“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. I’m 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 Ulvцya Island, a few miles outside of Oslo. We are set
up in Oslo, not far from you. While probing around Ulvцya 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 precog. “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 bom 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, any-
how? 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. Swenesgard,” 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 therd, 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.”