Psykogeddon

by Dave Stone

  "May I help oo?" Bruno interrupted.

  "Help me to what?" said the puzzled Professor, looking up for a moment, but keeping his finger on the book he was reading from, so as not to lose his place.

  "To paint a dog green!" cried Bruno. "Oo can begin wiz its mouf, and I'll-"

  "No, no!" said the Professor. "We haven't got to the Experiments yet. And so," returning to his notebook, "I'll give you the Axioms of Science. After that I shall exhibit some Specimens. Then I shall explain a Process or two. And then I shall conclude with a few Experiments. An Axiom, you know, is a thing that you accept without contradiction. For instance, if I were to say "Here we are!", that would be accepted without any contradiction, and it's a nice sort of remark to begin a conversation with. So it would be an Axiom. Or again, supposing I were to say, "Here we are not!", that would be-"

  "- a fib!" cried Bruno.

  "Oh, Bruno!" said Sylvie in a warning whisper. "Of course it would be an Axiom, if the Professor said it!"

  "- that would be accepted, if people were civil," continued the Professor, "so it would be another Axiom!"

  "It might be an Axeldum," Bruno said, "but it wouldn't be true!"

  "Ignorance of Axioms," the Lecturer continued, "is a great drawback in life. It wastes so much time to have to say them over and over again. For instance, take the Axiom, 'Nothing is greater than itself'; that is, 'Nothing can contain itself'. How often do you hear people say, "He was so excited he was unable to contain himself"? Why of course he was unable! The excitement had nothing to do with it!"

  "I say, look here, you know!" said the Emperor, who was getting a little restless. "How many Axioms are you going to give us? At this rate, we sha'n't get to the Experiments till to-morrow-week!"

  "Oh, sooner than that, I assure you!" the Professor replied, looking up in alarm. "There are only," (he referred to his notes again) "only two more, that are really necessary."

  "Read 'em out and get on to the Specimens," grumbled the Emperor.

  "The First Axiom," the Professor read out in a great hurry, "consists of these words, 'Whatever is, is.' And the Second consists of these words, 'Whatever isn't, isn't.' We will now go on to the Specimens. The first tray contains Crystals and other Things." He drew it towards him, and again referred to his notebook. "Some of the labels - owing to insufficient adhesion-" Here he stopped again, and carefully examined the page with his eye-glass. "I can't read the rest of the sentence," he said at last, "but it means that the labels have come loose, and the Things have got mixed..."

  - Lewis Carroll

  Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

  TWELVE

  "My object all sublime

  I shall achieve in time -

  To let the punishment fit the crime -

  The punishment fit the crime."

  - The Mikado

  "And there," said Barnstable Wheems, "lies the crux of the entire case before this hearing. Throughout the evidence presented here, my client has demonstrated a profound moral sense - a profound sense of right and wrong - to the extent that he can cogently, if self-righteously, argue against flaws self-evident in the fundamental nature of the Justice Department of Mega-City One itself. With some justification, I might add, though the ultimate validity of those arguments is quite beside the point.

  "There is a vital, area, however, where this profound moral sense is singularly lacking. There are some questions he simply, and glaringly, fails to consider for the simple fact that he is unaware they even exist."

  "I've got a little man in my head," said Efil Drago San, with perfect calm. "His name is Jeremy and he wears a little hat."

  Every single person in the chamber - including Barnstable Wheems, but with the exception of the drooling and senile Brit-Cit Senior Judges - turned to look at Drago San with surprise. Not only at the fact that this was the first time he had actually spoken during the proceedings, but at the sheer stupidity of what he had said.

  Barnstable Wheems, having something to say on tap, recovered first.

  "My client," he said, "despite his profound moral sense, has throughout his life, if there has ever been the possibility of killing another human being, arranged matters to do so. It is an innate, absolute and uncontrollable compulsion. He does not even so much as attempt to justify this, because the morality, or lack of it, in his actions never enters his head. It quite simply never occurs to him.

