The situation rankled, and many of us were waiting for a chance to break out of it, to enter into a destiny which we still thought was glorious and unlimited. Despite all our setbacks, America was still a land of hope and dreams.
3.
I docked the ship, went through the space locks and came into a large metal room which served as the asteroid’s receiving station. There was a man there to greet me, bearded, older than me, in his mid-thirties, wearing black slacks, a blue and white sailor’s shirt and a black sailor’s cap.
He said, “Welcome to Manitori. I am Henke. Please follow me.”
He led me down a corridor and up a flight of stairs, then down another corridor. He stopped at a door, opened it.
“These are your quarters. Clothes have been laid out for you. The gentlemen always dress for dinner. The Governor will join you in the dining room later.”
It was a good-sized, luxuriously furnished room. On the large, low bed there were the clothes—a white silk jacket and white sports pants.
Adjoining the room was a white tiled bathroom, and a bathtub like a small swimming pool: Nothing like that on our ships. I took a long, luxurious scrub, gave myself a real close shave, dressed. Henke returned to take me to dinner.
The dining room was like a banquet hall. The walnut paneling must have cost plenty, to say nothing of the crystal chandeliers overhead.
There was a long table set with five places. Four people were already there. The tall, bald old fellow with the flowing beard, sitting at the head of the table, was obviously my host. I went up to him and offered my hand.
“I’m Ned Fletcher,” I said. “I want to thank you for letting me come aboard your planet.”
“You are most welcome,” said my host. “I am Mr. Smith. I own this little planetoid we call Manitori. The people here often call me The Governor. Please be seated, Mr. Fletcher.”
I sat down at the place he indicated.
“You will have noted that most of our places at table are empty. I do enjoy company, but strangers come by so seldom. Allow me to present my associates, Dr. Hanna and Captain Gomez, and my daughter, Vera.”
Vera was small, with curly reddish-brown hair framing features of considerable piquancy and animation. She was an attractive girl of about twenty. She wore a sort of pale green chiffon evening dress. I learned later that the dress was from Paris, though she had never been there. She looked at me and smiled, a small, wistful smile, and looked away. But later I caught her looking at me again.
What followed was a feast that would have been remarkable Earthside, but out here in the asteroids was little short of miraculous. Course after course was served by Henke and another man, also in a blue and white striped sailor shirt. Although they were skillful enough, they didn’t seem very alert. There was a zombie-like quality to them which I was to remember later. Captain Gomez was small and olive-skinned. He had a hair-line mustache and wore a freshly pressed khaki uniform without insignias. He didn’t talk much.
Dr. Hanna engaged me in conversation over the crayfish bisque. Hanna was middle-aged, with black, bushy hair and thick, hairy hands which shook with a fine tremor. He told me he was in charge of health services on Manitori, but that took up little of his time. He spent most of his time doing research. He didn’t specify its nature.
“It’s a pleasure for us all to see a face from Outside,” Smith said, at the conclusion of the meal. “For Vera, especially, I’m sure. She doesn’t get to see many young people around here. Mr. Fletcher, you’re welcome to stay here as long as your busy schedule permits. The room and whatever we can provide are at your service.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir,” I said. “I’m much obliged.”
“Good! Feel free to wander over the entire structure. Manitori is a wonderful little world. A lot of detailing has gone into it. Vera will be glad to show you around. You’ll find certain areas marked forbidden except to authorized personnel. This is for the protection of the few guests we have. The forbidden areas have to do with the energy that runs our world.”
4.
I retired early. The next day I went for a stroll around the planetoid. Wherever I looked, the landscaping was expensive, beautiful, and realistic. There was enough roughness of texture and irregularity of outline to convince you that this place had come about naturally rather than artificially. I marveled at the complications that had gone into this, how it had been put together and how it was maintained. I stayed a day, then another. So pleasant and perfect was this little world that it was difficult to tear myself away.
Vera frequently accompanied me on my tours. We wandered through crisp yellow meadows in the warm heat of a late summer day. Vera wheedled special permission from her father to stage a thundershower for me on the weather machine. She called up bulging, purple-bottomed cumulus clouds stacked atop each other like giant soft-edged anvils. There were flashes of many-branched lightning, long deep drum rolls of the thunder, and then the rain, and after that the mist.
We ran through the pelting rain, our clothes plastered against us, leaning against the whistling wind, and we fought our way to a stand of trees, slipping and falling and laughing in the grass-buried mud. We clung to each other shivering under a giant oak and while the elements raged around us, we clung together for warmth. I became acutely aware of Vera’s womanly presence. But I told myself to forget about it. Smith was a very wealthy man. I was sure he had more brilliant plans for his daughter than marriage to a spaceship driver.
One thing bothered me about this place. Even using sophisticated energy sources and automatic switching equipment, I didn’t see how it was possible for so few people to maintain such an elaborate setup.
There was something curious here. I really wanted to get a look at the Power Level. But the entrance to it was on a little hill and it was surrounded by barbed wire.
