by Leo Lukas
Boryk? Rhodan thought in surprise. What does that mean? And who the blazes is Boryk?
Then a light went on in his mind.
But it was already too late.
Icy mental waves surged towards him and over him, crashing against him again and again. They were trying to drag Boryk in two competing directions, pulling him to the side of one party or the other.
The battle, the psycho-war, was taking place throughout the entire colossal structure. Not only the players were feuding with each other, but also, invisibly and on a purely mental level, the audience! It was split into two hostile camps although mixed in with each other and not separated by space. Both constantly cheered their favorites on the field with every possible emotion.
And while they fought each other that way, they were unconsciously but with painful intensity soliciting the support of the only neutral individual. Boryk!
Significantly more sensitive to mental influence than others because of his gift, Boryk felt as though seized by titanic forces. At any moment they threatened to tear him apart down the middle. He had no other choice than to protect himself by calling up the cold fever. He defended himself with all his power. Resisting the monstrous pressure he turned his blazing inner self outwards, in utter fear of being swallowed up and completely destroyed. He realized that the released energies mutually reinforced each other and increased within a fraction of a second. But even if he had wanted to, he wouldn't have been able to stop it. He didn't have the slightest control over the process once it had started.
It was a question of existence or extinction. Him or them.
A hundred thousand opposed a single individual. But this was Boryk, the Maffan, Majittri, and Matekten, Duani's man and Fosse's son, Boryk the ever young, just recently reborn. A hundred thousand times more desperate than his giant opponents, he won.
"Take Boryk home! Take Boryk home!" resounded through the Rotodrome as though from a single mouth. All the other choruses abruptly stopped dead. The game in the glassy, rotating, oversized half-pipe slowed and came to a stop. A brawny, three-armed humanoid who had just led his team's attack, floated in consternation high over the arena in the low-gravity area. He held the glowing, egg-shaped ball in the hand of his chest arm and looked at it as though he didn't know how he'd gotten it or what he was supposed to do with it. Meanwhile, the opposing team's goal ring was within throwing range and unguarded because the defending players were squatting on the bottom of the tube. Apparently heedless of the increased gravity at the lowest level, they were clapping and shouting in time with the masses: "Take Boryk home! Take Boryk home!"
Perry Rhodan was the first to react. "Boryk is the mutant's name!" he exclaimed. "And he just took over the stadium!"
A thin, cold, and very black fog wanted to wrap around his thoughts, seize them, and divert them in another direction. But he managed to maintain a stable mind.
Next to him, Mechtan reached moaning for his PsIso-Net covered head. The Admiral's eyes rolled and turned in opposite directions. Then he shook himself like a wet dog, panting as though he had nearly drowned. Sweat stood out on his forehead. His vision cleared. Achab ta Mentec had already recovered from the psi attack and didn't wait until his superior had come completely back to his senses. Instead did the only thing possible and gave the snipers the order to fire.
Too late.
Two waves of thousands upon thousands of bodies surged through the stadium's rings to the Lemurian mutant's seat. They towered over Boryk like high breakers, protecting him, burying him under themselves. Then the human mass rolled down towards the playing field.
"Set paralyzers to Akonian standard!" Achab said with a calm, clear voice into his com link. Rhodan felt a high degree of respect for the Maphan who kept his nerve and perspective in the middle of the chaos while his commander still gasped for words. From their positions on the upper edge of the funnel-shaped building, the sharpshooters fired at the 10,000-headed mob that surrounded Boryk like bees around a queen that had just left the hive. The sports fans fell stunned to the floor by the hundreds, but new ones constantly stepped up and took their place. This they did with astonishing care not to trample the unconscious bodies or to injure each other despite the mass confusion. It was as if they were guided by some ghostly power.
