Damn her! She was enjoying every minute of this!
“Good-bye, Tarin Bul or whatever your name really is. I’m sure you realize that all this is going to your control as well, and so do we. Therefore, the first thing to be done is locate that little organic transmitter in you and excise it. But maybe we’ll send your control a copy of Talant’s recording session. Wouldn’t that be true justice?” And, with that, she walked out and the door hissed behind her.
I could not move, literally. All I could do was die a little each second as I heard the master psych turning on various devices.
Suddenly I felt another presence in my head. It was the start of the psych process, of course, but merely the preliminary test of my blocks and defenses, set up by the best psychs in the Confederacy. I could not be broken, nor could they—my mind, however, could be destroyed just like anyone’s else’s, perhaps with a lot more effort. In fact, my immunity to psychs in general was now the root of my greatest fear. What if they didn’t get it all? What if there was one tiny corner that was still me, unable to act or do anything yet there … ?
I heard a recording cube slip into place in the dark. It begins, I thought, and steeled myself.
But it wasn’t the beginning. Instead a thin, reedy man’s voice began feeding directly into my brain. “Listen, agent,” he said, “I am Jorgash, the psych in this project. Like all other Medusan psychs, I was trained at an institute on Cerberus, the only such institute for psychs in the Diamond. It is run by a master. Neither he nor we have any taste for the Four Lords, for Talant Ypsir, for this incredible alien alliance that might well destroy us all, or for the rest of it. We did not train to be torturers, but healers. Long ago we established our control over many of the top-level bureaucrats of Medusa, since Ypsir insists they all undergo psych loyalty reinforcement to him. We gained control of Laroo on Cerberus in that way, with the help of your comrade there. But that is out for Ypsir himself; he won’t come near a psych machine. Since he was once in an accident with Fallen and Kunser and at their mercy—and they saved him—those are the only two others he trusts implicitly. They won’t undergo psych, either, for any reason.
“It would be relatively simple to kill Ypsir, but that would do no good. Unless Ypsir, Fallon, and Kunser are all killed—and in a relatively short time—the elimination of one will simply elevate another. Fallon, in particular, is adept enough at the couch to create others outside our influence, as could Kunser. They make it their business to know. They do not trust any psych, but neither do they suspect that almost all of us are involved. But before any can move toward an effective takeover of the entire system, we will need all three dead close together. Accomplishing this will be difficult—may be impossible. The three are rarely together, with Fallon and Kunser meeting only twice over the past three years and only once with Ypsir present. I say this so as not to encourage you unduly.”
I felt some hope rise in spite of myself. Was this just a trick of a master psych or was this for real? I had no way of knowing.
“I cannot save you,” Jorgash continued. “I could not save your friends. But their minds didn’t have your strength or your core identity, built up and reinforced by master psychs. If I did not execute this program almost exactly as Ypsir tailored it, if any of the original you remained even on the subconscious level, it would show. It would show physically; you couldn’t help it, and that is exactly what a cautious Ypsir will be looking for. What I propose to do I frankly admit I have never done before, and understand only in theory. If my master teacher were here he could do it easily; he created the process long ago, for other purposes and for other times.
“What I propose to do is to push whatever of your core identity I can into a specific recess so remote from consciousness that it might as well not be there. It won’t be measurable in any way, and, in addition, all communication between the matrixed area and the rest of your brain will be cut. It is, a delicate operation—the difference between obliterating this core and storing it thus is a measurement best expressed as a forty-place decimal point. Even I won’t know if I hit it right or not, nor exactly what was saved—if anything. But what I am trying to save is your total hatred and contempt for the Medusan system and particularly for those people who would do this sort of thing to human beings. If your hatred is strong enough, if your thirst for revenge is strong enough, it might just survive, although so buried, and cut off that even you will not know it is there. In theory, if this part of you remains, a single stimulus could be used to trigger it, reconnect it to your psyche. The stimulus I will give you and reinforce is a situation in which all three principals are in your presence simultaneously. If I succeed, your blind hatred will rush out and you will then kill all three or die in the attempt.
“Now, this is a long shot. One of the three may die, in which case you may find yourself in the presence of the other two and not have your rage triggered. Or all three might never be together in your presence, in which case, again, it will not trigger. But all three have been together and may well be again, particularly under war conditions.
“It may be a week, a month, a year, ten years. We can’t know. But we can hope, and that is the chance I must take.”
A chance he must take!
“What you will be after you kill them, assuming you do and survive, I cannot say. Most likely the action will bring about a total release, after which you will again and always be what Ypsk has made you. You might become a wild beast. But you might have rational potential, depending on how much of you survives. Regardless, so thorough will the physical transformation and freeze be that you will physically, hormonally, and emotionally become what I intend to make of you. That I promise, although it is no comfort. Under a really good psych you might be restored intellectually, although, of course, as a new and different person with no past memories. I can do no less and still convince Ypsir and his test battery. Again, this may all fail—even my teacher succeeded only with fewer than ten percent of his subjects—but I can offer you, and your control, the hope that that beautiful creature by Ypsir’s side is in fact a ticking bomb that if triggered, could create such a power vacuum on Medusa that those under our control would assume power. I must proceed now, and I am sorry, but I hope this is some comfort. I have already spotted the absolutely ingenious organic transmitter in your brain, so I know your control has this information, too. Now only he and I will know. Time is short and the process long and arduous. Forgive me, Bul, or whatever your name is. Good-bye.”
