The Grssh, ghastly marauders from Omicron Ceti, space-degenerates, space-imperialists, cold-blooded, roachlike, depending for their metabolism upon the psychotic horrors which they engendered in man through mental control and upon which they fed, were rapidly conquering the Galaxy. They were irresistible, for they possessed the power of simul-kinesis… the ability to be in two places at the same time.
Against the vault of space, a dot of light moved, slowly, like a stricken meteor. It was a rescue ship, Halsyon realized, combing space for survivors of the explosion. He wondered whether the light of Jupiter, flooding him, with rusty radiation, would make him visible to the rescuers. He wondered whether he wanted to be rescued at all.
“It will be the same thing again,” Halsyon grated. “Falsely accused by Balorsen’s robot… Falsely convicted by Judith’s father… Repudiated by Judith herself… Jailed again… and finally destroyed by the Grssh as they destroy the last strongholds of Terra. Why not die now?”
But even as he spoke he realized he lied. He was the one man with the one secret that could save the earth and the very Galaxy itself. He must survive. He must fight.
With indomitable will, Halsyon struggled to his feet, fighting the constricting chains. With the steely strength he had developed as a penal laborer in the Grssh mines, he waved and shouted. The spot of light did not alter its slow course away from him. Then he saw the metal link of one of his chains strike a brilliant spark from the flinty rock. He resolved on a desperate expedient to signal the rescue ship.
He detached the plasti-hose of the O2 tank from his plasti-helmet, and permitted the stream of life-giving oxygen to spurt into space. With trembling hands, he gathered the links of his leg chain and dashed them against the rock under the oxygen. A spark glowed. The oxygen caught fire. A brilliant geyser of white flame spurted for half a mile into space.
Husbanding the last oxygen in his plasti-helmet, Halsyon twisted the cylinder slowly, sweeping the fen of flame back and forth in a last desperate bid for rescue. The atmosphere in his plasti-helmet grew foul and acrid. His ears roared. His sight flickered. At last his senses failed…
When he recovered consciousness he was in a plasti-cot in the cabin of a starship. The high frequency whine* told him they were in overdrive. He opened his eyes. Balorsen stood before the plasti-cot, and Balorsen’s robot, and High Judge Field, and his daughter Judith. Judith was weeping. The robot was in magnetic clamps and winced as General Balorsen lashed him again and again with a nuclear whip.
“Par bleu! God damn! the robot grated. “It is true I framed Jeff Halsyon. Ouch! Flux de bouche. I was the space-pirate who space-hijacked the space-freighter. God damn. Ouch! The bartender in the Spaceman’s Saloon was my accomplice. When Jackson wrecked the heli-cab I went to the spacegarage and X-beamed the sonic before Tantial murdered O’Leary. Aux armes. Jeez. Ouch!”