The Best of Argosy #6 - Minions of Mars

by William Grey Beyer

  “The people of the Moon are worse off than that,” Mark countered. “They’re dead! Except for one unfortunate survivor.”

  Omega nodded with unaccustomed gravity. “I get your point,” he admitted. “You mean that while my race is dead, with the exception of one representative of high attainment, your race, even though at low ebb at present, has possibilities of becoming great. Greater than I. Consider me properly squelched.”

  “Check,” Mark said. “It will be millions of years before the earth will produce an intelligence equal to yours. But the fact remains that the human form of life has a certain indomitable spirit which can overcome all its shortcomings, if given time. It lags at times, and seems to have been lost, but always forgets errors and sets itself a new goal.”

  “Admitted,” said Omega. “That’s why I’ve taken steps to see that the race does continue. But what’s that got to do with your idea?”

  “Nothing except that mankind’s past efforts to supplement his senses mechanically have shown me that it should be equally possible to duplicate the waves of thought, especially those of hypnotism. Before I submitted to Doc Kelso’s new anaesthetic, I used to spend most of my time fooling with radio and other wave equipment. I know a little something about it.

  “NOW suppose I should design a machine which would project a beam of thought waves in the range of hypnotism. Suppose this beam extended in a straight line for several hundreds of miles, and transmitted the suggestion that danger was present in the vicinity. Anyone approaching the line of the beam would be suddenly stricken by a surge of man’s strongest emotion, fear. And the closer a person came to the beam, the stronger would be the emotion. That person would have to turn back!”

  “It could be done, I suppose,” Omega admitted. “But what good would it do?”

  “Well,” said Mark, “suppose I placed the transmitter so that the beam extended along the border to the country controlled by the Mics. And another one along the northern border of England. And a few more along the coastline.”

  “Maybe you got something, son,” Omega said. “It would prevent any fighting along all those beams. The Brish could not be invaded from any direction.”

  “Nor could the Brish invade,” Mark added. “It would allow them to disband their armies safely. The men thus liberated would seek other forms of employment and thus shorten the working hours of everyone. There would be that many more producers, with no need for added production. The taxes would come down and money could be spent for useful purposes.”

  “Utopia!” said Omega. “But that would leave the country isolated. Nobody could get out.”

  “I’d leave gaps in the beam for shipping. They would be small and easily defended.”

  Omega was enthusiastic. “Splendid!” he exclaimed. “Half of mankind’s troubles abolished in one fell swoop. What’s holding you up? Get started!”

  Mark spread his hands and smiled. “I need help,” he confessed. “Your help.”

  “But what could I do for the colossal intellect that can bust out with an idea like that?”

  “Don’t be a worm. You know perfectly well I need to know the exact wave length and frequency of the hypnotic vibration. And I need instruments and tools. Unless you can create the desired projector —”

  “I’m afraid not,” Omega said, all seriousness now. “You see I have no flair for things mechanical. Without trying to run down your ability, mechanisms are primitive. For millennia I have been making the things I need directly from the raw energies which are available everywhere. Or converting those energies to any purpose I might have. But for me to work with a machine such as you propose would be as hard as for you to make fire with a pointed stick. But I can make tools and equipment for you to experiment with. I used to spend a lot of time in the old General Electric and Westinghouse laboratories, and I know what they look like.”

  “Fair enough,” said Mark. “I’ll need a lot of stuff. And there isn’t much time. Tomorrow the games start. I’m going to fight in them, you know. Duke Jon’s idea.”

  “What do you want to bother with that for? You can walk out of here right now, and put all your time on this business until you get it finished.”

  “Won’t do,” Mark snapped. “If I go back to rebel headquarters, Murf and the rest of them will want to start the rebellion right away. And if I disappear, the whole thing will fall through. There would be no use protecting the country with my idea, if I leave the nobles in power. They’d just put the armies on boats and start wars of conquest.

  “The only thing I can do is show up each day at the games, and work here in the prison the rest of the time. As long as my friends, the rebels, know that I’m alive, they’ll wait for me.”

  Chapter 14: The Ides of Mark

  IT WAS fortunate that the prison had been emptied on the night previous. As a result Mark and Omega had plenty of room to work in. Omega, his memory of the instruments and machines he had seen as faultless as if he had been working from blueprints, constructed devices in use during Mark’s earlier life, almost as quickly as Mark could describe them.

  Before long the cell block looked more like an electrical laboratory than part of a prison. The two guards remained timidly in the outer room, playing a desultory game of cards and staring moodily at the door to the prison.

  When Mark had assembled all the things he needed to begin work, he suddenly snapped his fingers and made an exclamation of dismay. “Power!” he exclaimed. “I have batteries enough to conduct experiments, but once I manage to project the proper wave length I’m going to need a lot more than batteries can give. Or, in fact, more than I can get from any compact means I’m familiar with.”

  “Don’t worry about power until you manage to design a transmitter for the hypnotic wave,” Omega advised. “Once you have a machine for making that wave you will have all the power you can use.”

  “Just how do you figure that?”

