The Paradox Men

by Charles L. Harness

  She had planned her most plausible line of defense even as Haze-Gaunt’s question left his lips. Smiling wryly, she closed the panel behind her. “Yes, I had a pleasant outing, Bern. I go out whenever I can. Slaves have the vices of slaves, don’t they?”

  “We’ll come back to that,” rejoined the chancellor grimly. “The main question is, what do you know about Alar? How did you meet? Why did you let him escort you to the ball instead of turning him over to the palace guards?”

  “Bern,” she said, “is my bathroom the place for an inquisition? And it’s really rather late. Perhaps in the morning.”

  She could have bitten off her tongue. This defense was not ringing true. She could sense the little psychologist anticipating her every word—knowing almost exactly what she would say next. Perhaps the diabolical little man had even forewarned Haze-Gaunt of what she could be expected to say if she were hiding something from them.

  “Oh, very well,” she said wearily, stepping away from the wall. “I’ll tell you what I know, though I can’t see why it’s so important. Alar climbed up on my balcony this evening. I threw a knife at him but I wasn’t a very good shot. I missed and in the next instant he had me by the wrist.

  “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t take him into the ballroom. What could I do? My maids were gone. It’s really your fault, Bern, for not providing at least a minimum of protection for me.”

  She knew it was no good, but at least they’d take a few moments to pick it to pieces. Meanwhile, she would be thinking. She walked casually to the wash basin, as though she had made her final contribution to the discussion, and studied her face in the mirrors a few seconds. She was spraying her face with a perfumed water-palm oil emulsion when Haze-Gaunt spoke again.

  “Your friend seems to have taken a shower in here and borrowed some of my clothes—not to mention the Italian saber. Were you bound and gagged during all that?”

  Keiris stopped rubbing her oiled face and reached languidly for the water-alcohol spray knob. “It has always been my understanding that my apartment was wired with concealed microphones. I assumed that every word that passed between the Thief and me would be heard by the guards and that Alar would be captured in this very room.”

  “By a remarkable coincidence,” Thurmond murmured, “your knife severed the wire.”

  The water-alcohol spray stung her cheeks sharply. She rubbed her face briskly with a deep-napped towel, then faced the three again with a shell of poise that was growing thinner by the minute.

  Shey was still smiling. Once, he seemed almost to chuckle.

  “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that,” said Haze-Gaunt coldly. He unlaced his fingers from the small of his back and folded his arms on his chest as he sauntered toward them. “And I’ll even assume, for the time being, that the next phase of your story is true—that you believed we knew all along that the Thief at the ball was Alar, and that we were biding our own good time in taking him. We’ll let that go.

  “You may or may not know that after his capture Alar was given to Shey for examination and that Alar somehow knew that you were missing from the palace grounds an hour ago, just before Shey was to have begun his experiments. Alar obtained his release by telling Shey that you were being held as a hostage by the Thieves. You must have told him that you would be missing at that moment, and that he could use the knowledge to effect his release. Do you deny that?”

  Keiris hesitated and looked at Shey for the first time. The pain-dabbler was eyeing her in rapt anticipation. She knew that her face must be very pale. For nearly a decade she had thought she could face death with calm. But now that the probability was crystallizing before her very eyes it became horrible.

  What was it about death that frightened her? Not death itself. Only the hour of dying—the hour that Shey knew how to prolong indefinitely. And she would talk. She knew that Shey could make her talk. She would have to tell about the Meganet Mind and a potent weapon would be lost for Kim’s Thieves.

  Somewhere, somehow, Kim might still be alive. What would he think when he learned of her betrayal? And incidentally, just how had Alar known that she had been waiting for him at the Thief rendezvous during his brief imprisonment in Shey’s chambers? There were too many questions, and no answers.

  She wondered just how much pain she could take before she became talkative.

  “I deny nothing,” she said finally. “If you want to think that I provided the Thief with the means for his escape you may certainly do so. Does my background lead you to expect an overwhelming loyalty to you, Bern?” She watched his face closely.