"Take Boryk home!" they chanted in unison, clipped, staccato, more like robots than people. As though they possessed a collective awareness, they scurried in all directions without ever colliding. They lifted each other and arranged themselves in layers, living piles of human beings. Lightning-fast, they closed the holes that had been made by the paralyzer beams so there was never a clear shot at the Lemurian mutant. Slowly, almost sluggishly, but inexorably, they flowed like an avalanche in slow motion towards the playing field. They filled the half-pipe with their bodies. Adroitly they wedged and spread their bodies so the decreasing gravity worked to their advantage the higher they piled themselves.
"Take Boryk home! Take Boryk home!"
The goal-directed, coordinated, mechanically marionette-like behavior of the human mass made Perry Rhodan's skin crawl. Sports fans, shot through his mind, are the ideal objects for such a Suggestor. Merging with the largest possible crowd, subordinating themselves to a greater whole, is exactly what they strive for! Instead of resistance to the influence, they gladly accept the brainwashing once a certain threshold has been reached, and increase its effect beyond measure.
Even so, it seemed to be only a question of time until the space soldiers succeeded in clearing away the wall of bodies and penetrating to Boryk. After all, every avenue of escape was closed off to him.
Unless ...
"The two ring-shaped teleporters they use as goals!" Rhodan exclaimed to Achab. "Where are they controlled from?"
"The Rotodrome's technical center is underneath the playing field. Why ... ?" The Maphan gave a start as he understood. The engineers who had the task of controlling the stadium's antigravs and other systems of course saw and heard what was happening above them. That meant that they were also now under Boryk's control and had become part of his insect-like army.
Achab immediately ordered several troops protected with PsIso-Nets into the underground level. Even before the soldiers had reached the control center, a tone sounded from Rhodan's wristband. He looked at the read-outs. The signature had vanished.
"He's gone," Rhodan said tersely.
13
"He that Loveth Danger ... "
Meanwhile, in the vicinity of Gorbas IV
Eight cadets were on board the DIOGU, the cruiser that Maphan Achab ta Mentec had sent to investigate the situation in the Gorbas System.
Rikhil cer Hospt was one of them. They were completing the last practical training exercise before the final examination that in a few weeks that would decide their future careers. With appropriate fervor, Rikhil crammed whenever he found the opportunity. During his off-duty hours, certainly. But also when, as now, he was spending his on-duty time as the fourth com operator. He had set up a data module and a reading device on his console and studied, studied, studied.
His superiors—and they included everyone else in the com center, as more than one cadet was never on duty at the same time during routine operations—tolerated it with a wink, since otherwise there was hardly anything to do. Rikhil got along well with the officers. He would soon be one himself and made an effort to learn from them and profit from their rich experience. It was only too bad that Achab ta Mentec, his great idol, was so seldom seen on board the DIOGU. Perhaps, once they had returned in glory from this mission ...
Stop dreaming and study! Rikhil admonished himself.
If only the material wasn't so dry! Of course, he and his fellow students also acquired the knowledge required on the examination by hypno-training, which went much faster and literally happened in their sleep. But for a genuine understanding of the material, and especially when different subjects had to be correlated by Nexialistic methods, repeated study in a waking state was indispensabl
e. Nothing else helped, he just had to plow through it.
In keeping with their destination, the currently silent Howalgonium-supplier Gorbas IV, he had inserted a data file about hyper-crystals. And away we go: "Hyper-crystals are quartz-based minerals with particles of a hyper-energetic nature. These structures have attained a more or less stable state of materialization. Chemical and physical measurements always lead to widely fluctuating results. For example, the range of the determined 'atomic weight' can vary from zero to 1024. Chemically, noble gas-like low reactivity is displayed alongside chlorine-like high reactivity. Since the particles cannot be placed in the Periodic Table of the Elements, they were defined by the practical, result-oriented Arkonides who were the first Galactic race to experiment with them as 'Hyper-energetic Pseudo-material Concentration-nuclei,' generally abbreviated HPC."
Bleah! Rikhil thought. What a mass of verbiage! That's supposed to be practical?
On the other hand, he didn't know, either, how it could be expressed more simply. After all, no one could literally imagine an HPC. Anyone who was misled by the term "crystal" into thinking of something with edges, consisting of geometric shapes, was considerably wide of the mark.
