The Complete LaNague

by F. Paul Wilson

  “What did he mean by ‘ens’?” Eiselt asked.

  Hearn shrugged. “That puzzled us for a while until we remembered that his chief assistant’s name was Endicott. He must have wanted someone to tell Endicott something but never finished the sentence.”

  “Endicott? Where is Endicott?”

  “Dead too.”

  Eiselt rose wordlessly and started for the door.

  “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this soon, Doctor,” he heard Hearn say behind him. Stimulant supplies are diminishing. The Department of Production is so understaffed that it hasn’t been able to issue the latest production quota and so factories and mills all over the continent have had to shut down. We’ve had food riots in some areas because the Department of Distribution has fouled up its scheduling. There’s even talk of a march on Morgan City to demand more competence and efficiency in the handling of public affairs!”

  “I’m doing the best I can!” Eiselt gritted.

  “I know you are, and you’re doing it almost single-handedly. It’s just that I dread the thought of having to call in the IMC. But I fear it must come to that if we don’t get a breakthrough soon.”

  “Never! If we can’t lick this thing. They certainly can’t do any better”’ he declared, approaching Hearn’s desk.

  “Come now, Doctor,” Hearn replied. “I know you’re a dedicated Restructurist, as are we all, but lets be realistic. The IMC has the brains, talents and resources of a thousand worlds at its disposal. You can’t hope to compare our facilities with theirs.”

  Eiselt slammed his fist on the desk top. “We’ll solve this and we’ll do it without the help of the IMC!”

  “I hope you’re right,” Hearn said softly as he watched Eiselt storm from the office. “And I hope it’s soon.”

  EISELT MANAGED TO COOL his temper by the time he made his daily call to Sally. As her face came into focus on the viewscreen, he noticed that she looked distraught.

  “Something wrong, honey?” he asked.

  “Oh, Decker!” she cried. “They’ve gone!”

  “Who?”

  “Almost everyone! Students, faculty, administrators, fishermen, shopkeepers, everyone! They chartered groundcars and flitters and started out for Morgan City this morning!”

  Eiselt remembered the march Hearn had mentioned. “What about Doctor Bain?”

  “Oh, he’s still here. His wife wants me to stay with them until you get back. Maybe I’d better take her up on it.”

  The exodus from town had made her somewhat anxious and Eiselt wished he could be with her.

  “Good idea,” he said. Bain would look after her. After all, she was his patient and in her eighth month and if her husband couldn’t be there, someone should keep an eye on her. “Get over there as soon as possible and tell them I’ll be eternally grateful!”

  She ran a hand nervously through her brown hair. “Okay. Any luck so far?”

  “No. Every time I think I’m onto something, I wind up in a dead end.”

  The frustration was evident in her husband’s voice and Sally figured that the best thing she could do for him was allow him to get back to his work.

  “I’d better get packed now,” she told him. “Call me tomorrow.”

  “I will,” he promised and broke the connection.

  Depression was unusual for Decker Eiselt. In the past his nervous energy had always carried him through the troughs as well as over the peaks. But he felt drained now. He took the elevator down to street level and dropped into a chair by the window. That was when he spotted the dog.

  The dog’s gait grabbed his attention; the uneven, limping stride reminded him of another dog… years ago… at the university.

  Suddenly he was on his feet and racing for the elevator. He shot to the upper levels and burst into Caelen’s office just as the man was about to take another stimulant capsule.

  “Don’t take that! I’ve got one more test to make and I want you to try and sleep while I’m doing it.”

  Caelen hesitated. “I’m afraid, Decker. I’m afraid I may not wake up one of these times.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he assured him. “I want to monitor your cortex while you sleep.”

  “Are you on to something, Decker?”

  Eiselt pulled him to his feet. “I’ll explain as I wire you up. Let’s just say that I hope I’m wrong.”