  Haze-Gaunt was silent. Thurmond shifted his feet restlessly and glanced at his wrist radio.

  “Haze-Gaunt,” he clipped, “do you realize we’re letting this woman hold up Operation Finis? Every second is vital if we are to achieve surprise, but we can do nothing until we evaluate Alar. I urge that you turn her over to Shey immediately. Her actions show something more than a generalized sympathy with a subversive organization that she identified with her late husband.

  “There was something special between her and Alar. We must pull it out of her. And what about these incessant leaks of high secrets to the Thieves? You always thought you knew every move she made, every word she said. Where,” he concluded tersely, “has she been for the last hour?”

  “I have been with Alar.” She found it incredible that her voice could be so calm. She watched for the effect of the statement on Haze-Gaunt. The barest flicker of anguish passed over his eternally immobile mouth.

  She had been abandoned.

  Shey giggled and spoke for the first time.“Your answers are so clear that they completely obscure—what? You point with sweeping gestures to a wide-open highway but it is the camouflaged path that we seek.

  “Why are you so eager to imply that you have been activated all along by a simple emotional attachment for a man—even if he is a gallant swashbuckling Thief—whom you never saw before? I ask this, not because I expect answers here and now but so that you will understand the necessity, from our point of view, for what must follow.”

  Keiris finally knew the shape of physical despair. It was a leaden numbing thing that seized one nerve after the other and made her rotten with fear.

  “What do you—they—want to know, Bern?” she said. It was not a question but rather an admission of defeat. Her voice sounded oddly plaintive in her ears.

  Haze-Gaunt nodded to Shey, who stepped up and swiftly strapped a disc-like thing to her arm—a portable verigraph. The needles that circulated veinous blood through the instrument stung sharply; then the pain was gone. The thing’s eye blinked green at each heartbeat. She rubbed her arm above the instrument.

  They would make her own body betray her. They would program it with their insidious drugs, and then they would feed questions to it, just as though they were talking to a computer, and the answers would flash out as colors on that incorruptible little crystal, just like lines slavishly jumping out on a CRT. Green for truth, red for lies. Destroyed by a needle prick. She couldn’t even claim they had broken her under torture. It was bitterly unfair. She suppressed a whimper.

  Haze-Gaunt waited a moment for the scopolamine to take effect. Then he asked, “Had you ever known Alar before tonight?”

  “No,” she replied with what she believed perfect truth.

  To her utter amazement and wondering surmise, the blinking green eye of the instrument turned slowly red.

  “You have seen him before,” observed Haze-Gaunt grimly. “You should know better than to try to deceive the verigraph on the first question. You know well enough that it is effective over a three-minute period.”

  She sat down dizzily. The instrument had said she had lied—had said that she really had known Alar before. But where? When?

  “Perhaps a glimpse somewhere,” she murmured faintly. “I can’t account for it otherwise.”

  “Have you carried information to the Thieves before?”

  “I don’t kno
w.” The light flashed a vivid yellow.

  “She isn’t sure,” interpreted Shey smoothly, “but she thinks she has occasionally betrayed information in the past, evidently through anonymous intermediaries, and she believes it reached the Thieves. We have only two minutes before the ’graph becomes ineffective. Let’s hurry on.”

  “In these matters,” Thurmond asked her harshly, “do you act independently?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  The light immediately flashed red.

  “A categorical lie,” sniggered Shey. “She’s working for someone. Who directs you?” he demanded.

  “No one.”

  Again the red light.

  “Is it a cabinet member?” demanded Thurmond.

  Even in her near-stupor she marveled at his eternal suspicion of treachery in high places.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “But someone in the palace?”

  “The palace?”

  “Yes, here in the chancellory palace?”

  The light was blinking green steadily. She groaned with relief. The Meganet Mind was quartered within the imperial palace, not the chancellory palace.

