Iron Head: Science Fiction Mystery Tales

by E. C. Tubb

  “Get ready,” he warned Hendrickson. “No delaying now.” And then Arden moved.

  And stood just before them.

  Hendrickson wasted no time.

  *

  “We were lucky,” Hendrickson said with feeling. “Damn lucky.” Carter, relaxed in his chair, nodded his agreement.

  The policeman had been intelligent; too intelligent to believe his eyes. He ignored Arden’s abrupt movement, accepted their explanations that he was a mentally deranged patient who had escaped from observation, but had firmly and politely accompanied them back to the hospital. They had been identified, of course, there had been no difficulty about that and, satisfied, the officer had left. There had only remained the task of getting Arden back to his room and the episode was almost over.

  Aside from the speculations of the staff, the orderlies, the porters and the wave of rumour which would, even now, be sweeping through the building. But that couldn’t be helped and, if Arden recovered, it wouldn’t matter.

  If he recovered.

  Hendrickson voiced Carter’s own, deep-hidden thought.

  “You know,” he said. “We’ve hit on something...” he sought for a word “...spectacular.”

  Carter remained silent. He was ahead of the other man.

  “I’ve always discounted the extra-sensory perception faculties,” continued Hendrickson. “The psi-phenomena, you know what I mean. Well, doesn’t this thing prove something?”

  “It proves quite a lot.” Carter was deliberately noncommittal.

  “Arden walked out of this locked room. We both saw the way he moved down in the street.” He paused, then added casually: “We started an experiment—but it didn’t go as expected.”

  “And you’re tempted to let it run its course.” Carter pointed to the figure of Arden, slumped in drugged unconsciousness in his chair. “‘You’re wondering, as I’ve wondered, just what would happen if we let him alone. I don’t know what would happen. I’m only certain of one thing. Arden, as we knew him, would no longer exist.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “I know.” Carter was tired, he felt the ache of fatigue in his bones. “We have proved, by accident if you like, that memories are more important than we ever guessed. Memory conditions us from the cradle to the grave. We all live in a closed world the boundaries of which are imprinted within us via our memories. We accept those memories and we live by them. We have no choice.”

  No choice—but now the drug had given them a choice. To erase the entire conditioning of a lifetime so that, for the first time, the mind could be truly free. Free in the one peculiar way Arden had experienced so that no limitations were recognised and, because not recognised, did not exist.

  What would be the logical outcome of creating such a freedom?

  Carter didn’t know and he didn’t want to think about it. He was certain of only one thing. Such a freedom could be achieved only at the cost of the existing personality. The rewards might be high but, for the subject, the price would be too high. The price would be mental death.

  He could only hope that Arden had not already paid that price.

  Together they set to work. Arden was drugged but they had the entire pharmacopoeia on which to call, drugs for the body and mind, medicines and their years on years of know-ledge and, when knowledge failed, the shrewd guesses which all doctors everywhere consider part of their talent.

  Carter, his work done, sat and listened to the soft, soothing, strong and commanding voice of Hendrickson as the expert hypnotist sought to repair the damage of the ravaged mind. He couldn’t tell, they had no way of telling how deep were the lesions, how shocking the traumas, how permanent the damage. They could only hope.

  Arden had been shocked but his waking periods had been small, most of the time he had been under sedation. Locked in the blind, dark world of unconsciousness, his mind would have tended to repair itself. Divorced from the new, disturbing stimuli the old channels would have remained open. Now, if their drugs and Hendrickson’s suggestions worked, he would wake as if nothing had happened. It took time.

  *

  The day crawled past, both men eating a hurried meal before returning to their vigil. The window darkened. Fatigue rode them both but they dared not sleep. Lights like stars glowed in the streets below and still Arden did not wake.

  “What shall we tell him?” Hendrickson rubbed his eyes, red with his tiredness.

  “Nothing. The experiment failed, that’s all he needs to know.”

  “Do you think that he’ll be satisfied with that?”

