The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  The patient began babbling again: “I’m the three man, the he man, the tree man, the me man, the three man, the three man . . .” His voice faded and he slumped unconscious.

  Vomact walked out of the vault. He was a little unsteady.

  His colleagues took him by the elbows.

  He smiled wanly at them: “I wish it were lawful . . . I could use some of that condamine myself. No wonder the pain nets wake the patients up and even make dead people do twitches! Get me some liquor. My heart is old.”

  Grosbeck sat him down while Timofeyev ran down the corridor in search of medicinal liquor.

  Vomact murmured, “How are we going to find his Elizabeth? There must be millions of them. And he’s from Earth Four too.”

  “Sir and doctor, you have worked wonders,” said Grosbeck. “To go under the net. To take those chances. To bring him to speech. I will never see anything like it again. It’s enough for any one lifetime, to have seen this day.”

  “But what do we do next?” asked Vomact wearily, almost in confusion.

  That particular question needed no answer.

  The Lord Crudelta had reached Earth.

  His pilot landed the craft and fainted at the controls with sheer exhaustion.

  Of the escort cats, who had ridden alongside the space craft in the miniature spaceships, three were dead, one was comatose and the fifth was spitting and raving.

  When the port authorities tried to slow the Lord Crudelta down to ascertain his authority, he invoked Top Emergency, took over the command of troops in the name of the Instrumentality, arrested everyone in sight but the troop commander, and requisitioned the troop commander to take him to the hospital. The computers at the port had told him that one Rambo, “sans origine,” had arrived mysteriously on the grass of a designated hospital.

  Outside the hospital, the Lord Crudelta invoked Top Emergency again, placed all armed men under his own command, ordered a recording monitor to cover all his actions if he should later be channeled into a court-martial, and arrested everyone in sight.

  The tramp of heavily armed men, marching in combat order, overtook Timofeyev as he hurried back to Vomact with a drink. The men were jogging along on the double. All of them had live helmets and their wirepoints were buzzing.

  Nurses ran forward to drive the intruders out, ran backward when the sting of the stun-rays brushed cruelly over them. The whole hospital was in an uproar.

  The Lord Crudelta later admitted that he had made a serious mistake.

  The Two Minutes’ War broke out immediately.

  You have to understand the pattern of the Instrumentality to see how it happened. The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a plenum of the low, the middle and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and to keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong – ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed.

  With three Lords, the situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to citizen status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.

  This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan: “Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!”

  The Lord Crudelta had seized the troops – not his troops, but the light regular troops of Manhome Government – because he feared that the greatest danger in the history of man might come from the person whom he himself had sent through space3.

  He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his command – an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the incomparable communications net, both open and secret, reinforced by thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged from the Ancient Wars.

  Overriding, overridden!

  These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before recorded time began. Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of weapons, most often by cutting in on other peoples’ mechanical and social controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as they had taken them.

  But not Crudelta’s hastily called troops.

  The war broke out with a change of pace.

  Two squads of men were moving into that part of the hospital where Elizabeth lay, waiting the endless returns to the jelly baths which would rebuild her poor ruined body.

  The squads changed pace.

  The survivors could not account for what happened.

  They all admitted to great mental confusion – afterward.

  At the time it seemed that they had received a clear, logical command to turn and to defend the women’s section by counterattacking their own main battalion right in their rear.

  The hospital was a very strong building. Otherwise it would have melted to the ground or shot up in flame.

  The leading soldiers suddenly turned around, dropped for cover and blazed their wirepoints at the comrades who followed them. The wire-points were cued to organic material, though fairly harmless to inorganic. They were powered by the power relays which every soldier wore on his back.

  In the first ten seconds of the turnaround, twenty-seven soldiers, two nurses, three patients and one orderly were killed. One hundred and nine other people were wounded in that first exchange of fire.

  The troop commander had never seen battle, but he had been well trained. He immediately deployed his reserves around the external exits of the building and sent his favorite squad, commanded by a Sergeant Lansdale whom he trusted well, down into the basement, so that it could rise vertically from the basement into the women’s quarters and find out who the enemy was.

  As yet, he had no idea that it was his own leading troops turning and fighting their comrades.

  He testified later, at the trial, that he personally had no sensations of eerie interference with his own mind. He merely knew that his men had unexpectedly come upon armed resistance from antagonists – identity unknown! – who had weapons identical with theirs. Since the Lord Crudelta had brought them along in case there might be a fight with unspecified antagonists, he felt right in assuming that a Lord of the Instrumentality knew what he was doing. This was the enemy all right.

  In less than a minute, the two sides had balanced out. The line of fire had moved right into his own force. The lead men, some of whom were wounded, simply turned around and began defending themselves against the men immediately behind them. It was as though an invisible line, moving rapidly, had parted the two sections of the military force.