  “The imperial palace, then?” suggested Shey.

  She didn’t answer but knew the light was burning crimson.

  The three men exchanged glances.

  “The Imperatrix?” asked Thurmond.

  The light turned green. The police minister shrugged his shoulders.

  She realized dully that she must faint, but that she could not.

  And it came. Haze-Gaunt displayed once again the flash of dazzling intuition that had brought him to the leadership of his wolf pack. He asked:

  “Do you receive orders from the Meganet Mind?”

  “No.”

  It was no use. She knew without looking at the light that it must surely have betrayed her.

  Oddly, she felt only relief. They had got it out of her without pain. She couldn’t blame herself.

  Then “Barbellion?” asked Thurmond dubiously, naming the Colonel of the Imperial Guards.

  She froze. The three minutes had passed. The verigraph was no longer registering. The light must not have turned red on the name “The Meganet Mind.”

  “We’ve run over the time a little,” interposed Haze-Gaunt, frowning. “Her blood is buffered again, and her reactions for the last questions were meaningless. We’ll have to wait six or seven days for another try at the truth.”

  “We can’t wait,” objected Thurmond. “You know we can’t wait.”

  Shey stepped up and disconnected the verigraph. Keiris felt the stab of another needle, and her head was horridly clear again by the time she realized what Haze-Gaunt had replied.

  “She’s yours, Shey.”

  11

  Return of Keiris

  DEAR, DEAR KEIRIS,” smiled Shey. “Our rendezvous here was as inevitable as death itself.”

  From where she lay, strapped to the operating table, the woman sucked in her breath and looked with wide eyes about the room. There was nothing there but the gleaming whiteness, the pans of strange instruments—and Shey, swathed in a white surgical gown.

  The psychologist was speaking again, his words interspersed with giggles.

  “Do you understand the nature of pain?” he asked, leaning over her as far as his rotundity would permit. “Did you know that pain is the finest of the senses? So few people do. In the gross animality of most of mankind pain is used solely as a notice of physical injury.

  “The subtler overtones are missed entirely. Only a few of the enlightened—such as the Hindu fakirs, the Penitentes, the Flagellants—appreciate the supreme pleasures that may be obtained from our sadly neglected proprioceptive system.

  “Look!” He pulled back his sleeve deftly, exposed a pulpy raw spot on his inner arm. “I peeled off the epidermis and let flaming drops of ethanol fall there for fifteen minutes, while I sat in my box at the opera, enthralled by the Imperial Ballet’s rendition of Inferno. In the whole audience I alone completely appreciated it.” He paused and sighed. “Well then, let us begin. You can talk any time you wish. I hope not too soon.”

  He wheeled up a dial-clustered box and unreeled two needle-tipped wires from it. One needle he jabbed into the palm of her right hand, then strapped it down to the palm with adhesive tape. The other was similarly applied to her right bicep.

  “We start with the elementary, and advance to the complex,” explained Shey. “You will appreciate the stimuli more fully if you understand their effect. Observe the oscillograph.” He pointed to a circular glass panel of dull white, split horizontally by a luminous line.

  She cried out involuntarily as a sharp pain shot up her arm—and stayed there, throbbing rhythmically.

  Shey giggled. “Nice appetizer, eh? See the cathode beam? It shows that impulses travel up that particular nerve trunk in several speeds. There’s the sudden flashing pain—the peak on the cathode tube, traveling about thirty meters a second. Then several slower impulses come up, with speeds down to half a meter a second. They make up the dull ache that follows stubbing your toe, or burning your finger.

  “These impulses are gathered into larger and larger nerve fibers that eventually pass into the spinal cord and are carried to the thalamus, which sorts out the various stimuli of pain, cold, warmth, touch, and so on, and routes the messages to the cerebrum for action.

  “The post central convolution lying just behind the fissure of Rolando seems to get all the pain impulses.” He looked up cheerfully and adjusted the needle in her upper arm. “Bored with that monotonous old stimulus? Here’s another.”