  SUPINE ON A TABLE, a very groggy Dr. Caelen tried valiantly to focus his eyes on the oscilloscope screen and concentrate on what his younger colleague was saying.

  “See that?” Eiselt remarked, pointing to a series of spikes. “There’s an unusually high amount of cortical activity synchronized with respiration. Put that together with the symptoms of this epidemic, the nature of Sebitow’s research and his last words and the result is pretty frightening. You see, I fear Sebitow’s last words were a warning.”

  “A warning against what?”

  “Telencephalization!”

  He saw no sign of recognition in Caelen’s eyes.

  “It’s a neurophysiologist’s term,” Eiselt explained. “If a lame dog out on the street hadn’t reminded me of it, the concept never would have occurred to me.”

  “Forgive me, Decker, but I’m not following you.”

  Eiselt paused. “Maybe this will help you remember: the most common and effective means of illustrating telencephalization is to take an experimental animal and sever the spinal cord at midthorax, or at the neck. If that happened to a man, he’d lose the use of his legs in the first instance and also the use of his arms in the latter. But an animal with a severed spinal cord – a dog or possum, for instance – can still walk! His gait is often irregular but the point is he can still get around while a man is rendered helpless. Why? Because man has telencephalized his walking ability! As part of his evolution, the higher centers of man’s nervous system have taken over many motor functions formerly performed by the lower, local centers.

  “I have a theory that Sebitow might have developed a way to cause telencephalization, possibly for use as a rehabilitation technique… to let higher centers take over where damaged local centers are no longer effective. But I fear the city got a blast of the radiation he was using to induce this takeover and the symptoms we’ve seen led me to the conclusion that somehow the respiratory center has been telencephalized. The encephalogram seems to confirm this.”

  “But you said nothing was wrong with the respiratory center,” Caelen rasped in a weak whisper.

  “There’s no pathology, but it seems that the voluntary areas of the forebrain are in command and are overriding the local peripheral sensors. Thus the diffuse respiratory malaise and broken breathing rhythm when you exercised. The voluntary areas of the cortex were starting to take over. They are nowhere near as efficient nor a sensitive as the local centers such as the pressoreceptors in the lungs and the chemoreceptors in the aorta and carotid arteries which work directly through the respiratory center without going near the cortex. But because of telencephalization, the respiratory center is no longer responsive to the local centers. And there lies the problem.

  “It boils down to this: You and all the other victims are breathing on the border of consciousness! This means you stop breathing when unconscious! Without oxygen the acidity of your blood goes up and the local chemoreceptors start screaming. But the respiratory center no longer responds and so impulses are finally relayed to the cortex; the cortex is roused and you wake up gasping for air. That’s the theory. I want to monitor the voluntary areas to confirm or deny it; if activity there falls off as respiration falls off, then we’ll know I’m right.”

  “What’ll we do if you’re right?” Caelen asked.

  Rather than tell him that he didn’t have the faintest idea, Eiselt pulled a blanket over him. “Try to sleep.” The exhausted administrator closed his eyes. Eiselt watched him a minute, then went over to the drug cabinet and filled a syringe with a stimulant. Just in case.

  AS HE SAT AND WATCHED the oscilloscope, a dull ro
ar filtered up from the street. Going to the window, he saw a shouting, gesticulating crowd marching below. They were frightened, and they were angry, and they wanted to know what was wrong. Kamedon had been running so smoothly… now, chaos. Some areas were receiving no food while others received more than they could use; some factories were shut down while others received double quotas; and no one could be sure when he would next be paid. What was happening? The famous efficiency of Kamedon was breaking down and the people wanted to know why.

  Someone broke a window. Somebody else followed suit. Fascinated, Eiselt watched the march turn into a mob scene in a matter of minutes.

  He glanced over at Dr. Caelen and realized with a start that the man had stopped breathing. He cursed as he noted the reduced cortical activity on the ‘scope. Telencephalization of the respiratory center – no doubt about it now.