That evening Henke laid out fresh clothes for me and turned down the sheets.
“Henke,” I said, “what’s going on around here? Why is the Power Level forbidden?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about that,” Henke said.
“I suppose I’ll have to ask The Governor.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Why not? What’s going on around here?”
Henke looked at me steadily for a moment. “If you really want to know, I’ll show you.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Very well. But not now.”
“When?”
Henke thought for a moment. “If you can slip away without being noticed, come to the automatic weather station behind the Power Level at 3 p.m. tomorrow, when the others are taking their siestas.”
5.
The asteroid was run on a very Terran schedule, and the lighting and temperature effects were arranged accordingly. Every night the sun came down, the temperature fell, dew appeared, night came. In the morning the little artificial sun increased its heat output, a dry Mediterranean heat, and one felt sleepy and in need of a rest in a shady bedroom. I threw off my lethargy, however, and went for a walk as usual.
I passed no one on my way out. Henke met me in a clump of trees behind the Power Level.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “You might learn something—unpleasant.”
“Now you’ve really got me curious,” I said.
“All right, Mr. Fletcher. Come with me.”
We went into a side door cut into the hill that led directly to the Power Level. Henke led me down stone steps into a passageway below ground. Yellow lights set into the ceiling flickered as we continued our descent toward the heart of the operation. And then we were in the Operating Sector.
Henke brought me to a little room and opened a slit window. Looking through the slit, I could see below me a large amphitheater. At first I thought it was a kind of school. There were row upon row of benches, with tables in front of them, and men sat on the benches in front of the tables and stared into television monitors. They all wore black-striped T-
shirts, black slacks, and black caps.
I did not understand immediately what they were doing. I thought at first they were watching pictures on the screen. Then I saw that each screen showed a moving pattern of lines. Between the benches a few uniformed men strode to and fro, their hands clasped behind their backs, their attitude one of superiority. Obviously, they were supervisors.
I noticed also that these supervisors all carried small thin whips. When one of the workers didn’t seem to be working hard enough, the supervisor would reach out and touch him on a shoulder with the whip. The whips must have been electrically charged; a touch was enough.
“What are they doing?” I asked Henke. “What’s going on?”
“The people at the monitors are the mind-slaves,” Henke said. “They keep this planetoid going.”
“How?”
“Their mental labors, combined and synchronized through Dr. Hanna’s machines, produce most of the effects you see on this world. The mind-slaves have literally constructed most of what you have seen on this planetoid.”
“With their minds? That’s impossible!”
“Dr. Hanna has found a way to assist the principles of telepathy and psychokinesis. He can translate brain power directly into force.”
“Force? Do you mean electricity?”
Henke shook his head. “The force produced by combined minds is like nothing else the world has ever seen.”
I thought Henke had to be out of his mind. And yet, the setup before me looked effective and sinister.
“What is that group working on?” I asked. Eight men were seated together at a table, staring into their monitors.
“That’s the garden wall detail. Our walls, even our hills, are constructed and maintained almost entirely by mind work. Mr. Smith is very proud of it.”
“They don’t look like they’re having much fun,” I said.
“Nor would you if you had to spend all your waking hours staring into a screen and thinking about a hill or a garden wall.”
“And that group there?”
“They make the clouds in our sky. Other groups visualized and maintain other physical features.”
I watched them bend over their monitors, their faces strained, their bodies tensed.
“It looks like hellish hard work,” I said.
Henke nodded. “Your volition drains away. That’s the effect The Governor’s infernal machines have. All day you sit in front of your computer. You have to push your willpower at it constantly. And you can’t cheat. They can read our concentration levels on their dials and assess what kind of an effort we’re making. And punish us if we slacken. Not much fun, I can assure you. Come, we’d better get away from here.”
6.
We went out through the dark underground passageway and came out again into the light. We walked around the hillside until we came to a little stand of trees. We sat down in the shade.
“Is this all they let you do?” I asked. “Don’t you get any free time?”
“Oh, we get a few hours a day free time,” Henke said. “And of course, they can’t stop us from sleeping, not unless they want to kill us, which they don’t, not until there are replacements. But they take everything out of us by the cruelest punishment known to man, and all the more cruel because it is refined and mental. I mean the cruelty of forcing a man to think, deeply and with utter concentration, about something that he doesn’t want to think about, and to keep that up for hours and hours, day after day, week after week.”
“How did you men get here?” I asked.
“Some of us were recruited from towns all over America. Others were taken off foundered space freighters. It wasn’t so bad at first. Mr. Smith used to give us Sundays off, and sometimes Saturday would be a half day. We could go to the movies, and he even used to provide women for us from some of the space brothels that tour the colonies. I’m not saying it was good, but it was a lot better than it is now. We’ve been losing men, see, and Mr. Smith hasn’t been able to replace them fast enough. Now we all have to work almost around the clock. Otherwise the whole place would fall apart.”
