The Lost Perception (13 page)

“And the world’s wealth?” Madame Carnot went on boastfully. “We have as much of it as we now need. And the rest is assured. Through national assessments, we already take more than half of the revenues of all governments. Of course, that is but little compared with the flow we expect after we suppress the Screamies and the world recovers its productive capacity.”

Gregson bent close to the woman. “It won’t work,” he predicted earnestly. “When that suppressor on VJO goes into operation, the people of the world will rise up and throw off the harness.”

She shrugged. “They may try. But they won’t succeed. We have our International Guardsmen everywhere. And, should it appear that our authority is in danger, we have only to turn off the suppressor and let them have another taste of the Screamies.”

Coercion on an astronomic scale. And Gregson saw that it
would
succeed—that, actually, there was little choice. Either Earth was doomed to almost total depopulation by the fatal consequences of hypersensitivity, or it had to settle for an end to the plague—for world-wide suppression of rault—
on the bureau’s terms.

He caught her wrist. “Tell me about the Valorians. Why are they
really
here?”

But she wrested her arm free. “One who can hardly zylph,” she protested childishly, “does not demand answers of Madame Carnot.” She sat there with her lips stubbornly compressed against each other.

He snatched her rault caster from the table and twisted its knob until his glial receptors barely began responding to the assault of artificial hyperradiance. At first he zylphed only the physiological complexities of his own body, the flow of blood through minuscule capillaries, the slow catabolic attrition of dying cells, their anabolic replacement He advanced the setting another notch, until he sensed Madame Carnot’s presence in the same field. He dismissed the impulses carrying undesired major impressions—just as a person observing the totality of an intricate mosaic would ignore the whole to study detail within a small area. And he directed his attention instead at the complex structure of her mind, trying desperately to discover the secret of sensing attitudes and thoughts.

Vaguely, he perceived the evil, the total malignity, the lust for power that would not be blunted by senility. But there was something else in her mind—an avid anticipation that ran like a vibrant chord through the entire spectrum of her unconscious thought Something that seemed to throb with the eagerness of her malicious expectancy.

In the next moment the rault caster was knocked from his grasp by a hand which had darted into the compact field of hyperradiance so suddenly that he had hardly had a chance to zylph it. The instrument shattered and his arms were pinned to his side by two International Guardsmen. A third bent attentively over Madame Carnot.

“Tuez-lui! Tuez-lui!”
she screamed.
“Tout de suite—tuez-lui!”

In response to her frantic order to kill him immediately, one of the Guardsmen leveled a laserifle at Gregson.

But just then the entire room came ablaze with a tremendous burst of rault and abruptly Gregson was zylphing the whole building—everyone in it, all the electronic activity in every circuit of each computer and switchboard and automatic projector.

Madame Carnot screamed in terror, her eyes turned upward as though looking through the ceiling.

Then Gregson sensed the source of the fierce surge of hyperradiance. There was a powerful rault caster aboard a long-range hopper which was even now verticaling down to the tiled floor of the roof garden. As it landed, crushing tropical plants and scattering terrace furniture, the Guardsmen opened fire.

Valorians and humans alike poured from the hopper. The French windows burst open and laser rays sliced into the room. Caught in the crossfire, Gregson dropped to the floor.

Two of the guards collapsed and Madame Carnot, raked by several beams, slumped in the chair. Her brief, agonizing death scream lashed out like chalk screeching on a blackboard.

Even in the confusion of the moment, however, Gregson could zylph several outrageous things hurtling through the night sky, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles away. His attention had been demanded by their enormity, their deadliness, their brutal purpose. And he could sense the nuclear nature of each payload.

“Gregson! Gregson!”

It was visually that he recognized Kenneth Wellford, his British friend who had bought the Screamie package in London.

Gregson started to rise.

And Wellford tried but failed to knock aside the rifle in the hand of the Valorian next to him. Its linear amplifier spat out a beam that caught Gregson full in the chest.

Suspended over the Atlantic Ocean more than twenty-two thousand miles out in space, the massive, wheeling hulk of Vega Jumpoff Station lumbered through its synchronous orbit.