"In addition, the Arkonides classified hyper-crystals with reference to the effectiveness of their useful hyper-energetic potential on the basis of their different colors: Violet Criipas is, by this standard, the most effective, followed by blue Mivelum and green Skabol. Yellow Losol only causes catalytic effects, while red Khalumvatt loses its hyper-effectivity after brief use. By contrast, whitish or even clear Kyasoo mixed forms can be employed for a variety of purposes. One hyper-crystal that is much in demand is Howalgonium. As a form of quartz that cannot be synthesized, it also has an unusual relation with silicon. Fifty percent of a Howalgonium hyper-crystal consists of the isotope Si-30, which in nature composes only about three percent of all silicon."
Rikhil gave a start when a report came in from the Hyper-detector Section. The Space-Jet that had previously been observed at the edge of the system had disappeared from its hyper-energetic view. The craft had probably moved within the sun's cover, shielding it from detection.
"Should we report this to Akon?" he asked, his fingers spreading eagerly over his virtual keyboard.
"Take it easy," the chief com operator growled. "Even the Arkonides don't shoot that fast. The Jet might turn up again before long. Maybe it didn't disappear at all and this is just an error due to the heavy background noise. Our dear colleagues are sometimes a little over-eager."
Rikhil grinned. There was traditionally a certain rivalry between Espejels and Davrons, com operators and hyper-detectors, that expressed itself in derisive, sometimes outright malicious, remarks. Occasionally it even came to a good dust-up in the mess. In addition to his studies and in order to augment his pocket money, Rikhil worked three days a week in a super-elegant restaurant on Drorah that preferred "real" personnel over robots and androids. There, the relationship between cooks and waiters was exactly the same ...
During the approach, the DIOGU's scientific section had discovered that the Gorbas System had been hidden in a nebula until about 50,000 years before. Since then, the star and its companions had exited the dark cloud and now stood just two light-years from its outlying tendrils. At present it was close to a cosmic catastrophe. A nearby star had turned into a supernova and a deadly emissions front was rapidly approaching. The resulting variations in radiation intensity were already discernable and significantly hindering hypercom and hyper-detection. That was what the Chief meant by "background noise."
In a minimum of four weeks to a maximum of seven, the star Gorbas would be triggered into exploding as well. Then its eight planets would be incinerated. But when that happened, Rikhil wanted to be sauntering through Veehraátoru as a freshly minted graduate with a proudly swelled chest, with at least one beautiful, sultry-eyed First Semester under each arm ...
Hmm. Onwards. "While the crystal structure corresponds to a normal space lattice, the pseudo-matter deposits can display an atom-like fine structure, but even the most exact measurements result in an 'atomic weight' ranging between 208 and 513. The natural hyper-radiation varies in relation with the 'pseudo'-mass, which is described as a 'Hyper-energetic Varying Constant.' This is to be distinguished from that which is produced by external stimulation—conventional and/or hyperphysical. Howalgonium with the specification of RT-0066 means, for example, that the range of the varying deviation consists of no more than sixty-six Kalupes, a value that can hardly be surpassed. Howalgonium with a 'Supervalent Throttling Constant,' called STC-Howalgonium, is, however, required for Anti-Temporal Tidal Fields such as the Solar Imperium's ATTF shield of long ago."
Whew! Rikhil thought. Playing around with time shouldn't be allowed at all! That's what brought about the Beasts and the First Conditioned way back when!
From what he had gathered, almost all kinds of hyper-crystals were found on Gorbas IV, among them the rare STC-Howalgonium in unusually large quantities. No wonder the workers were mining like mad in order to extract as much as possible from the deposits before the entire system vaporized in the heat of the supernova.
Perhaps they are simply too busy digging a fortune out of the planet's crust to repair their hyper-transmitter ... But no, that thought was too stupid and unworthy of a future Fleet officer. No one cut himself off willingly from the home base, especially not in such an exposed and dangerous position. There had to be something else, something more serious, behind it.
