“Blimps,” Gram said. “They’ll look like blimps. Only with tails. It’s the tails you have to watch for, that’s where the poison is.”
Barnes rose. “May I leave now and start the procedure re Cordon’s execution? And the attack on the 16th Avenue Under Men printing plant?”
“Yes,” Gram said.
Lingering at the door, Barnes asked, “Would you like to attend the execution?”
“No.”
“I could have a special box made up for you from which you could see but into which no one—”
“I’ll watch it on closed-circuit TV.”
Barnes blinked. “Then you don’t want it telecast over the regular planet-web system? For everybody to see?”
“Oh, yeah, Gram said, glumly nodding. “Of course; that’s half of it, isn’t it? All right, I’ll simply watch it like everyone else does. That’s good enough for me.”
“As to the 16th Avenue printing plant . . . I’ll have a list made up of everyone we catch there, and you can go over the list—”
“And see how many old friends are on it,” Gram finished.
“You might want to visit them in prison.”
“Prison! Does everything have to end there or end as an execution? Is that right?”
“If you mean, Is that what happens? then the answer is yes. But if you mean—”
“You know what I mean.”
Barnes, reflecting, said, “This is a civil war we’re fighting. During his time, Abraham Lincoln imprisoned hundreds upon hundreds of men, without due process, and still he’s remembered as the greatest of the U.S. presidents.”
“But he was always pardoning people.”
“You can do that.”
“Okay,” Gram said cannily. “I’ll free everyone from the 16th Avenue printing plant that I knew. And they’ll never find out why.”
“You’re a good man, Council Chairman,” Barnes said. “To extend your loyalties even to those who are now actively working against you.”
“I’m a slimy bastard,” Gram grated. “You know it; I know it. It’s just that—well, hell. We had a lot of good times together; we used to get a million laughs out of what we printed. Laughs, because we put funny stuff into it. Now it’s all solemn and stodgy. But when I was there, we—aw, the hell with it.” He lapsed into silence. What am I doing here? he asked himself. How did I get into a position like this, with all this authority? I never was meant for it.
On the other hand, he thought, maybe I was.
Thors Provoni awoke. And saw nothing, only depth of blackness surrounding him. I’m inside it, he realized.
“That is true,” the Frolixan said. “It upset me when you went to sleep—as you call it.”
“Morgo Rahn Wilc,” Provoni said, into the darkness. “You’re a worrier. We sleep every twenty-four hours; we sleep from eight to—”
“I know that,” Morgo said. “But consider how it appears: you gradually lose your personality, your heart beat drops, your pulse slows . . . it looks very much like death.”
“But you know it isn’t,” Provoni pointed out.
“It’s the mental functioning that changes so much, that makes us uneasy. You’re not aware of it, but unusual and violent mental activity takes place while you sleep. First, you enter a world that to some extent is familiar to you . . . in your mind you are where genuine personal friends, enemies, and socially-contacted figures speak and act.”
“In other words,” Provoni said, “dreams.”
“This sort of dreaming forms a kind of recapitulation of the day, of what you’ve done, whom you’ve thought about, talked with. That does not alarm us. It is the next phase. You fall into a deeper interior level; you encounter personages you never knew, situations you’ve never been in. A disintegration of your self, of you as such, begins; you merge with primordial entities of a god-like type, possessing enormous power; while you are there you are in danger of—”
“The collective unconsciousness,” Provoni said. “That the greatest of the human thinkers Carl Jung discovered. Abreaction past the moment of birth, back into other lives, other places . . . and populated by archetypes, as Jung—”
“Did Jung stress the point that one of these archetypes could, at any time, absorb you? And a reformation of your self would never reoccur? You would be only a talking, walking extension of the archetype?”
“Of course he stressed it. But it’s not at night in sleep that the archetype takes over, it’s during the day. When they appear during the day—that’s when you’re destroyed.”
“In other words when you sleep while awake.”
Grudgingly, he said, “True.”
“So, when you are asleep we must protect you. Why do you object to my enfolding of you during this period? I am concerned for your life; you are so made that you would throw it away in a single gamble. Your trip to our world—a terrible gamble, one you should not have made, statistically speaking.”
“But I made it,” Provoni said.
The darkness had begun to withdraw as the Frolixan left him. He made out the metal wall of the ship, the large hamper used as a hammock, the half-closed hatch to the control room. His ship, the Gray Dinosaur: his world for so long. His cocoon, within which he slept a good part of the time.
They would wonder at the fanatic now, he thought, if they could see him stretched out in his hammock, a week of beard on his face, his hair down to his shoulders, his body grimy, his clothing rancid and grimier still. Here he is, the savior of man. Or rather of some part of mankind. The part which had not been suppressed until—he wondered what it was like, now. Had the Under Men gotten any support? Or were most Old Men resigned to their meager status? And Cordon, he thought. What if the great speaker and writer is dead? Then probably it all died with him.
But now they know—my friends anyhow, know—that I found the help we need and that I am returning. Assuming they got my message. And assuming they could decode it.
I, the traitor, he thought. The caller upon the unhuman for support. Opening up Earth to an invasion by creatures which otherwise would never have noticed it. Will I go down in history as the most evil of men—or savior? Or perhaps something less extreme, down there in the middle. The subject of a quarter page entry in the Britannica.
“How can you call yourself a traitor, Mr. Provoni?” Morgo asked.
“How indeed.”
“You have been called a traitor. You have been called a savior. I have examined every particle of your conscious self, and there is no lusting after the vainglory of greatness; you have made a difficult voyage, with virtually no hope of success, and you have done it for one motive only: to help your friends. Isn’t it said in one of your books of wisdom, ‘If a man give up his life for his friend—’ ”
“You can’t complete that quotation,” Provoni, said, amused.
“No, because you don’t know it, and all we have ever had to go on is your mind—on its contents, down to the collective level, which worries us so at night”
“Pavor nocturnus,” Provoni said. “Fear at night; you have a phobia.” He got shakily from his hammock, stood dizzily swaying, then shuffled to the food-supply compartment. He pressed a button, but nothing emerged. He pressed a second button. Still nothing emerged. He felt, then, panic; he pressed buttons at random . . . and at last a cube of R-ration slid into the receptacle.
“There is enough to get you back to Earth, Mr. Provoni,” the Frolixman assured him.
“But,” he said savagely, grinding his teeth, “just barely enough. I know the calculations; I may have to go through the last few days with no food at all. And you’re worried about my sleep; Christ, if you’re going to worry, worry about my gut.”