rankest mutiny. You know the penalty, do you not?" "Certainly I do—what of it?" The first officer snapped back. "Suppose that I tell you to go to Arisia?" Helmuth's voice was now soft and silky,
but instinct with deadly menace. "In that case I tell you to go to the ninth hell—or to Arisia, a million times worse!" "What? You dare speak thus to me?" demanded the arch–pirate, sheer amazement at the fellow's audacity blanketing his rising anger.
"I so dare," declared the rebel, brazen defiance and unalterable resolve in every line of his hard body and in every lineament of his hard face. "All you can do is kill us. You can order out enough ships to blast us out of the ether, but that's all you can do. That would be only death and we'd have the fun of taking a lot of the boys along with us. If we go to Arisia, though, it would be different—very, very different. No, Helmuth, and I throw this in your teeth, if I ever go near Arisia again it will be in a ship in which you, Helmuth, in person, are sitting at the controls. If you think this is an empty dare and doe t like it, don't take it. Send on your dogs!"
"That will do! Report yourselves to Base D under…"
Then Helmuth's flare of anger passed and his cold reason took charge. Here was something utterly unprecedented, an entire crew of the hardest–bitten marauders in space offering open and barefaced mutiny—no, not mutiny, but actual rebellion to him, Helmuth, in his very person. And not a typical, skulking, carefully planned uprising, but the immovably brazen desperation of men making an ultimately last–ditch stand. Truly, it must be a powerful superstition indeed, to make that crew of hard–boiled hellions choose certain death rather than face again the imaginary—they must be imaginary—perils of a planet unknown to and unexplored by Boskone's planetographers. But they were, after all, ordinary space–men, of little mental force and of small real ability. Even so, it was clearly indicated that in this case precipitate action was to be avoided. Therefore he went on calmly and almost without a break. "Cancel all this that has been spoken and that has taken place. Continue with your original orders pending further investigation," and switched his plate back to the department head.
"I have checked your conclusions and have found them correct," he announced, as though nothing at all out of the way had transpired. "You did well in sending a ship to investigate. No matter where I am or what I am doing, notify me Instantly at the first sign of irregularity in the behavior of any member of that ship's personnel."
Nor was that call long in coming. The carefully–selected crew—selected for complete lack of knowledge of the dread planet which was their objective— sailed along in blissful ignorance, both of the real meaning of their mission and of what was to be its ghastly end. Soon after Helmuth's unsatisfactory interview with Gildersleeve and his mate, the luckless exploring vessel reached the barrier which the Arisians had set around their system and through which no uninvited stranger was allowed to pass.
The free–flying ship struck that frail barrier and stopped.
In the instant of contact a wave of mental force flooded the mind of the captain, who, gibbering with sheer, stark, panic terror, flashed his vessel away from that horror impregnated wall and hurled call after frantic call along his beam, back to headquarters. His first call, in the instant of reception, was relayed to Helmuth at his central desk.
"Steady, man, report intelligently!" that worthy snapped, and his eyes, large now upon the cowering captain's plate, bored steadily, hypnotically into those of the expedition's leader. "Pull yourself together and tell me exactly what happened. Everything!"
"Well, sir, when we stuck something—a screen of some sort—and stopped, something came aboard. It was…oh…ay–ay–a–e!" his voice rose to a shriek, but under Helmuth's dominating glare he subsided quickly and went on. "A monster, sir, if there ever was one. A fire–breathing demon, sir, with teeth and claws and cruelly barbed tail. He spoke to me in my own Crevenian language. He said…"
"Never mind what he said. I did not hear it, but I can guess what it was. He threatened you with death in some horrible fashion, did he not?" and the coldly ironical tones did more to restore the shaking man's equilibrium than reams of remonstrance could have done.
"Well, yes, that was about the size of it, sir," he admitted.
"And does that sound reasonable to you, the commander of a first class battleship of Boskone's Fleet?" sneered Helmuth.
"Well, sir, put on that way, it does seem a bit farfetched," the captain replied, sheepishly.
"It is far–fetched." The director, in the safety of his dome, could afford to be positive. "We do not know exactly what caused that hallucination, apparition, or whatever it was—you were the only one who could see it, apparently, it certainly was not visible on our master–plates. It was probably some form of suggestion or hypnotism and you know as well as we do that any suggestion can be thrown off by a definitely opposed will. But you did not oppose it, did you?"
"No, sir, I didn't have time."
"Nor did you have your screens out, nor automatic recorders on the trip. Not much of anything, in fact .
I think that you had better report back here, at full blast " "Oh, no, sir—please!" He knew what rewards were granted to failures, and Helmuth's carefully chosen words had already produced the effect desired by their speaker. "They took me by surprise then, but I'll go through this next time."
"very well, I will give you one more chance. When you get close to the barrier, or whatever it is, go inert and put out all your screens. Man your plates and weapons, for whatever can hypnotize can be killed. Go ahead at full blast, with all the acceleration you can get. Crash through anything that opposes you and beam anything that you can detect or see. Can you thin of anything else?"
"That should be sufficient, sir." The captain's equanimity was completely restored, now that the warlike preparations were making more and more nebulous the sudden, but single, thought wave of the Arisian.
"Proceed!"
The plan was carried out to the letter. This time the pirate craft struck the frail barrier inert, and its slight force offered no tangible bar to the prodigious mass of metal. But this time, since the barrier was actually passed, there was no mental warning and no possibility of retreat.
Many men have skeletons in their closets. Many have phobias, things of which they are consciously afraid. Many others have them, not consciously, but buried deep in the subconscious, specters which seldom or never rise above the threshold of perception. Every sentient being has, if not such specters as these, at least a few active or latent dislikes, dreads, or outright fears. This is true, no matter how quiet and peaceful a life the being has led.
These pirates, however, were the scum of space. They were beings of hard and criminal lives and of violent and lawless passions. Their hates and conscience– searing deeds had been legion, their count of crimes long, black, and hideous. Therefore, slight indeed was the effort required to locate in their conscious minds—to say noting of the noxious depths of their subconscious ones—visions of horror fit to blast stronger intellects than theirs. And that is exactly what the Arisian Watchman did. From each pirate's total mind, a veritable charnel pit, he extracted the foulest, most unspeakable dregs, the deeply hidden things of which the subject was in the greatest fear. Of these things he formed a whole of horror incomprehensible and incredible, and this ghastly whole he made incarnate and visible to the pirate who was its unwilling pent, as visible as though it were composed of flesh and blood, of copper and steel. Is it any wonder that each member of that outlaw crew, seeing such an abhorrent materialization, went instantly mad?