Henke sighed. His ravaged face was stern. “Back before the emergency, it used to be nice after a tough day’s thinking to be able to think about nothing. Or to think your own thoughts. I used to think about where I was brought up—
Maine, up near the Quebec border. I used to like to think about those Maine mornings, the sun coming up over the fir trees, the whole world growing green and light. I thought about other things, too. But there’s no time for that now. We’ve warned him. He says he’ll do something about it, but I don’t see what he can do. We’re getting no new people in here and the rest of us can’t go on much longer.”
“How come you’re not in there with the others?” I asked.
“I burned out, and so they leave me unwatched,” Henke said. “They think I can barely communicate. But I have fooled them. I have retained the faculties of speech and reasoning. What I have lost are my other abilities. Long years of work on the Mind Machines have stripped my neuronal sheaths and exhausted whole areas of my mind. I used to be a pretty fair mathematician. Now all I can remember is the formula for the diameter of a circle, E=MC2. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Listen,” I said, “I can see you’re in a terrible situation. As soon as I get back to Earth I’m going to notify the authorities and see that something is done about it.”
“You are, are you?”
“Of course I am.”
“What makes you think you’re going to get back? The first few nights you’re Smith’s guest. That’s when he milks you of whatever small novelty value you may have.”
“And then?”
Before he could answer, I heard the sound of footsteps. Captain Lopez came up the hillside, tapping a swagger stick against the side of his starched khakis.
“Mr. Fletcher, you were asked not to go into the Power Level. Henke must have forgotten about their closed-circuit TV cameras. Huh, Henke?”
Henke cringed and didn’t answer. “Now you’ve seen what you shouldn’t have seen,” Lopez went on. “Well, come with me, Mr. Fletcher.”
I took a step back and clenched my fists. Lopez laughed. The side flap of his holster was open. His hand hovered near the butt of his automatic. It was as though he was challenging me—can you jump me before I can draw and fire? He looked pretty confident and I figured he might have reasons for that.
Lopez, gun out now, directed me back into the Power Level, down a corridor and into a room.
“You will wait here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing too drastic, I assure you. I want you to wait here while I confer with Dr. Hanna and The Governor.”
Lopez left and locked me in. I sat down to wait for the bad news.
7.
They only kept me in there a few hours. That’s not so long. But I tell you, it was hard on my nerves. I was thinking that I hadn’t been so smart, to let Lopez put me in here without a fight. Whatever happened, nothing good was going to come to me in this place. They could kill me, report that I’d taken off again, send my spaceship outward bound on automatic pilot. I was in a fix.
Then Lopez came and brought me out. I asked him where we were going, but he said that no questions were allowed.
He had the gun in his hand, as if he had divined that I might be desperate. I was still ready to jump him, but I saw no point in committing suicide. I hoped to get a better chance later.
He took me up to the big room where I had eaten dinner with Mr. Smith that first night. Smith was there, looking stern and imposing in the big chair, his great beard spread out over his chest like he was some kind of old-time prophet. Vera was there, too, dressed in dark slacks and blouse, looking, I thought, a little uneasy.
“Take a seat, Mr. Fletcher,” The Governor said. I could tell nothing from his voice. “It seems you have been looking into our family secrets.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Your
secrets are safe with me. I was just curious, that’s all.”
“What I’m working on is simply too important to let some outsider bungle it. I had rather dire plans for you, Fletcher. But then my daughter told me the big news.”
Vera said, “Ned, there was no sense in keeping our plans a secret after you looked into the Power Level. You should have waited, darling. But I don’t suppose it matters. I’ve told my father that we intend to get married.”
I prided myself on not doing a double take. What I said was, “Sweetheart, I’m sorry your father had to find out this way.”
I walked over to her. She rose and came into my arms. And whispered in my ear, “You’re doing fine, chump. Keep it up!”
“Well, Ned,” Smith said, “I suppose we might as well get on a first name basis. You may call me Cedric. Vera tells me it was love at first sight. That you two were plighted, so to speak, on the evening of your arrival here. That is the only thing which disposes me to trust you.”
He rose and came over to me.
“Ned, what I’m doing is very important. Not just for me, for all mankind. I will explain it to you in due course. Will you promise never to betray me?”
“Of course I promise, sir,” I said. It was one of those things you have to say. What else could I do? But it still sits bad on my conscience.
“Very well, then. Later, after dinner, I’ll tell you about my project.”
8.
“You catch on pretty fast,” Vera said when we were alone.
“What’s the idea?”
“It was the only way I could help you. You and I have a common cause here. You want to get away from this place, right? Well, so do I. Yes, I know, I’m his daughter. But he’s what you’d call over-protective. I’ve been here all of my life. I want so desperately to get to Earth and live a normal life. But Smith is lonely; he keeps on thinking up reasons why I should stay. I feel sorry for him, but I must get away from here, Ned.”
“OK,” I said. “You’ve got a deal. Help me figure out how to get back into the ship and I’ll take you anywhere you want.”
“Strictly business,” Vera said. “But you’ve got to make it look good as long as we’re here.”
Uncanny Tales Page 3