  “Perhaps not. If necessary we can explain later.” Carter didn’t want to talk about it. Again he considered whether or not to accelerate Arden’s waking and for the dozenth time decided against it. They had meddled enough.

  In his chair Arden stirred. He sighed, his eyes opening, his face resolving itself into lines and planes as his muscles bunched and his relaxation dissipated. He looked at the two men.

  “Carter.” His eyes shifted.

  “Hendrickson.” He sat, thoughtful, his eyes on the night beyond the window. He sighed again. “So it failed.”

  “You feel nothing?” Carter leaned forward.

  “Nothing.”

  Curiosity nagged at Carter’s mind.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing to speak of. Just a strange kind of jumbled dream. A peculiar thing...” His voice faded. “But it isn’t important.”

  “No,” said Carter decisively. “It isn’t important.”

  Arden said nothing. His eyes, as they stared at the night, filled with unshed tears. Not because of the failure of the experiment which could have meant so much. But because of the memory of a girl which affected his life. A girl he couldn’t forget.

  THE MAN IN BETWEEN

  I met him while the hurt was still fresh and I was all sick and twisted inside. I felt that I had the choice between cutting my throat or getting drunk and, as I was still partly insane from shock, I tried to get drunk. Tried to. It’s a funny thing about alcohol; sometimes it meets you more than halfway so that, before you know it, you’re good and stinking, and at others, the stuff acts and tastes like sour water.

  This was one of those times.

  Carmodine had taken most of my money and sold me a litre of rock juice with permission to sit at the bar and drink it. Rock juice is made from anything which happens to be available at the time and, if you’re very lucky, you might even get some surgical spirit in it. Personally, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that I was drinking cut-down rocket fuel. It didn’t matter.

  I was half-way through the bottle when the stranger reached over and touched me on the arm.

  “Alcohol,” he said mildly, “is a depressant. All it does is to accentuate your present emotion.”

  “So what?” I tipped the bottle and did more damage to my vocal chords. “Join me?”

  “No.” He looked at me. “You’re Jim Blake. I’m Harry Fendyke. I’ve heard all about you.”

  “All about me?” I stared at him and he stared back.

  He was that rare thing in the Belt—an old man who really was old. There are plenty of the other kind, young men who look old, but you don’t often see the genuine article. Like me, he was dressed in heavy coveralls, the pockets zippered and the material worn and faded with dirt and time. He wore magna-boots and a radiocap, but had left off his contact belt. At first glance he looked exactly like any of a thousand prospectors to be found within half an astronomical unit of where we were sitting.

  “You made a strike,” he said. “You thought you’d struck it rich, then you found you hadn’t. Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself and want to run away.” He touched the bottle. “If you feel like that about it, why don’t you get yourself a couple of pipes?”

  “Opium costs more than liquor,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t go for that stuff.”

  “Why not? Alcohol, opium, neococaine, reefers, tingle-tubes, what’s the difference? They all offer the
same thing.”

  “I don’t think so.” I tasted the rock juice again, then pushed away the bottle. Some-how, I had lost the taste and desire for the stuff. I glared at the old man. “Listen, I didn’t ask you to talk to me, and I can do without your preaching. And you’re wrong about one thing. I was gypped out of that claim. Robbed blind.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “I’m no liar,” I snapped. “I found it, marked it, and came in with the samples for assay. They read high and I knew that I’d hit the jackpot. So what happens? By the time I get my ship cleared and find the place again I’ve been jumped. A different marker, and a resident prospector with a couple of goons to stop arguments. I came back and found that my claim application had been altered in one of the coordinates. I argued and they threw me out. Robbed? You tell me?”

  “You could have made a mistake,” he suggested. “Those orbits are pretty erratic, and it wouldn’t be hard to plot a wrong set of co-ordinates.”

  “Maybe.” I gulped down some of the swill I’d bought and paid for. “But I’ve been in the Belt for five years now and I know my business. The claim office is working strictly for Consolidated, and a lone prospector doesn’t stand a chance.” He didn’t say anything and his silence annoyed me.