Searing pain inside my head … Feel like I’m going to implode … Oh, God! I—
TERMINATED.TRANSMITTER DESTROYED.
Epilogue
1
He came out of it slowly, and shivered a bit as he lifted the probes from his head.
“That was most unpleasant,” the computer said.
He chuckled. “Well, God bless Dumonia, bless his devious hide. We might get something yet.”
“You seem remarkably fit for one who just underwent a wrenching defeat, faced his worst fear, and stared at mental savagery. Better, in fact, than you came out of the last three. I fear for your sanity.”
“You needn’t,” he assured the computer. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I have to argue with you, though, on the failure. We’ve finally met our aliens, gotten their names, and confirmed some of my wildest and least certain deductions.”
“Then you have solved the enigma?”
“I think so. Morah’s comments still worry me. I still have that gaping feeling, not that I’m wrong, but that I’ve missed something. That was confirmed by Ypsir’s own attitudes just now.”
“But we never saw Ypsir.”
“We didn’t have to. But he’s a slick old greasy bastard, an old Confederacy politician, remember, and here he was about to make a recording that he intended to flaunt to the Confederacy. That’s confidence. You don’t flaunt something like that if you expect to get into a losing war soon. Yet he knows the relative strength and power of the Confederacy military. H
e is depraved, vicious, and almost inhuman, but he’s not stupid. Even with two of the Four Lords gone and the scheme blown wide open—they knew about us, note—he still expects to win. Why? Unless our fundamental assumption about these aliens, these Altavar, are wrong.”
“You think there will be a war, then?”
“I’m almost positive. Actually, it’s pretty odd, but the best chance of avoiding war was the man who doesn’t fit, Marek Kreegan. I wish now he had lived instead of this slime ball Ypsir.”
“I do not understand. He was a traitor.”
“He remains the one who doesn’t fit. Look at the Four Lords. One is a classic gangster, a master hoodlum, and the other two were former politicians so corrupt they crawled. And then there’s Kreegan. What the hell was he really doing there? And how did he come to be accepted as an equal Lord by the other three? Remember, we just learned that the other Lords actually deposed Ypsir’s predecessor because they found him too much the reformer and not really corrupt enough to share in the running of their criminal empire. Everybody keeps going back to Kreegan, too—the only man who wasn’t shown corrupt, and who they all seemed to depend upon even though they had no reason to. Not only did he not come from the criminal class—he was self-exiled, remember—but Lilith has the least to offer the hidden war. Yet there he is, at the forefront, the leader.”
“He did not seem admirable to me.”
He chuckled. “Maybe not, but he sure reminded me of me, and vice versa. I look at Kreegan and I see a man on a mission, a very long and complex mission, not a corrupt criminal.”
‘There is no record he was on a mission.”
“Not for us. Well, maybe for us—but not officially. I think Kreegan, somewhere, on some other mission, stumbled on the aliens. I don’t know how, and I doubt if we ever will, but he found out what was going on years before we knew. Decades, perhaps, since there’s some evidence those aliens have been here all along.”
“Would it not have been more effective to report this information?” the computer asked.
“Report it? With what? He probably had no physical evidence. The Confederacy only believed it when they couldn’t avoid the truth, and even now they tread softly and slowly through the Warden Diamond rather than hitting hard and fast when the evidence that this is the heart of the conspiracy is right at hand. They would have declared Kreegan insane and destroyed him or sent him to the Diamond anyway. And so he played his role to the hilt, worked hard for twenty years—twenty years!—and finally became Lord of Lilith so he could take control of events. I think we killed the greatest Confederacy agent in human history before his plans came out”
“You think he was setting the aliens up for the kill, then?”
“Oh, no. If anything, I think he was totally committed to his covert war against the Confederacy, using those damned robots. He preferred a weakened, shaky, off-balance Confederacy to an actual war. That’s just what he was trying to do, in fact. I’d bet on it. And that fits in with Ypsir and Morah. I think these Altavar are stronger than we dreamed. I mink Kreegan assessed them as the probable victors in an all-out war, with huge masses of humanity killed. Sure! It fits! He had to choose between a covert war that would dismember the Confederacy or an all-out interstellar conflict he felt we could not win.”
“Are you going to include that in your report?”
“No. They wouldn’t believe it, anyway, and if they did they wouldn’t understand. It makes no difference in any event, except that explanation lays to rest a few of my remaining questions. He’s gone, and only Morah, who is good-but really hasn’t the skills of a Kreegan, is holding things off right now. Somewhere along the line, Morah and Kreegan met, and Morah, the brilliant master criminal, developed a Kreegan-style sense of what had to be done. He came around to Kreegan’s point of view. He is doing what he can, but he knows he isn’t up to the job. Damn!” He sat deep in thought for a moment. Finally he said, “Call Morah. Tell him to keep that meeting in session, that I’ll get back to him as soon as I have consulted with my superiors.”
