“And Father certainly has a balanced, judicious mind, Rod,” said Jane, a bit defiantly. “Only—darn him—he wouldn’t let me read those books.”
Caquer grinned at her. The professor’s use of the word “Graydex” had reassured him.
Renting Graydex books was only a misdemeanor, after all.
“Ever read any Graydex books, Rod?” the professor asked. Caquer shook his head.
“Then you’ve probably never heard of hypnotism. Some of the circumstances in the Deem case—Well, I’ve wondered whether hypnotism might have been used.”
“I’m afraid I don’t even know what it is, Professor.”
The frail little man sighed.
“That’s because you’ve never read illicit books, Rod,” said Gordon. “Hypnotism is the control of one mind by another, and it reached a pretty high state of development before it was outlawed. You’ve never heard of the Kaprelian Order or the Vargas Wheel?”
Caquer shook his head.
“The history of the subject is in Graydex books, in several of them,” said the professor. “The actual methods, and how a Vargas Wheel is constructed would be Blackdex, high on the roster of lawlessness. Of course I haven’t read that, but I have read the history.”
“A man by the name of Mesmer, way back in the Eighteenth Century, was one of the first practitioners, if not the discoverer, of hypnotism. At any rate, he put it on a more or less scientific basis. By the Twentieth Century, quite a bit had been learned about it—and it became extensively used in medicine.”
“A hundred years later, doctors were treating almost as many patients through hypnotism as through drugs and surgery. True, there were cases of its misuse, but they were relatively few.”
“But another hundred years brought a big change. Mesmerism had developed too far for the public safety. Any criminal or selfish politician who had a smattering of the art could operate with impunity. He could fool all the people all the time, and get away with it.”
“You mean he could really make people think anything he wanted them to?” Caquer asked.
“Not only that, he could make them do anything he wanted. With the use of television one speaker could visibly and directly talk to millions of people.”
“But couldn’t the government have regulated the art?”
Professor Gordon smiled thinly “How, when legislators were human, too, and as subject to hypnotism as the people under them? And then, to complicate things almost hopelessly, came the invention of the Vargas Wheel.”
“It had been known, back as far as the Nineteenth Century, that an arrangement of moving mirrors could throw anyone who watched it into a state of hypnotic submission. And thought transmission had been experimented with in the Twenty-first Century. It was in the following one that Vargas combined and perfected the two into the Vargas Wheel. A sort of helmet affair, really, with a revolving wheel of specially constructed tricky mirrors on top of it.”
“How did it work, Professor?” asked Caquer.
“The wearer of a Vargas Wheel helmet had immediate and automatic control over anyone who saw him—directly, or in a television screen,” said Gordon. The mirrors in the small turning wheel produced instantaneous hypnosis and the helmet—somehow—brought thoughts of its wearer to bear through the wheel and impressed upon his subjects any thoughts he wished to transmit.
“In fact, the helmet itself—or the wheel—could be set to produce certain fixed illusions without the necessity of the operator speaking, or even concentrating, on those points. Or the control could be direct, from his mind.”
“Ouch,” said Caquer. “A thing like that would—I can certainly see why instructions in making a Vargas Wheel would be Blackdexed. Suffering Asteroids! A man with one of these could—”
“Could do almost anything. Including killing a man and making the manner of his death appear five different ways to five different observers.”
Caquer whistled softly. “And including playing nine man Morris with soapbox radicals—or they wouldn’t even have to be radicals, but just ordinary orthodox citizens.”
“Nine men?” Jane Gordon demanded. “What’s this about nine men, Rod?”
“I hadn’t heard about it.”
But Rod was already standing up.
“Haven’t time to explain, Icicle,” he said. “Tell you tomorrow, but I must get down to—Wait a minute, Professor, is that all you know about the Vargas Wheel business?”
“Absolutely all, my boy. It just occurred to me as a possibility. There were only five or six of them ever made, and finally the government got hold of them and destroyed them, one by one. It cost millions of lives to do it.”
“When they finally got everything cleaned up, colonization of the planets was starting, and an international council had been started with control over all governments. They decided that the whole field of hypnotism was too dangerous, and they made it a forbidden subject. It took quite a few centuries to wipe out all knowledge of it, but they succeeded. The proof is that you’d never heard of it.”
“But how about the beneficial aspects of it?” Jane Gordon asked. “Were they lost?”
“Of course,” said her father. “But the science of medicine had progressed so far by that time that it wasn’t too much of a loss. Today the medicos can cure, by physical treatment, anything that hypnotism could handle.”
Caquer, who had halted at the door, now turned back.
“Professor, do you think it possible that someone could have rented a Blackdex book from Deem, and learned all those secrets?” he inquired.
Professor Gordon shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “Deem might have handled occasional Blackdex books, but he knew better than try to sell or rent any to me. So I wouldn’t have heard of it.”
At the station, Lieutenant Caquer found Lieutenant Borgesen on the verge of apoplexy.
He looked at Caquer.