  “You think I’m talking hot air? Listen. How many lone prospectors have hit it rich during the past two years? How many big claims have been registered by Consolidated? You trust the claims office? Then how is it that the recorder lives like a king on an income which wouldn’t keep him in cigarettes? Get wise, Harry. The Belt’s rotten with graft.”

  A juke box tore the air with a blare of noise just as he opened his mouth to say something and everyone turned to stare towards the stage. Carmodine’s imported stripper, a fifty-year artificial blonde, danced forward, blew a few kisses, threw off a few veils, and went into her routine. I turned away in disgust to find Harry staring at me. He raised his eyebrows.

  “I had a mother,” I explained. “You were saying?”

  “If you think the Belt’s so bad then why do you stay?”

  “Why do you?”

  He nodded, as if I’d answered his question, and looked around at the crowd. They were so intent on the floor-show that he could have committed murder and no one would have noticed. Even then he wasn’t satisfied. He jerked his head at me and slipped from his stool.

  “I’m going. I’d like you to come with me.”

  “Why?”

  “To talk.” He smiled. “To find out why, if you think the Belt’s so bad, you haven’t done anything about it.”

  He moved off then, thrusting his way through the crowd and, after a couple of seconds, I followed him.

  He led me to Ku Fei’s.

  *

  Ku Fei was a Eurasian who had grown rich selling dreams. His pipe palace was known all over the seventh decant and he imported his stuff direct from Earth. Good stuff, too, top-grade opium from the poppy fields of China and, in a way, he was a craftsman at his trade.

  I stopped outside the door and stared at Harry.

  “What’s the idea?”

  “I want to talk to you. If you know a more private place let me know. If you don’t, follow me and keep quiet.”

  He had a point there. Privacy, in the cramped quarters beneath the dome, was at a premium. The walls were thin, the place was crowded, and no one knew when a whisper might be picked up and amplified by a trick of acoustics. I was remembering all that as I followed Harry into the pipe palace.

  A doorman, a Japanese or a Chinese—I wouldn’t know the difference—bowed and hissed at us as we entered. That was the only homage he paid to tradition. When he spoke it was in English better than mine.

  “Pipes?”

  “Two. Put us in adjoining bunks.” Harry paid out a sheaf of creased bills and nudged me as the doorman handed us over to an attendant.

  “You smoked before?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t inhale. Just relax and pretend that you’re enjoying it.”

  I nodded and sat on the edge of a low bunk while the attendant prepared the pipes. All around, in a long low room filled with bunks, men sat or reclined, smoking and staring before them with glazed eyes. Others had sunk into a drug-induced stupor, and one or two muttered in their sleep. The air was heavy, sickly, filled with a vaguely disturbing fragrance, and I was reminded of the community barracks where I had stayed while working on Mars.

  I wasn’t disgusted, or embarrassed, or guilty. Ke Fei ran a legitimate business, for in the Belt, drugs, like alcohol, were legal. In fact, anything was legal if you could get away with it. The only law enforcement station in the entire decant consisted of not more than a dozen men, and they couldn’t be bothered with any crime short of murder.

  That was in practice. In theory, they were supposed to uphold the entire legislature. They did, too, but to get justice you had to collect the evidence, grab the criminal, find your witnesses and take the entire shooting match to the station for a hearing and sentence. Naturally, as that was a lot of bother, law in the Belt tended to be settled without the sanction of the authorities.

  The attendant passed me the pipe, a slender-stemmed thing of plastic with a tiny bowl, and I settled back on the mattress and pretended to be enjoying it. Beside me, his mouth a few inches from my ear, Harry grunted and smoked until the attendant had soft-shoed away.

  “I could be wrong,” he said quietly, not whispering, but speaking as if to himself. “Maybe you haven’t got what I’m looking for, but I’m willing to take a chance. How badly do you hate Consolidated?”