  The oily black smoke of dissolving bodies began to glut the ventilators.

  Patients were screaming, doctors cursing, robots stamping around and nurses trying to call each other.

  The war ended when the troop commander saw Sergeant Lansdale, whom he himself had sent upstairs, leading a charge out of the women’s quarters – directly at his own commander!

  The officer kept his head.

  He dropped to the floor and rolled sidewise as the air chittered at him, the emanations of Lansdale’s wirepoint killing all the tiny bacteria in the air. On his helmet phone he pushed the manual contr
ols to TOP VOLUME and to NONCOMS ONLY, and he commanded, with a sudden flash of brilliant mother-wit, “Good job, Lansdale!”

  Lansdale’s voice came back as weak as if it had been off-planet, “We’ll keep them out of this section yet, sir!”

  The troop commander called back very loudly but calmly, not letting on that he thought his sergeant was psychotic.

  “Easy now. Hold on. I’ll be with you.”

  He changed to the other channel and said to his nearby men, “Cease fire. Take cover and wait.”

  A wild scream came to him from the phones.

  It was Lansdale. “Sir! Sir! I’m fighting you, sir. I just caught on. It’s getting me again. Watch out.”

  The buzz and burr of the weapons suddenly stopped.

  The wild human uproar of the hospital continued.

  A tall doctor, with the insignia of high seniority, came gently to the troop commander and said, “You can stand up and take your soldiers out now, young fellow. The fight was a mistake.”

  “I’m not under your orders,” snapped the young officer. “I’m under the Lord Crudelta. He requisitioned this force from the Manhome Government. Who are you?”

  “You may salute me, captain,” said the doctor, “I am Colonel General Vomact of the Earth Medical Reserve. But you had better not wait for the Lord Crudelta.”

  “But where is he?”

  “In my bed,” said Vomact.

  “Your bed?” cried the young officer in complete amazement.

  “In bed. Doped to the teeth. I fixed him up. He was excited. Take your men out. We’ll treat the wounded on the lawn. You can see the dead in the refrigerators downstairs in a few minutes, except for the ones that went smoky from direct hits.”

  “But the fight . . . ?”

  “A mistake, young man, or else – ”

  “Or else what?” shouted the young officer, horrified at the utter mess of his own combat experience.

  “Or else a weapon no man has ever seen before. Your troops fought each other. Your command was intercepted.”

  “I could see that,” snapped the officer, “as soon as I saw Lansdale coming at me.”

  “But do you know what took him over?” said Vomact gently, while taking the officer by the arm and beginning to lead him out of the hospital. The captain went willingly, not noticing where he was going, so eagerly did he watch for the other man’s words.

  “I think I know,” said Vomact. “Another man’s dreams. Dreams which have learned how to turn themselves into electricity or plastic or stone. Or anything else. Dreams coming to us out of space3.”

  The young officer nodded dumbly. This was too much. “Space3?” he murmured. It was like being told that the really alien invaders, whom men had been expecting for thirteen thousand years and had never met, were waiting for him on the grass. Until now space3 had been a mathematical idea, a romancer’s daydream, but not a fact.

  The sir and doctor Vomact did not even ask the young officer. He brushed the young man gently at the nape of the neck and shot him through with tranquilizer. Vomact then led him out to the grass. The young captain stood alone and whistled happily at the stars in the sky. Behind him, his sergeants and corporals were sorting out the survivors and getting treatment for the wounded.

  The Two Minutes’ War was over.

  Rambo had stopped dreaming that his Elizabeth was in danger. He had recognized, even in his deep sick sleep, that the tramping in the corridor was the movement of armed men. His mind had set up defenses to protect Elizabeth. He took over command of the forward troops and set them to stopping the main body. The powers which space3 had worked into him made this easy for him to do, even though he did not know that he was doing it.

  “How many dead?” said Vomact to Grosbeck and Timofeyev.

  “About two hundred.”

  “And how many irrecoverable dead?”

  “The ones that got turned into smoke. A dozen, maybe fourteen. The other dead can be fixed up, but most of them will have to get new personality prints.”

  “Do you know what happened?” asked Vomact.

  “No, sir and doctor,” they both chorused.

  “I do. I think I do. No, I know I do. It’s the wildest story in the history of man. Our patient did it – Rambo. He took over the troops and set them against each other. That Lord of the Instrumentality who came charging in – Crudelta. I’ve known him for a long, long time. He’s behind this case. He thought that troops would help, not sensing that troops would invite attack upon themselves. And there is something else.”

  “Yes?” they said, in unison.

  “Rambo’s woman – the one he’s looking for. She must be here.”

  “Why?” said Timofeyev.