“You!” he said. And then, plaintively, “The world’s gone nuts. Listen, Brager discovered Willem Deem, didn’t he? At ten o’clock yesterday morning? And stayed there on guard while Skidder and you and the clearance men were there?”
“Yes, why?” asked Caquer.
Borgesen’s expression showed how much he was upset by developments.
“Nothing, not a thing, except that Brager was in the emergency hospital yesterday morning, from nine until after eleven, getting a sprained ankle treated. He couldn’t have been at Deems. Seven doctors and attendants and nurses swear up and down he was in the hospital at that time.”
Caquer frowned.
“He was limping today, when he helped me search Deem’s shop,” he said. “What does Brager say?”
“He says he was there, I mean at Deem’s, and discovered Deems body. We just happened to find out otherwise accidentally—if it is otherwise. Rod, I’m going nuts. To think I had a chance to be fireman on a spacer and took this damned job. Have you learned anything new?”
“Maybe. But first I want to ask you, Borg. About these nine nitwits you picked up. Has anybody tried to identify—”
“Them,” interrupted Borgesen. “I let them go.”
Caquer stared at the beefy face of the night lieutenant in utter amazement.
“Let them go?” he repeated. “You couldn’t, legally. Man, they’d been charged. Without a trial, you couldn’t turn them loose.”
“Nuts, I did, and I’ll take the responsibility for it. Look, Rod, they were right, weren’t they?”
“What?”
“Sure. People ought to be waked up about what’s going on over in Sector Two. Those phonies over there need taking down a peg, and we’re the only ones to do it. This ought to be headquarters for Callisto, right here. Why listen, Rod, a united Callisto could take over Ganymede.”
“Borg, was there anything over the televis tonight? Anybody make a speech you listened to?”
“Sure, didn’t you hear it? Our friend Skidder. Must have been while you were walking here, because all the televis turned on automatic
ally—it was a general.”
“And—was anything specific suggested, Borg? About Sector Two, and Ganymede, and that sort of thing?”
“Sure, general meeting tomorrow morning at ten. In the square. We’re all supposed to go; I’ll see you there, won’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Lieutenant Caquer. “I’m afraid you will. I—I got to go, Borg.” Rod Caquer knew what was wrong now. Almost the last thing he wanted to do was stay around the station listening to Borgesen talking under the influence of—what seemed to be—a Vargas Wheel. Nothing else, nothing less, could have made police Lieutenant Borgesen talk as he had just talked. Professor Gordon’s guess was getting righter every minute. Nothing else could have brought about such results.
Caquer walked on blindly through the Jupiter-lighted night, past the building in which his own apartment was. He did not want to go there either.
The streets of Sector Three City seemed crowded for so late an hour of the evening. Late? He glanced at his watch and whistled softly. It was not evening any more. It was two o’clock in the morning, and normally the streets would have been utterly deserted.
But they were not, tonight. People wandered about, alone or in small groups that walked together in uncanny silence. Shuffle of feet, but not even the whisper of a voice. Not even—
Whispers! Something about those streets and the people on them made Rod Caquer remember now his dream of the night before. Only now he knew that it had not been a dream. Nor had it been sleepwalking, in the ordinary sense of the word.
He had dressed. He had stolen out of the building. And the street lights had been out too, and that meant that employes of the service department had neglected their posts. They, like others, had been wandering with the crowds.
Listening to last night’s whispers. And what had those whispers said? He could remember part of it…
“Kill—kill—kill—You hate them…”
A shiver ran down Rod Caquer’s spine as he realized the significance of the fact that last night’s dream had been a reality. This was something that dwarfed into insignificance the murder of a petty book-and-reel shop owner.
This was something which was gripping a city, something that could upset a world, something that could lead to unbelievable terror and carnage on a scale that hadn’t been known since the Twenty-fourth Century. This—which had started as a simple murder case!
Up ahead somewhere, Rod Caquer heard the voice of a man addressing a crowd. A frenzied voice, shrill with fanaticism. He hurried his steps to the corner, and walked around it to find himself in the fringe of a crowd of people pressing around a man speaking from the top of a flight of steps.
“—and I tell you that tomorrow is the day. Now we have the Regent himself with us, and it will be unnecessary to depose him. Men are working all night tonight, preparing. After the meeting in the square tomorrow morning, we shall—”
“Hey!” Rod Caquer yelled. The man stopped talking and turned to look at Rod, and the crowd turned slowly, almost as one man, to stare at him.
“You’re under—”
Then Caquer saw that this was but a futile gesture.
It was not the men surging toward him that convinced him of this. He was not afraid of violence. He would have welcomed it as relief from uncanny terror, welcomed a chance to lay about him with the flat of his sword.
But standing behind the speaker was a man in uniform—Brager. And Caquer remembered, then, that Borgesen, now in charge at the station, was on the other side. How could he arrest the speaker, when Borgesen, now in charge, would refuse to book him. And what good would it do to start a riot and cause injury to innocent people—people acting not under their own volition, but under the insidious influence Professor Gordon had described to him?
Hand on his sword, he backed away. No one followed. Like automatons, they turned back to the speaker, who resumed his harangue, as though never interrupted. Policeman Brager had not moved, had not even looked in the direction of his superior officer. He alone of all those there had not turned at Caquer’s challenge.