Laboring at but fractional efficiency, its life support systems were nagging inconveniences. As soon as qualified personnel was obtained by the Security Bureau
’s
Space Division, however, deficiencies would be eliminated. It could then be expected that the air would be purer in recycling, spin stabilized for a constant G factor, and radiation dampers brought up to more than minimum allowable efficiency.

Critically needed were technicians who
knew
how to operate the systems without having to rely on rault to zylph their designs and purposes. For Vega Jumpoff was even now generating the embryonic field of stygumness that would be expanded to blanket all Earth. And so strong was the field, already, that localized casters could produce no zylphable hyperradiance within hundreds of miles of its center.

In Command Central, August Pritchard, the Security Bureau’s assistant space director, confronted the bank of telescreens, fascinated with the surface scenes they were relaying.

But he paused long enough to address the intercom: “What’s your guess on the radius of our field now, Swanson?”

“About five thousand miles,” came the prompt reply. “We’ll have to ship more generator units up here and hook them into the suppressor circuit before
we
can enlarge it beyond that.”

Pritchard undid the top brass button of his uniform blouse and the loose flesh of his neck, until then bulging out over the stiff collar, sagged comfortably.

“How soon before we run another output test?” Swanson asked.

“There’s a shuttle craft on the way up. He’ll give us a ‘mark’ as soon as he enters our stygumness.”

Pritchard ran an impatient hand over his bare scalp. His nose wrinkled as he sniffed air that seemed once again to be cycling on the foul side. And, crossing back to the telescreen bank, he found his steps becoming disturbingly heavier. Station spin, still not under proper reciprocating control, seemed to be speeding up somewhat.

Damn! When would they send someone who could straighten out the whole mess?

They had said something about a man named Gregson. Used to be project engineer in charge of systems aboard VJO. Now
there was
someone who could help out! The hatch swung open to admit a gangling man whose height was only exaggerated by his high-neck uniform blouse bearing the Space Division insignia. Five stars on his collar identified him as director of that division.

“Test ship approaching,” General Forrester announced. “We can watch it on No. 13 telescreen.”

Pritchard energized No. 13 and its tube instantly showed the craft superimposed upon the blue-green pastel of Earth.

“We’re still out of contact with Paris Ground Control,” Forrester disclosed. “Wonder what’s happened.”

“Nothing significant, I’m sure. They’ve probably had their hands full pulling the string on those Valorian bases of operation.”

“I suppose so. But what puzzles me is the fact that we’ve launched only four of our nuclear birds. I thought we had twenty-two Valorian cells staked out to smash.”

“Takes time, I guess. We’ll get around to the others before the night’s out.”

“But that’s just the point. We were supposed to hit them all at the same time so that none would get away.”

Pritchard turned back to the array of telescreens. On the right, in the sunlit hemisphere, he watched a nuclear cloud boiling up over the Southern Ukraine; another in Egypt, east of Cairo. On the left, in the black of Earth’s night, two patches of residual nuclear fury coruscated against ebony velvet—one in Quebec and the other northwest of the Gulf of Mexico.

“Makes a nice show,” Pritchard observed.

“I’d enjoy it better if we could count more of them,” Forrester said uneasily.

The intercom rasped, “Shuttle nearing stygumness field.”

Pritchard glanced at the test ship, looming large now against a small Earth.

Shortly, thereafter they received their “mark” from the craft as it climbed into Vega Jumpoff’s immense field of stygumness.

“How about a range reading?” Pritchard called into the intercom.

After a moment came the answer:
“Eight thousand
miles!”

Pritchard grinned and nodded. “All we have to do is extend our radius to a little better than twelve thousand.”

“Then we can move VJO down into a lower orbit and keep Earth perpetually—within its field—shielded from all hyperradiance.”

“Only one hitch,” Pritchard reminded. “We need Gregson to get this wheel down there safely and stabilize the thing in its new orbit.”

Gregson rolled over on taut canvas and winced from a deep ache in his chest. Then he remembered Madame Carnot’s and the laser fight and he sat up on the cot, shaking his head.

All around were masonry walls damp with age and mottled by mold. The room was immense. A stairway hewed out of stone blocks climbed into the chamber along one wall, reversed itself and continued upward.