  “I already told you that hypnosis is a wave only slightly separated in frequency from the one which controls the energies of space. They’re both waves of the same band-thought. Consider the analogy of sound waves. If you design a machine to produce the sound known as ‘G,’ you ought to be able to adjust the same device to produce ‘A’.”

  Mark’s eyes popped. “You mean it lies within the mechanical genius of man to produce a machine which could create matter from energy?”

  “Why not? I remember one race of reasoning animals, no more intelligent than humans, who managed to supply all their power that way. The inventor was one who was gifted with the ability to use, to a small extent, the telekinetic power of his own brain. He determined the wave-length and duplicated it by machinery.

  “The outfit wasn’t nearly as versatile as a brain, but it was compact and easily constructed. Used universally, it supplied all the power needs of his people. Unfortunately the race was snuffed out thousands of years ago by an unexpected nova. Their planet was completely destroyed. And there were no survivors, because they were all on it. They hadn’t managed as yet to utilize telekinesis for space travel.”

  “Too bad,” said Mark. “But if they did it, humans can do it.”

  “Sure. But don’t get cocky. It would be a lot better to aspire to the ability to do those things mentally. Mechanical perfection only leads to degeneration. Once a machine will do a thing for you, you no longer try to prove your own ability along the same lines. Did you ever see the fellow who used to pound on an adding machine? Do you think he would have made any attempt to improve his own ability to add or multiply? Of course not. The machine could beat him every time. So it would be silly.

  “But for our present purpose all that will be needed, once you figure how to produce a wave as short as thought, is to adjust the machine to transmute spacial energy into the required amount of electrical energy. It should be simple.”

  Mark screwed up his face as he tried to think of a certain little point which had popped into his head as Omega talked and had popped right out again.
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  He gave it up and frowned at the darkness of the corridor. The sun, he noticed, had ceased to shine through the window. It had changed its position as the day wore on. He mentioned that he would need light to work by. Omega, with appropriate mystic wavings of the hands, changed the chemical structure of the surface materials of the walls and ceiling so that they emitted a soft glow, making the corridor as light as Mark could wish.

  “Cold light,” Omega explained, airily. “The same principle as the light contained in the end of a firefly. Your scientists were working on it, but they never quite got it.”

  MARK worked feverishly the whole afternoon. He had all the equipment he could possibly use and he had a dozen ideas as to how he might manufacture the desired wave. Each of these ideas had to be tried, and the task involved a terrific amount of labor.

  Coils, inductances, vacuum tubes, and a myriad of other devices had to be set up and wired for each experiment. Omega had told him the exact properties of the waves and how it should be impressed to deliver a constant message of danger when picked up by a human mind.

  Aside from the mere postulate, Omega wasn’t a great deal of help. He offered a host of suggestions, most of which Mark vetoed impatiently.

  Sometimes he would look at the apparatus Mark was hooking up, and shake his head, unable to follow the intricacies presented by the vibratory changes in progress in the various devices. Here was an endeavor in which Mark’s intellect outshone that of the almost omnipotent Omega. The devising of instruments to aid his weak body and limited senses was man’s forte, while Omega needed no such aptitude. His was the direct method of twisting the forces of nature with his mind, without the circumlocution of cumbersome mechanical devices.

  Finally Omega, deciding that he was more hindrance than help, went into the guard room and amused himself by annoying the guards. Presently two new men appeared, one of them a sergeant, to replace the missing two. Omega went back to Mark.

  “You can keep them occupied as you did the others, can’t you?” Mark said.

  “Sure, but their coming made me think of something. You said you were going to participate in the games. Suppose after you get through entertaining the crowd tomorrow, the authorities decide to keep you in some other prison? There is one closer to the arena than this one. And I can’t spend all my time watching over you. I have several things which require attention, off and on.”

  “What do you suggest?

  Omega walked his decrepit body over to the spot where Mark was bending over an unfinished hook-up. Mark looked up and felt the impact of the ancient one’s eyes. For an instant his senses reeled, and then he felt normal again.

  “What did you do?” he asked, startled.

  Omega grinned, toothlessly. “It just occurred to me that if you possessed about ten times the hypnotic power of Erlayok you could suggest to your captors, without them even suspecting it, that it would be safer to return you to this empty prison where four guards could take turns watching you.”

  “No doubt,” Mark admitted. “But I don’t get it. I haven’t any hypnotic power at all.”

  “I told you that all humans have the brain structure necessary to generate the waves. But only a very few ever learn how to use them. The portions of the brain which could be so used remain undeveloped in the others. The same applies to telekinesis and telepathy. Why even your own scientists recognized the fact that only about two-fifths of the human brain was ever used. What the other three-fifths was for they they didn’t know.

  “And if you had learned to exercise, early in life, that portion which emits hypnotic waves, it would be pretty well developed by now. About ten times as well developed as the same portion of Erloyak’s brain. So I just developed it for you!”

  MARK looked unconvinced. “But... I don’t feel any different.” He stopped and puckered his brows in concentration. “You forgot something,” he finally said. “I still don’t know how to use it, even if you did alter the structure of that portion of my brain. It’s like a big muscle without any nerves to operate it.”