  “Because he’s here.”

  “You’re assuming that he came here because of his own will, sir and doctor.”

  Vomact smiled the wise crafty smile of his family; it was almost a trademark of the Vomact house.

  “I am assuming all the things which I cannot otherwise prove.

  “First, I assume that he came here naked out of space itself, driven by some kind of force of which we cannot even guess.

  “Second, I assume he came here because he wanted something. A woman named Elizabeth, who must already be here. In a moment we can go inventory all our Elizabeths.

  “Third, I assume that the Lord Crudelta knew something about it. He has led troops into the building. He began raving when he saw me. I know hysterical fatigue, as do you, my brothers, so I condamined him for a night’s sleep.

  “Fourth, let’s leave our man alone. There’ll be hearings and trials enough, Space knows, when all these events get scrambled out.”

  Vomact was right.

  He usually was.

  Trials did follow.

  It was lucky that Old Earth no longer permitted newspapers or television news. The population would have been frothed up to riot and terror if they had ever found out what happened at the Old Main Hospital just to the west of Meeya Meefla.

  Twenty-one days later, Vomact, Timofeyev and Grosbeck were summoned to the trial of the Lord Crudelta. A full panel of seven Lords of the Instrumentality were there to give Crudelta an ample hearing and, if required, a sudden death. The doctors were present both as doctors for Elizabeth and Rambo and as witnesses for the Investigating Lord.

  Elizabeth, fresh up from being dead, was as beautiful as a newborn baby in exquisite, adult feminine form. Rambo could not take his eyes off her, but a look of bewilderment went over his face every time she gave him a friendly, calm remote little smile. (She had been told that she was his girl, and she was prepared to believe it, but she had no memory of him or of anything else more than sixty hours back, when speech had been reinstalled in her mind; and he, for his part, was still thick of speech and subject to strains which the doctors could not quite figure out.)

  The Investigating Lord was a man named Starmount.

  He asked the panel to rise.

  They did so.

  He faced the Lord Crudelta with great solemnity. “You are obliged, my Lord Crudelta, to speak quickly and clearly to this court.”

  “Yes, my Lord,” he answered.

  “We have the summary power.”

  “You have the summary power. I recognize it.”

  “You will tell the truth or else you will lie.”

  “I shall tell the truth or I will lie.”

  “You may lie, if you wish, about matters of fact and opinion, but you will in no case lie about human relationships. If you do lie, nevertheless, you will ask that your name be entered in the Roster of Dishonor.”

  “I understand the panel and the rights of this panel. I will lie if I wish – though I don’t think I will need to do so” – and here Crudelta flashed a weary intelligent smile at all of them – “but I will not lie about matters of relationship. If I do, I will ask for dishonor.”

  “You have yourself been well trained as a Lord of the Instrumentality?”

  “I have been so train
ed and I love the Instrumentality well. In fact, I am myself the Instrumentality, as are you, and as are the honorable Lords beside you. I shall behave well, for as long as I live this afternoon.”

  “Do you credit him, my Lords?” asked Starmount.

  The members of the panel nodded their mitered heads. They had dressed ceremonially for the occasion.

  “Do you have a relationship to the woman Elizabeth?”

  The members of the trial panel caught their breath as they saw Crudelta turn white: “My Lords!” he cried, and answered no further.

  “It is the custom,” said Starmount firmly, “that you answer promptly or that you die.”

  The Lord Crudelta got control of himself. “I am answering. I did not know who she was, except for the fact that Rambo loved her. I sent her to Earth from Earth Four, where I then was. Then I told Rambo that she had been murdered and hung desperately at the edge of death, wanting only his help to return to the green fields of life.”

  Said Starmount: “Was that the truth?”

  “My Lord and Lords, it was a lie.”

  “Why did you tell it?”

  “To induce rage in Rambo and to give him an overriding reason for wanting to come to Earth faster than any man has ever come before.”

  “A-a-ah! A-a-ah!” Two wild cries came from Rambo, more like the call of an animal than like the sound of a man.

  Vomact looked at his patient, felt himself beginning to growl with a deep internal rage. Rambo’s powers, generated in the depths of spacea3, had begun to operate again. Vomact made a sign. The robot behind Rambo had been coded to keep Rambo calm. Though the robot had been enameled to look like a white gleaming hospital orderly, he was actually a police robot of high powers, built up with an electronic cortex based on the frozen midbrain of an old wolf. (A wolf was a rare animal, something like a dog.) The robot touched Rambo, who dropped off to sleep. Doctor Vomact felt the anger in his own mind fade away. He lifted his hand gently; the robot caught the signal and stopped applying the narcoleptic radiation. Rambo slept normally: Elizabeth looked worriedly at the man whom she had been told was her own.