  He put a hand on Caelen’s shoulder and shook him. No response. Looking closer, he noticed a blue tinge to the man’s lips. With frantic haste he found a vein and injected the stimulant, then hooked up a respirator.

  Slowly, as normal breathing returned, Dr. Caelen’s eyelids opened to reveal two dull orbs. Cortical activity had increased on the oscilloscope.

  Decker Eiselt’s shoulders slumped with relief – and defeat. He was beaten. Telencephalization was an evolutionary process – although in this case the evolution was suicidal – and he had no way of combating it, no way of returning command to the local centers. The only hope for Dr. Caelen – and Kamedon – was the IMC. And Eiselt knew he would have to be the one to call them in.

  They would be gracious rescuers, of course, and would do their work skillfully and competently. The IMC would find a solution, rectify the situation and then leave, no doubt refusing to accept payment, explaining that they were only too glad to have such an opportunity to expand the perimeters of neurophysiology.

  But it would soon be known throughout the settled galaxy that Kamedon, the pride of the Restructurist movement, had found it necessary to call in the IMC. And pro-Federation propagandists were sure to waste no time in drawing an ironic comparison between Restructurist philosophy and the syndrome which had afflicted Morgan City.

  He could see it now: “Centralists suffering from overcentralization!”

  To put it mildly, the near future was going to be a most difficult period.

  Outside, the roar of the mob redoubled.

  WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS

 

  For John W. Campbell, Jr.,

  of course

  In the light of what we know today, it is difficult to imagine how the Restructurist movement engendered any popular support at all. But it did. Whole sectors at one time declared themselves “Restructurist” and agitated for what they called reform legislation.

  But “reform” was a gross misnomer: the Restructurist hierarchy was composed of first-order reactionaries, economic royalists who were avowed enemies of the free market. Their political philosophy had been thrown out by the LaNague revolution and the Federation charter kept it out. But they hung on, cloaking their ambitions in feigned social concern, mouthing humanitarian slogans as they maneuvered to exert control over interstellar trade.

  from Stars for Sale:

  An Economic History of Occupied Space

  by Emmerz Fent

  PROLOGUE

  THE ROOM WAS A SPECIAL ONE, situated in the far corner of a building on the outskirts of the Federation complex. The Continuing Fund for the Restructuring of the Federation had leased it more than twenty standard years before and had footed the bill for all the extensive and expensive renovations.

  The windows had been removed and the openings filled in and sealed. The wall spaces had been filled with a heavy mixture of synthestone and lined with a micromesh grid which, when activated, would distort not only the vibrations in the walls themselves but any electronic transmissions down to but not including the subspace level as well. The grid encapsulized the room and door, ensuring that an external amplifier attempting to monitor voices within the room would pick up only an indecipherable garble of sounds and no more. A psi-shield had been added as a final touch. Nothing within, short of a subspace transmitter, could beam a message out, and even the most compact s-s set in existence couldn’t hide here.

  Especially here. The walls, floor, and ceiling were completely bare and the lamps were self-powered floor models. All the furniture was made of the transparent crystal polymer that had been so popular two decades before. No hiding place in the room for any sort of monitoring device and any attempt to insert one into the Wall would disrupt the micromesh and set off a malfunction signal. It was the “safe room” reserved for special meetings of the upper echelon of the Restructurist movement. Elson deBloise had called for such a meeting today.

  Douglas Habel entered first. He was the grand old man of the movement, now in semi-retirement. He avoided the head seat with some effort – that belonged to Elson now – and situated himself along the far side of the conference table.

  Philo Barth came in soon after. Paunchy, ribald, a seemingly supercilious individual, he was firmly entrenched as a Federation representative from his sector.

  “’Lo, Doug,” he said, and fell heavily into a chair. He and Habel discussed in low, casual tones the upcoming hiatus during which all the representatives would return to their respective homeworlds.