  Omega crouched down until his eyes were on a level with Mark’s. Suddenly Mark felt an almost irresistible desire to go to sleep. But knowing that sleep was one thing he didn’t have any need for, he automatically fought against it. And as he fought, he tried to create a similar suggestion in the mind of Omega. A futile gesture, of course, for the mighty mind of Omega could not be downed. But the effort gave Mark his first practice in the use of his new faculty. He was like a fledgling trying its wings; a boy boxing with his father and learning to coordinate hand and eye.

  “Now,” Omega finally said, “suppose you command the two new guards to come in here.”

  Mark considered the problem. It was very likely that the guards he had chased out of the corridor would try to prevent the new ones from coming back here. They wouldn’t want the replacements to know that their prisoner had the jail under his control, even if they weren’t the sort to try to spare these new men from an experience such as they had undergone. The old guards wouldn’t use force to prevent the new ones from coming back. They would just discourage the idea. Therefore the proper procedure would be to.

  WEARILY, the guard at the left of the table removed a cud of tobacco from his mouth and heaved it through the open doorway as the new men entered. His companion was stubbornly retrieving two cards which had tucked themselves up his sleeve while he was shuffling the recalcitrant deck. He looked up and smiled in relief at the sight of the replacements. Maybe he would get a little peace now.

  Carefully he laid the deck on the table and watched it for a moment. Surprisingly it seemed inclined to accept his authority and remain there.

  “Sit down, boys. I’ll deal you a hand,” he invited, “I’m Edmun and this is Spud.”

  Spud ejected a flake of tobacco from his mouth and looked triumphant when it plastered itself against the wall. He smiled his welcome.

  The newcomers seemed disinclined to join in the game. They announced a desire to look over the prison. It was one they had never been in.

  “It’s like all the rest of them,” Edmun said. “Come on. We need you in the game.”

  “When I go into a new place,” said one of the newcomers, “I like to let the lads in the cells know who I am. So I won’t get any nonsense off them later on.”

  His companion nodded.

  “There’s only one in there,” said Spud. “He won’t give any trouble. We don’t even have to feed him.”

  “Don’t have to feed him?”

  “No. The Duke said to starve him so he’d be more ferocious in the arena tomorrow.”

  “A prisoner of the Duke’s, eh? I’m going to see that boy. The Duke don’t often put anybody in jail.”

  “He’s nothing much to look at,” Edmun said. “Let’s start the game.”

  The two new guards looked at each other. One spoke the thought which coursed through both their minds: “There’s something funny here,” he muttered.

  “We’re going in,” the other announced.

  “You’re wasting your time,” said Spud. “Let’s play.”

  The two exchanged glances and came to an unspoken agreement.

  “We got lots of time,” said one, opening the inner door. The other followed and closed the door. They looked in amazement at Mark and Omega standing among the strange equipment on the corridor floor, and gazed incredulously at the illuminated walls and ceiling.

  “Clever,” Omega applauded. “Putting that suspicion in their minds did the trick. That’s the sort of thing you might have to use tomorrow.”

  Mark looked speculatively at the guards, who were too astounded to do more than gape. “I’m not so sure that they wouldn’t have come back here anyway,” he said.

  “Try another experiment,” Omega suggested. “Something you know very well they won’t do. You don’t have to be subtle, you know. After all, nobody would believe a guard who accused his prisoner of hypnotizing him. Mow ‘em down.”

  BY THIS time one of
the new men got a grip on himself. He drew his sword and stepped forward. He was going to find out very quickly why these prisoners weren’t in their cells, and put them where they belonged. And quick.

  His eyes bored angrily into Mark’s. For some reason his stare didn’t seem to have its usual effect. Mark didn’t seem to be afraid at all. His eyes were the friendliest the guard had even seen. There couldn’t be any harm in a man like that. He stopped, undecided. And then he realized what the whole unusual situation meant.

  Dimly he remembered the fellows in the outer room saying something about this fellow participating in the games tomorrow. He had thought that the man was to be one of the victims of the orgy, but he knew now that he had been wrong. This lad was designing some sort of torture machine with which to entertain the crowd in the arena. And the old man was helping him. They were both public-spirited men, anxious to please the throngs who were to witness the holiday games.

  He squinted at one of the nearer of the machines. He couldn’t make much of it, though the thought occurred to him that if a man was forced to step in it he would certainly get his feet all cut up on those glass tubes and sharp wire ends. A thing like that would be better if it had a knife concealed among those coils.

  “Here,” he said. “Maybe you can use this.”

  The sword, with which he had originally intended to force the prisoners back into their cells, he extended to Mark, smiling in his desire to be friendly and helpful.

  Mark handed it back, “No,” he said, “I don’t think I can use it.” He picked up the weapons of Edmun and Spud, which were as rigid as they had ever been, and offered these also. “You can return these to the other guards. Now suppose you men go back to the guard room and leave me alone. I want to get this finished before the week is over.”

  The guards nodded quite happily and went away. They closed the inner door tightly, lest Mark be disturbed by the sound of the card game. They looked sheepishly at the other two guards.