  “I can’t tell you.” I answered him in the same way. “They haven’t invented the word to describe it.”

  “I was afraid of that.” He sent scented smoke coiling over my head. “You’re wasting your energy, Jim. Hating is a negative emotion. It means that you want to destroy, not create. You want to tear down, not build up. It means that you’ve got a little mind.”

  “I’m no Christian,” I said. “Also, I’ve been slapped on both cheeks at once. Should I offer them my rear?”

  “You’ve been hurt. But that’s past, finished with. Do you want revenge or do you want to do something so that others can’t be hurt in the same way?”

  “I’m no Crusader.”

  “Every man is a Crusader, Jim. He may not know it, but he is. You are. If you weren’t then what are you doing out here in the Belt?”

  “That’s simple. I’ve the yen to get rich.”

  “Money? You’ve spent how long? Five years, isn’t it? Five years of living in constant danger, doing without luxuries, doing without most of the things which people accept as their right, and you tell me that you’ve done it all for money.” He chuckled to himself. “How much are you worth, Jim? You’ve a ship, maybe. Some equipment, probably a load of debt and a mounting fuel bill. You’ve lived on the edge of bankruptcy ever since you hit the Belt. If you want money why don’t you take a job? With your knowledge and resourcefulness you could live rich. Why don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. The smoke was getting into my brain and I was having trouble with my eyes. Harry wasn’t surprised. He seemed to be quite contented talking to himself.

  “You don’t because you can’t,” he said. “Space is in your blood and you can’t get it out. I’ll bet that you worked on Mars until they beat the desert and made life easy. Then you came out here to the Belt. When the ships reach out towards Jupiter you’ll be on them, too. You know what you are, Jim? You’re a pioneer.”

  He sucked at his pipe and kept on talking. I seemed to be sinking in a cloud because his voice seemed awfully far away.

  “You don’t like things as they are here, but you won’t do anything about it. You let yourself be robbed and swindled, and all you can think of is getting drunk. You blame Consolidated, but you never stop to blame yourself. You’re weak, Jim. You haven’t the guts to stand up for what you represent. You’re a coward.”

  I swung at him then, but my arm had no strength an
d all I did was to roll over so that I stared into his face. He grinned at me and blew smoke into my eyes.

  That was the last thing I remembered.

  *

  I awoke and my stomach told me that I was in space. Beneath me I felt the hard surface of a bunk; across chest and thighs webbing held me down, but I wasn’t a prisoner. I released the snaps and swung my legs over the edge of the bunk, slapping my magnaboots against the metal of the floor before trying to stand upright. I sat down again as my head almost burst and was still nursing it when Harry came aft from the controls.

  “Awake, Jim?” He slipped a coffee bulb in my hand. “Drink this and you’ll get rid of the butterflies.” He waited until I’d drained the container through its tube. “Better?”

  “I’m alive.” I looked around. I was on my own ship. I knew every scratch on the bulkheads. “What’s the idea?”

  “Don’t you remember?” He grinned at me, his seamed old face crinkling around his youthful eyes. “We made a deal, we’re partners.”

  “Don’t try it,” I said tiredly. “I’ve been taken by experts. You got me doped in Ku Fei’s. Why?”

  “I warned you about inhaling.”

  “I didn’t inhale. I didn’t have to.” I ran my tongue over fur-lined teeth. “Got a cigarette?”

  He passed me one and I sucked it into life, letting the smoke bite some of the slime and fuzz from my mouth and throat. I took a second drag and squinted at him through the smoke. “Well?”

  “You’re a heavy smoker, Jim. You inhale without realising it. I didn’t deliberately drug you; you just went on an opium jag.”

  “Then to hell with opium! I thought that you were supposed to get some fancy dreams with that stuff.”

  “Not at first, you don’t. After you’re used to it a couple of pipes will send you to Paradise.” He looked at me, rubbing the short bristles on his chin. “You want to take another swing at me?”