  Doyl Catera entered next, a scowl on his face. He was young, an up-and-coming bright star in the Restructurist firmament, but his moods were mercurial… and he despised the “safe room.” Nodding to the other two, he threw himself into a chair and waited in moody silence.

  Before long, Elson deBloise made his entrance, carefully timed for last. He had a heavy build, dark brown hair graying just the right amount at the temples, and a presence that reeked of self-assurance.

  DeBloise slid the door shut behind him and pressed a button at its center which would mesh it with the grid woven around the rest of the room. Without hesitation, he then took the seat at the head of the table and extracted a small noteplate from his pocket.

  “Well,” he said affably, “we all know why we’re here, I guess.”

  “Not why we’re here, no,” Catera said with biting precision.

  DeBloise maintained a friendly tone. “Doug, Philo, and I are well aware of your objections to the security precautions in this room, Doyl, but we feel they’re necessary evils.”

  “Especially at this point of the game, Doyl,” Habel said. “We’re on Fed Central and this planet is run by the pro-charter forces. And while I must admit that during my long career they have, as a group, respected our security, there are others outside the political community who have no such scruples. I have reliable information that someone has been keeping close watch on our movements lately, especially yours, Els. I don’t know who’s behind the surveillance as yet, but at this stage of our plan, I must emphasize that we cannot be too careful. Is that clear, Doyl?”

  “All right.” Catera’s tone was resigned. “I’ll go along with the security charade for now. Let’s get on with our business and get it over with.”

  “I’m all for that,” Barth muttered. “The subject is money, I believe.”

  “Isn’t it always?” deBloise replied.

  He had remained carefully aloof from the preceding exchange, maintaining a pose of lofty equanimity. He despised Catera for his reckless maverick tendencies and, although he rarely admitted it even to himself, for his potential threat to deBloise’s position as standard bearer of the movement. But nearly three decades in active political life had taught him to hide his personal feelings well.

  “The sector treasurers are raising a bit of a fuss about the amount,” Barth said. “They can’t imagine what kind of project could possibly require such a sum.”

  “You all stuck to the agreed-upon pitch, I hope,” deBloise said with an eye toward Catera.

  Catera held his gaze. “Of course. We told them it was for a penetrating investigation into the wa
y the LaNague Charter is failing many of the Federation planets. It was stretching the truth to the limits of endurance, but I suppose we can ultimately defend our sales pitch if the plan goes awry.”

  “Have no fear of that,” deBloise assured him. “But the money – are the treasuries going to come through with what we need?”

  Barth nodded. “They’ll come through, but reluctantly. If it hadn’t been for Doug’s little speech, they’d still be holding out.”

  Habel beamed. He had recorded a short, stirring message for the representatives to carry with them to the sector committees. In it he had exhorted all committed Restructurists to rise to the challenge of the day; to free the monies that would allow the Restructurist leadership to gather the necessary information to open the eyes of the Federation Assembly and turn it around.

  “It was a good speech, even if I say so myself.”

  “It was,” deBloise agreed, “and it seems to have worked, which is of primary importance. Now we can finally set the plan into motion.”

  “I still have my reservations, Elson,” Catera said, and the other occupants in the room held their breath. Catera’s sector was one of the richest and they were counting on it for a large share of the money. If he held back...

  “How could you possibly object to the plan, Doyl?” Habel said with all the fatherliness he could muster.

  “It’s a moral question, actually. Do we have the right to play political games with a technological innovation of this magnitude? It has the capacity to revolutionize interstellar travel and could eventually make all planets neighbors.”

  “We’re not playing games, Doyl,” deBloise replied with passion. “What we intend to do will move us closer to the goals of the movement. An opportunity like this presents itself once in a lifetime – once in a millennium! If properly handled, it can bring all our efforts to fruition. And if we don’t seize it now and use it to our advantage, then we don’t deserve to call ourselves Restructurists!”