“That is easily done. Has it occurred to you that they all are together in a highly vulnerable and exposed space station around Lilith at this time? Just one well-placed shot….”
“And then we would have to deal blind with the Altavar, and I’m not even sure we can. Besides, with what will you shoot them down?”
“This picket ship has more than enough armament for such a simple task.”
He chuckled. “So man can triumph over computer after all. How the hell do you suppose Altavar have gotten in and out of system, not to mention those robots? Where would be the first place you’d try out and test those robots to see if they really could fool everybody?”
“Oh. You mean that this ship is under their control and in their hands. That is a most unpleasant thought.”
“Bet on it. If you need any further confirmation, just remember that I sat down in a com chair up there, punched in Morah’s name and planet, and got a connection in seconds. No hunting around, no guesswork. The comm people knew who he was and exactly where he was at that point.”
“I could detonate this module, at least protecting our information.”
“Icertainly hope not. Right now I’m the only one from the Confederacy that Morah or any of the others will trust at all. They know me, in one form or another. I’m right there with them. I’m Cal Tremon, Park Lacoch, and Qwin Zhang, but uncontaminated by Wardens. I’m the only man they’re going to believe, because I’m the only one they have expert evaluation of.” He laughed. “I don’t think you’re going to get to kill me anyway, old friend.”
“It is not my intention to do so unless the mission is compromised.”
“Maybe, maybe you just don’t know it. But it’s irrelevant.” He got up from the chair and moved back to the desk area, pulling down a pen and a pad of paper. He always used pen and paper for his notes rather than a terminal. You never knew who or what was listening in on a terminal, but if you ate your notes you knew exactly where they were and in what form. Old habits were hard to break now.
He was at it for some time, until, finally, slips of paper, cards, and scribbled notations were scattered all over the place. Finally he picked them up, looking them over, put them in an odd pile, smiled, then nodded. He reached up and pulled down the special comcode set.
“Open Security Channel R,” he instructed the computer. “Tightbeam, scramble, top security code. Let’s let them in on the fun.”
It took several minutes to establish communications through the various secret links over such vast distances, but because these signals traveled in the same oblique inter-dimensional way as the spaceships, communication was virtually instantaneous at this high-priority level. Once the phone was answered at the other end, that is, and all the information was matched to decode what was going in.
“Go ahead, Warden Control,” came a very slightly distorted voice from the speaker. “This is Papa speaking.”
“Hello, Krega! You sound tired.”
“I was sound asleep when your call came in, and I’m taking a couple of pills now to wake up. I assume this is some other special request you want—like the Cerberan thing?”
“No. This is my report. I have the strong feeling that something important is still missing, but I have no way of finding out what it is. Instead, I have assembled everything that I do know and all that my deductions lead to. I think I have enough information to allow us to act and I think time might be of the essence now. There is a war council going on in the Diamond right now, and I think our time’s about run out.”
“All hell’s breaking loose throughout the civilized worlds,” Commander Krega told him. “That sleep you got me out of was the first I’d tried in four days. It’s chaos! Supply ships routed wrongly, causing factories on a dozen worlds to shut down for lack of raw material, causing dozens more to have to ration food’ and other vital materials because the ships didn’t arrive. Even some naval units have opened fire on one another! The num
ber of those damned robots—and the scale of the operation—is massive, Control! Massive! There must be thousands of them, all at different, usually routine posts along the lines of communications, shipping, you name it. Our Confederacy holds together by total interdependence. You know that.”
He nodded and couldn’t suppress a slight smile. So Morah had put Kreegan’s war into operation unilaterally, as well as mobilizing the vast political and criminal organizations the Four Lords controlled. “How are you holding out?” he asked, almost hoping for a really bad answer.
“We’re coping—but barely!” Krega told him. “We were prepared for this kind of thing, considering what we already knew, but the scale is beyond anything we imagined—and it’s devilishly clever. The people they took over are very minor, routine links in complex chains, but they’re at just the right point to make a minor mistake on a shipping order, or routing order, or even battle order. And so damn minor the mistakes are hell to track down. They didn’t go for the admiral, instead they went for a minor clerk who types up or sends out the admiral’s orders. We can hold now, but there are already food riots in many places and I doubt if we can stopgap this for long. You’re right about the time business. If you can’t give us an out, we’ve got no choice but to take out the whole Warden Diamond—now.”
“I’m not sure you can, Papa,” he said bluntly. “We missed it on these aliens. Evidence shows they’re every bit as strong or even stronger than we are. Hold on to your hat. You aren’t gonna believe all this.”
“Well, get going, then. But I’m not sure I go along with that military-strength idea. Logic argues against it.”
He smiled wanly. Why are aliens evil to a psychotic murderer? That question bothered the Charonese, who didn’t answer it. He could.
Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail Page 24