The craft being on full automatic, Gus had nothing to do but lean back and sun himself, meanwhile smoking and daydreaming. One way or another, he said to himself, Gus Swenesgard is going to the top. And I mean the top. To succeed in wiping out the Neeg-parts where the Ganys themselves had failed . . that alone was enough to make him the most likely choice for top position in the bale—or maybe even something higher than that. Why not head wik of the whole North American continent?
He began, in his mind, to compose the expostulation which he would make to Mekkis once the Neegs had finally been pacified. I’m a man of the people, Gus said to his imaginary Gany audience. The common man will see himself in me, identify with my aims. It’ll make people more peaceable, seeing a poor slob like themselves on the top of the heap.
That wasn’t quite right. But something like it—and Gus had plenty of time. The Neeg-parts were still alive and kicking; this, of course, was only temporary. However, one had to consider it.
At that moment the signals which he had anticipated began to float in from the other ships; when he received notice that they had all reached their positions he said into his mike, “Okay; hit ’em hard!” He then signaled his own craft to rise up above the brow of the ridge, so that he could watch; he had no intention of risking his own neck by joining in the attack. As he cleared the crest he saw the other scout- bombers sweep in from all directions to converge on a spot a mile away. Expectantly, Gus waited for the bomb burst.
But no bomb bursts came.
“What’s wrong?” Gus demanded into his mike.
The squeaky voice of a creech responded, “They’re gone!”
“What do you mean?” Gus said, glancing hurriedly at his detection gear. “ I’m still picking them up from here!” But now a strange and fuzzy sensation filtered over his mind; when it had passed he looked again at the detection gear—and sure enough: no trace remained of the Neeg-parts. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, a note of panic in his voice.
As he stared fixedly in the direction of the converging, now aimlessly milling ionocrafts, he saw something else. Something far worse. An eye. A huge unwinking eye in the side of the mountain. Watching him. And then the mountain began to move, like a living thing. It raised a vast arm, an octopus pseudopodium, and smashed two of the ionocraft bombers with a single whip-like motion.
As he turned his own ionocraft and fled back over the brow of the hill he had, for an instant, the distinct impression that someone was sitting in the empty seat next to him. Percy X. Laughing.
“I’m sick,” the Oracle said.
“I ask you for a forecast,” Mekkis said contemptuously, “and all you can say is, ‘I’m sick.’ ”
“I don’t want to look in the future,” said the creech. “Looking at the future is what makes me sick.”
Mekkis did not feel to well himself. Perhaps, he thought, I’ve been reading too much. Yet I can’t stop now; somewhere in these fantastic theories of Bal- kani’s is the answer. The more I read the more I become convinced of it.
The concept of selective awareness, for example. That could explain so much of what seems paradoxical about these reports we've been getting about illusions that seem real. The mind selects, out of a mass of sense data, those ones of all the possible items to pay attention to, to react to, to treat as "real.” But who knows what the mind may be rejecting, what lies unseen out there in the world? Perhaps these illusions are not illusions at all, but real things that ordinarily are filtered out of the stream of incoming sense data by our intellectual demand for a logical and consistent world. Why were they unable, previously, to hurt us? Because, quite literally, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Being unknown to us—
Doctor Balkani!
Mekkis stared in amazement at the figure of the bearded, intense-looking man sitting in the chair across from him, smoking a pipe. As the Gany Administrator watched, the figure faded and was gone.
Shaking his entire body in a tic-like whipping motion, Mekkis said to himself, I must go on. Time is growing short.
“Snap out of it, man,” Percy commanded one of his troops who seemed to have given in, for the moment, to hysteria.
“But I tell you I’m still invisible!” shouted the man.
“I turned off the projector an hour ago,” Percy said, leaning against a tree with studied casualness. “You can’t be still invisible. I can see you as plain as day.”
“But I can’t see me!” shouted the distraught Neeg-part. “I hold up my hand in front of my face and, man, there ain’t nothing there!”
“Hey, Lincoln,” Percy said, turning to his second-in-command. “You see that man standing there, don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” Lincoln said, squinting through his scratched and broken horn-rimmed glasses.
“Anybody here who can’t see this man?” Percy demanded, turning to the rest of his troops which sat and stood in a loose semicircle around him.
“We all see him okay,” they murmured.
The Neeg-part leader turned again to the “invisible” man. “Now pick up your projector and let’s march.”
“No, man. I ain’t never going to touch one of those things again. Not to save my life.”
“Are you defying my orders?” Percy picked up his laser rifle.
“Easy does it, Percy,” Lincoln said, gently pushing the rifle to one side. “I’ll carry his projector.”
Percy hesitated, then shrugged and let Lincoln have his way.
At nightfall they reached one of their forward dug- outs and there counted noses. The man who had imagined himself to be invisible was no longer with them.
“He really did disappear,” one of the men said.
“No, he didn’t,” Lincoln said. “He just left the party and headed for Gus Swenesgard’s plantation.” “What?” Percy shouted. “And you just stood there and let him go? If you knew he was a deserter, why didn’t you shoot him?”
“You can’t shoot everybody, Percy” Lincoln said grimly. “And since you’ve started using those illusion projectors quite a few men have gone over the hill.. .and if you don’t stop, a lot more will follow.” “I can’t stop,” Percy said. “With these weapons I can finally really make a dent in those stinking wiks; I can really hurt them. Without these weapons it would only be a matter of time before we’d be finished.”
“Then.” Lincoln said stoically, “you’d better use them full force and use them now. While you still have a man or two left.”
The defectors drifted into Gus Swenesgard’s plantation by ones and twos at first, then in larger groups. Gus, suspecting some trick, had the first ones shot, but then, when he began to understand what was going on, started routing them into a hastily- constructed prison compound and set about personally interrogating them in the lobby of his hotel.
One fact became clear almost from the outset. Every one of the defectors was at least somewhat mentally disturbed—some seeming to be full-blown hallucinating paranoid schizophrenics.
Their most frequent delusion was that Percy X had not been captured but still led them, up in the mountains, or that he had escaped by some miracle and returned to them. Just to make sure, Gus phoned
Oslo and talked directly to Dr. Balkani; the psychiatrist assured him that both Percy X and Joan Hiashi remained safely under lock and key.
“Just wishful thinking,” Gus muttered as he hung up the phone.
The other delusions were remarkable for their variety and lack of consistent pattern. If one could speak of a “typical” case one might take Jeff Berner, a one-time captain in Percy’s rag-tag army, as representative.
Gus did not need to be a mind reader to tell instantly, when Jeff was brought into the lobby for questioning, that here stood a very, very scared Neeg.
“You Jeff Berner?” Gus asked, lighting a cigar and settling back comfortably in an overstuffed chair. Jeff, of course, remained standing.