Lieutenant Caquer hurried on in the direction he had been going when he had heard the speaker. That way would take him back downtown. He would find a place open where he could use a visiphone, and call the Sector Coordinator. This was an emergency.
And surely the scope of whoever had the Vargas Wheel had not yet extended beyond the bounoes of Sector Three.
He found an all-night restaurant, open but deserted, the lights on but no waiters on duty, no cashier behind the counter. He stepped into the visiphone booth and pushed the button for a long-distance operator. She flashed into sight on the screen almost at once.
“Sector Coordinator, Callisto City,” Caquer said. “And rush it.”
“Sorry, sir. Out of town service suspended by order of the Controller of Utilities, for the duration.”
“Duration of what?”
“We are not permitted to give out information.”
Caquer gritted his teeth. Well, there was one someone who might be able to help him. He forced his voice to remain calm.
“Give me Professor Gordon, University Apartments,” he told the operator.
“Yes, sir.”
But the screen stayed dark, although the little red button that indicated the buzzer was operating flashed on and off for minutes.
“There is no answer, sir.”
Probably Gordon and his daughter were asleep, too soundly asleep to hear the buzzer. For a moment, Caquer considered rushing over there. But it was on the other side of town, and of what help could they be? None, and Professor Gordon was a frail old man, and ill.
No, he would have to—Again he pushed a button of the visiphone and a moment later was talking to the man in charge of the ship hangar.
“Get out that little speed job of the Police Department,” snapped Caquer. “Have it ready and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” came the curt reply. “All outgoing power beams shut off, by special order. Everything’s grounded for the emergency.”
He might have known it, Caquer thought. But what about the special investigator coming from the Coordinator’s office? “Are incoming ships still permitted to land?” he inquired.
“Permitted to land, but not to leave again without special order,” answered the voice.
“Thanks,” Caquer said. He clicked off the screen and went out into the dawn, outside. There was a chance, then. The special investigator might be able to help.
But he, Rod Caquer, would have to intercept him, tell him the story and its implications before he could fall with the others, under the influence of the Vargas Wheel. Caquer strode rapidly toward the terminal. Maybe his ship had already landed and the damage had been done.
Again he passed a knot of people gathered about a frenzied speaker. Almost everyone must be under the influence by this time. But why had he been spared? Why was not he, too, under the evil influence?
True, he must have been on the street on the way to the police station at the time Skidder had been on the air, but that didn’t explain everything. All of these people could not have seen and heard that visicast. Some of them must have been asleep already at that hour.
Also he, Rod Caquer, had been affected, the night before, the night of the whispers. He must have been under the influence of the wheel at the time he investigated the murder—the murders.
Why, then, was he free now? Was he the only one, or were there others who had escaped, who were sane and their normal selves?
If not, if he was the only one, why was he free?
Or was he free?
Could it be that what he was doing right now was under direction, was part of some plan?
But no use to think that way, and go mad. He would have to carry on the best he could, and hope that things, with him, were what they seemed to be.
Then he broke into a run, for ahead was the open area of the terminal, and a small space-ship, silver in the dawn, was settling down to land.
A small official speedster—it must be the special investigator. He ran around the check-in building, through the gate in the wire fence, and toward the ship, which was already down. The door opened.
A small, wiry man stepped out and closed the door behind him. He saw Caquer and smiled.
“You’re Caquer?” he asked, pleasantly. “Coordinator’s office sent me to investigate a case you fellows are troubled with. My name—”
Lieutenant Rod Caquer was staring with horrified fascination at the little man’s well-known features, the all-too-familiar wart on the side of the little man’s nose, listening for the announcement he knew this man was going to make—
“—is Willem Deem. Shall we go to your office?”
Too much can happen to any man.
Lieutenant Rod Caquer, Lieutenant of Police of Sector Three, Callisto, had experienced more than his share. How can you investigate the murder of a man who has been killed twice? How should a policeman act when the victim shows up, alive and happy, to help you solve the case?
Not even when you know he is not there really—or if he is, he is not what your eyes tell you he is and is not saying what your ears hear.
There is a point beyond which the human mind can no longer function sanely, and when they reach and pass that point, different people react in different ways.
Rod Caquer’s reaction was a sudden, blind, red anger. Directed, for lack of a better object, at the special investigator—if he was the special investigator and not a hypnotic phantasm which wasn’t there at all.
Rod Caquer’s fist lashed out, and it met a chin. Which proved nothing except that if the little man who’d just stepped out of the speedster was an illusion, he was an illusion of touch as well as of sight. Rod’s fist exploded on his chin like a rocket-blast, and the little man swayed and fell forward. Still smiling, because he had not had time to change the expression on his face.
He fell face down, and then rolled over, his eyes closed but smiling gently up at the brightening sky.
Shakily, Caquer bent down and put his hand against the front of the man’s tunic. There was the thump of a beating heart, all right. For a moment, Caquer had feared he might have killed with that blow.
The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 30