  She braced herself but the pain was not nearly so sharp. “Not much, eh?” said the psychologist. “Just barely above threshold. After stimulation the fiber can’t be stimulated again for four-tenths of a millisecond. Then for fifteen milliseconds it goes the other way—hypersensitive—and then it’s subnormal again for eighty milliseconds, then normal from then on. It’s that fifteen millisecond hypersensitive period that I find so useful—”

  Keiris screamed.

  “Splendid!” crowed Shey, shutting off the switch on the black box. “And that was on only one nerve in one arm. It’s perfectly fascinating to add one pair of electrodes after another until the arms are covered with them, even though the subject generally dies.” He turned to the box again.

  Somewhere in the room a radiochron was ticking out the seconds with mocking languor.

  Alar stared in slow wonder at the bearded starveling in the mirror.

  What hour?

  What day?

  A sharp glance at the chronocal told his incredulous eyes that six weeks had passed since he had locked himself in the study here beneath Lunar Station, in a frantic race against the moment when the combined might of the Thieves and the Imperials would search him out and kill him.

  Had he really succeeded in solving the mystery of the star plate?

  He didn’t know.

  He thought he had discovered the identity of that luminous wheel in the lower right hand corner of the negative. He had discovered some very interesting aberrations in the nebulae in the intervening space and had considered several explanations, none of which were entirely satisfactory. He wondered if the Mind knew the answer. He rather suspected he did.

  Everyone seemed to know all the answers except him. There was almost a comical injustice in that he, the possessor of the miraculous ear and eye, who had skirted the fringe of godhood that night in Shey’s evil chamber, knew so little of himself.

  And now this strange and wonderful star plate—it held something that the Mind wanted him to know. But what?

  He scratched absently at his beard while his eyes toured the study. From the ceiling lamp dangled a small three-dimensional model of the galaxy. It seemed to apologize for the preposterous scenery beneath, which consisted of—books, gigantic, minuscule, gaudy, modest, in all the tongues of distant Earth.

  They swarmed over floor, chairs and tables, half-way up the four
walls, a rugged landscape drained here and there by valleys made by Alar as he walked the floor during the past weeks. The valleys were carpeted by a forlorn detritus of discarded scribblings.

  In a glaciated cirque of the book-Matterhorn that arched over his work-desk, his electron microscope was enshrined, surrounded by a gray talus of negatives.

  His roving eye next caught the glint of the tube of depilatory peeking at him from between the pages of Muir’s Space Mechanics. A moment later he was again before the mirror, rubbing his beard away by degrees, followed by curious inspection, as men invariably do when they depilate after a long absence from civilization.

  But when the stubble was all gone he was appalled at the pinched pallor of his face. He tried to remember when he had last slept or eaten. He couldn’t place either event precisely. He vaguely recalled devouring frozen cubes of vegetable soup with his bare fingers.

  He walked to the porthole and looked out into the blackness toward a ridge of wild lunar mountains, silver-tinged by the setting sun. Crescented Terra hung in gigantic splendor just above the ridge. He would like to be there now, asking questions of the Mind, of Haven—of Keiris. How long would it be before Earth would again be safe for him? Probably never, with both Thief and Imperial searching. It was a miracle that his imposture here at the observatory had not been detected.

  He reflected. Am I here for a purpose? Do I have a destiny? For good? For evil? Shall I share the doom of that wretched Earth? Or can I change those hapless creatures? Ridiculous thought! As John Haven once pointed out, someone would have to go back into the time of dawn man and work an impossibly intricate bit of genetic engineering on their genes and chromosomes. The Neandertals and others before and after them would have to be changed from unreasoning killers to men willing to recognize the brotherhood of men. Toynbee Twenty-two. And forget it.

  He shook his head gloomily. What he needed was a brisk walk along the sparse streets of Selena—the lunar settlement that housed the observatory staff and their families. He strode toward his shower room.