  "In this particular and specialised case, he is utterly unable to distinguish right or wrong - and in such a circumstance there is only one verdict possible in the eyes of the Law. My client, I submit, whatever the nature of his crimes, cannot be anything other than not guilty by reason of insanity!"

  There are some lies, some distortions of the truth, that are so basically at odds with the world as it is that they can stun you with their sheer enormity. There are so many different reasons why the lie is wrong that, for a moment, the mind short-circuits as it tries to work out which one to put forward first.

  During which time, more often than not, the liar has safely made his escape or won an election.

  The moment of stunned silence was broken by a sudden uproar from the Brit-Cit Senior Judges making up the board of adjudication.

  "HE'S RIGHT, Y'KNOW!" shouted the one with the ear-trumpet, with the over-loudness of the profoundly deaf. "MAN'S AS MAD AS A BOX OF FROGS, PLAIN AS THE NOSE ON YOUR FACE! CAN'T BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR HIS ACTIONS OR MY NAME'S NOT... Oh, blast, I've forgotten my name."

  "I must... heh... admit that if the defendant is criminally insane, then his... ungh... punishment falls outside of the direct remit of the Law," said another one.

  "HUH? WHUH?" said the one with the ear-trumpet.

  "I like strangling moles," said another Brit-Cit Senior Judge. "Got any moles?"

  It was as if the board of adjudicators had been waiting for this, primed to react in a specific manner and by rote - except, quite possibly, on the matter of moles.

  For her part, with the question of insanity hanging in the air, Chief Judge Hershey felt as though the world was sliding into it. The situation had turned utterly ridiculous, but it was the ridiculousness of a psychotic break.

  It was the equivalent of dealing with a schizophrenic, say, who believed that the Machine Germans were killing people and replacing them with physically identical robots. You could point out how flat-out stupid the delusion was all you liked... but that wasn't much help in dealing with a schizophrenic trying to stab you believing you were a robot made by the Machine Germans.

  In one fell swoop, the possible outcomes of this hearing had changed from a simple contest over rightful custody to a situation where anything could happen. The Brit-Cit board of adjudication could even, conceivably, decide that Efil Drago San should be released into care-of-the-community - to let him, effectively, loose. The Mega-City Justice Department would then be forced to absolutely refuse, for no technically valid reason under the Law - and that was just the situation this hearing had been set up to prevent in the first place.

  It was only a small matter, in the greater scheme of things, but small in the same way cancerous cells are small compared to the overall body they infest. As Dredd himself seemed to be forever saying, Justice Department authority depended to a massive extent on the rightness of the cause. Even a small crack in that edifice might prove unsustainable.

  As if in response to her thoughts, Hershey realised, Dredd was now on his feet.

  He didn't cry out for silence or do anything to overtly draw attention to himself at all. He simply stood there, radiating an innate sense of authority until the uproar in the chamber settled down.

  Dredd waited until there was silence and then, with all eyes on him, said, "I agree."

  "What?" said Chief Judge Hershey. She had no idea what she'd expected Dredd to say, but it certainly had not been this.

  "I agree," Dredd repeated. "If Efil Drago San is legally insane, the creep can't be held directly culpable for his actions under the Law."

  "What?" said Ch
ief Judge Hershey, and pretty much everybody else.

  Dredd turned to look into Drago San's somewhat smug face.

  "The fact remains, however," he continued, "that directly culpable or not, he remains a danger to himself and others. I say we hold him in the Mega-City One Psyko-Block, pending psychiatric evaluation."

  Efil Drago San's face fell.

  "Objection!" cried Barnstable Wheems, a little desperately, as though this development had caught him unprepared and he was missing a page of the script. "We have still not established proper custodial jurisdiction, and I understand that Brit-Cit itself has, er, any number of highly regarded secure psychiatric units and rest-homes set in big leafy gardens..."