Rikhil's thoughts wandered back to the Lemurians' experiments with time, which were often discussed heatedly on his cruiser when the subject came up. personally, he didn't share the fascination for the theoretical possibility of going into the past and "repairing" developments that had gone wrong before they could even start. Anyone who thought too much about time loops and paradoxes inevitably ended up with a very bad headache. He thought it was more exciting to ask himself if he would look into the future, should the chance ever arise. Would he risk it? Wasn't there an all too great danger of frustration if he was forced to see that nothing ever came of his innocent dreams and the grandiose plans of youth? On the other hand, would a young man lose all his motivation if he knew that all his wishes would be by and large fulfilled?
No, he'd rather be surprised.
Rikhil considered himself to be more of a realist than a visionary. Even so, he painted his future in glowing colors, those of the Seventh Akonian Spacefleet. He was among the best in his class. If he now managed an outstanding final examination, his application for a secondary orderly's position could hardly be denied even though his family was listed among the also-rans in the register of nobility. The idea that he would be appointed to Maphan ta Mentec's staff immediately was too fantastic even to consider. But over the years, step by step, promotion by promotion, he would get ever closer to him through outstanding achievement. Achab was an up-and-coming man, that much was certain. And the way things looked, Akonian society would experience an expansion of its horizons at the same time. Not only theoretically—Akonians of course weren't any less aware of the known universe than Terrans, Tefrodians, or Arkonides—but in practice as well. The status quo of roughly fifty star systems making up Akon's core territory and its sphere of influence beyond that, couldn't possibly be the ideal situation for all time. Any ancient, fossilized doctrine that isolation was necessary, the so-called "First Postulate," had to be outgrown eventually. Perhaps it would even be the Arkies who would give their quasi-descendants the final inspiration they needed to do so. Then the universe would be open to Rikhil.
Distant galaxies, unknown super-intelligences, perhaps even other universes ... He would discover and explore them, first at the side of Achab ta Mentec and later as the commander of his own squadron of explorers. He didn't dream of biological immortality, such as had been attained by Perry Rhodan, the Terran Resident, or Gaumarol da Bostich, the Imperator of Arkon. Rikhil wanted to become immortal because of his deeds, his achievements and
discoveries, not to mention the valuable commercial connections that he would make for his people in the endless depths of space. Then, when he was convinced that his life had had a purpose, he would lie contentedly on his deathbed and, surrounded by his numerous family members ...
The Hyper-detector Section pulled him ungently back into the present. "Unknown spaceship, probably originating on Gorbas IV, rapidly approaching on intercept course. Spherical shape, just one hundred meters in diameter, apparently Halutian. Neutral, then. If the gentlemen in the com center would be so kind ... ?"
"May I?" Rikhil asked. The chief com officer nodded patronizingly. Rikhil sent his ship's identification. Light battlecruiser DIOGU, unit 11-A-369 of the Seventh Akonian Imperial Fleet on reconnaissance flight in associated colonial territory ... and so on, strictly following protocol.
The space-sphere didn't respond. Instead, the Detection officer blustered: "Hey, you goldbrickers! Didn't you hear me? You're supposed to identify us! That four-armed Terran-buddy is energizing his weapon systems. Interval cannon, if I'm not mistaken, and it's a big one. If you don't get a move on ... "
"Activate defense shields!" the captain's voice overrode him. Sounding unusually stressed, Rikhil thought.
Then there was a faint, faraway, muted sound. As though someone was touching a soap bubble with a finger and making it burst.
In the next moment, a thunderclap shook the interior of the ship. A light, brighter and bluer than anything Rikhil had ever experienced, shot through the com center. All that could be seen of the chief com officer on duty and his two subordinates were their skeletons, thin as pencil lines.
On board the DIOGU at this moment in time were 212 Akonian space travelers, including eight cadets. Rikhil cer Hospt was one of them.
Had been.
14
Greetings from Paronn