  "That's why we're holding him for assessment," said Dredd. "To make sure he's in a stable state to make the trip." He turned to Chief Judge Hershey. "I get the feeling that such an evaluation might be tricky. It could take years."

  Hershey, for her part, was feeling nothing more or less than relief. Dredd could sometimes be so single-minded that it was possible to forget the steel trap of a mind that lurked behind the impassive planes of his impact-visor.

  Not for the first time, he had seen the clear and direct way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Sometimes that clear and direct way might be the simple application of a daystick to the head, or a tactical nuclear strike - and sometimes it was a simple application of the procedures of the Law.

  "That sounds about right," she said. "A proper and thorough evaluation could take years. Quite possibly the rest of his natural life."

  And this was why, less than half an hour later, Efil Drago San was being dragged under Tactical Response guard into the Mega-City Kook Kubes.

  "Dragged" was the operative word, in a literal if not actually violent sense. Power had been restored to his paraplegic floater, making the handling of his bulk easier, but the guidance and impellor systems had been yanked so that he floated under his own inertia and nothing more.

  Such motive power as was required was currently supplied by Dredd, to whom Drago San was handcuffed. The cuffs could only be unlocked by a specific sequential key, confirmed by Justice Department Control.

  "Do you know, my dear chap," Drago San said, "this reminds me distinctly of those pleasant hours we spent in the fungus jungles of Boranos. Ah, happy days, and to think I'd feared that they had gone for good."

  "Can it, Drago San," Dredd growled.

  "And still the same quite scintillating level of dialogue," said Efil Drago San. "Oh, dear me, how I missed it." He grinned. "The loneliness of the Iso-Cubes drove me quite mad, you know - or it would have, of course, were I not criminally insane in the first place. Do you think I'll get a padded cell with a view?"

  "Keep playing the game," Dredd said. "The result's still the same. We get to keep you. You lose."

  "Now I wouldn't talk too loosely about winning and losing," said Drago San, "until the final results are in. Did you enjoy that little bit of extra play I did, incidentally, back there in the hearing? Dropping in a sudden, little bit of extra nonsense, at just precisely the right time to catch everybody on the wrong foot, so Wheems could deliver the actual killing blow? Little bit of the old one-two-there. That's skill, that is, even though I say it myself."

  "Yeah, and like I say," said Dredd, "you still lose."

  "And as I say, again," said Drago San, "don't count on it."

  The external butterfly-wing blast-doors of the Psyko-Block racked themselves apart and up on their servos. Inside, in a stainless steel-lined antechamber, beams of light washed over them - visible projections of the ID, personality and weaponry-scans from the superconductive sensor arrays in the walls.

  Dredd was generally aware that these scans were of two distinct types, depending on their targets, and were in actual fact looking for mutually exclusive things. In the case of Efil Drago San, who would be subsequently undergoing a positive barrage of psycho-neurological testing in any case, the scans were looking for the smallest sign of anything so much as approaching a weapons-signature.

  Since Dredd and the four Tactical Arms guards, who had accompanied him and Drago San from the Manta, were crawling with weapons as a matter of course, the scans weren't even bothering to look for them. Besides, all weaponry carried by Justice Department personnel was chipped and coded to their precise biometric patterns; if anyone else laid a hand on them, the weapons would explode their directional charges, effectively vaporizing the unauthorised user.

  Instead, the scans were checking for abnormal synaptic and neurological patterns that might indicate the target to be acting under duress, psycho-conditioning or the like. There was even a distinctive and recognisable pattern, apparently, that would show up if the target had recently taken a bribe.

  All of which was to say, effectively, that if the Mega-City Iso-Cubes didn't drokk around with their security, the Psyko-Block systems could reject you for knowing what the term 'drokking around' even meant. The pulsing lightshow attendant to the sensor-scans meant nothing in itself - but it went on long enough to have you feeling a little relieved that Justice Department personnel were commonly celibate, so the question of being able to have babies in the future would never come up.

  At length, the sensors awarded the escort party a grudging pass, and the inner doors of antechamber racked up, airlock fashion, to allow them access to the entrance hall of the Psyko-Block.

  And, although nobody in the Mega-City, or in the whole world for that matter, save for two particular people, knew it... something changed, at that point, in the Psyko-Block.

  The Psyko-Block security system spontaneously went mad. It was a quiet sort of madness, the sort commonly suffered by sad, quiet little men who the neighbours believe would not hurt a fly. It would be a little while yet before the madness took any overt form. For the moment it was merely running the acid-bath and sharpening its knives.

  That explained why nobody noticed the slightest sign of its cybernetic mental collapse - save for the two particular people who knew about it.

  Something else happened, too, at the same time Dredd and Efil Drago San entered the Psyko-Block.

  For months, years even, the Block had been pumping out a psionic, psycholeptic pulse, on a metafrequency undetectable on the conscious level by even the most sensitive Judges in Psi-Division. Over the months and years, the power of this pulse had been building incrementally - and now, abruptly, it went into overdrive.

  Only one person - one of the particular people who also knew about the Psyko-Block sec-system - knew the cause, but everybody would soon notice the effect...

  Elsewhere:

  There are worlds outside the world we know, no more than a hand-width away. Everybody knows this, deep down, which is why sorcerers, mystics, conjurors, magicians and shamans, priests and all the others who purport to deal with the mystical and spiritual are forever waving their hands around.

  It's not just a question of hand-waving, distracting the audience from a trick, a con, or a severe logical flaw, it's the subconscious hope that if one moves the hands in a certain and particular way, and does it just right, then those movements will somehow slip between the dimensions and engage, like the lands and grooves of a key in a lock, and open up portals and vistas to some whole new other world.

  And sometimes it even works.

  For the most part, though, it's a good job that it doesn't. Most of the universe, any universe, consists of an utter vacuum - and most of the actual things in it are of no more use. Opening up portals and vistas to an ontological point that happens to occupy the same quasi-space as a sun, for example, is nobody's idea of a good time. If an extraordinarily brief one.

  It gets no better even if, somehow, one manages to open a portal to a place that isn't absolutely nothing or instant annihilation. Alternate Earths, for example, where Nazis won wars and/or presidents didn't get shot simply do not exist in any way, shape or form. They only ever existed in potentia, and the fact of the world we know collapsed the probabilities entirely. Li
ke being pregnant or dead, you can't have a world just a little bit different.

  There is, or possibly was, a world where the Dark Judges took power, defined all life as a crime, and busily wiped out the entire population on an industrial basis. Not so much of a change from our own world, you might think, if a bit twisted and extreme - until you realise that the base constants of that particular universe allowed the use of Magicks that were quite horrific - and not just in the sense that they were being wielded by people who couldn't even spell "magic" properly.

  That world is a dead wasteland now, and worse, contact with it has allowed its surviving entities to cross over into our own, their sojourns killing everyone and everything with whom they come into contact, death and devastation trailing in their wake. And this is the closest world - sufficiently different, sufficiently self-consistent to cohere and exist - to our own.

  There are worlds more different and worse. Worlds so different, their inhabitants so inimical to life as we know it, that direct contact would obliterate all that we know, and everything we ever can know, as easily as the pricking of a soap-bubble...

  The chamber is just one that exists in an infinity of rock, one of the countless bubbles that make up the known universe entire. There appears to be nothing out of the ordinary about it in the physical sense - save for the objects that are scattered through it. Strange objects that have no business being here in the bubble-world, and never will. To human eyes, if human eyes were here to see, and were able to actually see things in the infra-red radiating from the chamber walls, these objects might include:

  A big, freestanding brass barometer, its workings shot and the dial set permanently on "blustery".