Gripping his chest, he stumbled to a window. Below stretched a panorama of tumbled ramparts and battlements, surrounded by an outer moat. There were several smaller buildings, turrets, lesser embankments, bastions projecting into an inner moat. All was vine-covered, weed-infested and crumbling with decay.

Beyond the peripheral ditch, a wooded hill climbed toward blue sky. In the other direction, the same slope, mantled now with scraggly, neglected grapevines, continued on down to the bank of a broad, swift river.

This could only be the Rhine Valley. And he was in a room halfway up the central tower of a medieval castle.

Motion in the inner moat attracted his gaze and he peered through scrub trees growing from the ramparts and almost completely concealing two long-range hoppers. Then he remembered his glial cells and sensitized them. But he could zylph nothing in the stygumbraic blackness.

Seconds later, however, a powerful surge of hyperradiance assaulted him. It had not been synthetically produced, for he could zylph its emanation from Chandeen. Someone had turned down a suppressor that had, up until then, been canceling out all rault and cloaking the castle in a field of artificial stygumness.

Visually, he directed his attention at the two men who could be seen through the open hatch of the nearer hopper. Yet he could not zylph them, for the craft was concealed in a sphere of metadarkness which expanded and shrank in his hyperperception. Evidently, the fluctuating field was the same one that had recently enveloped him.

Gregson turned his transsensory attention on the castle. It was fully abandoned except for two areas. In a decrepit chapel in the courtyard, several men were assembling components into a massive and complex device that very evidently, at first zylph, was designed for long-range, hyper-electromagnetic communication—a cosmic transmitter meant to function on a principle involving a tight-beam rault carrier signal.

Two of the men were Valorians. Even from this distance it was not difficult to zylph their twin hearts. Scattered about the chapel and still producing hyperradiance, even though the artificial field of stygumness had recently collapsed, were several casters. They were like reassuring lanterns hung on the wall of a cave, Gregson thought, to push back the awful, threatening darkness.

Then movement in the central structure of the castle, two floors below, caught his attention and he zylphed Wellford and two Valorians. One, the alien he had retrieved from the field outside Paris, sat on a cot, her head bandaged.

Suddenly he sensed Wellford had become aware of him and was zylphing in his direction. Just then, however, the hopper’s sphere of stygumness ballooned outward and Gregson could perceive nothing more.

Moments later, anxious steps pounded on the stairs and Wellford, grinning, climbed into view. “Welcome to the ranks of the zylphers. I had no idea you belonged to the club.”

He had changed but little. The part in his blond hair was askew and his expression, though superficially jaunty, couldn’t conceal the persistent worry that shallowed beneath the surface. Despite his concern, however, he still seemed to be the genial, alert Englishman of two years earlier.

He approached and seized Gregson’s hand. “I say, I’m sorry about that laser blast last night. Did my best to divert it. But, fortunately, it was a broad beam.”

When Gregson only stared uncertainly at him, he added, somewhat testily and with a tinge of feigned melodrama, “Oh, come now, Greg. You’ve been misinformed. I
haven’t
come under the evil influence of the vicious Valorians. I’m
not
simply a senseless automaton in their hands.”

“How did you know I’d been told that?”

“I had a chance to give you a rather good zylphing after we picked you up last night.” He sat on the cot and provided cigarettes for both of them.

Gregson felt a bit less ill at ease, but not much. “What do you have in the works with the Valorians—a counter conspiracy?”

“Of sorts. But we do seem to have made some headway last night, wouldn’t you agree?—What with our raid on Paris Ground Control.”

“Evidently it succeeded.”

“Completely. We even managed to snatch some of the hornets from their nest for an exhaustive zylphing, besides doing a thorough job on Carnot. And there’s bound to be some confusion when the top of the pyramid is lopped off.”

“She actually was the top?”

“One of the first rault sensitives. Incredibly adept at zylphing.”

“As good as the Valorians?”

“Oh, of course not. We’re only
merely beginning
to zylph—even Radcliff. The Valorians have been at it all their lives. And we’re zylphing in almost total stygumness, compared with the rault-rich space where Valeria is.”

Gregson looked up from his cigarette. “And where’s that?”

“Closer to the center of the Galaxy. It emerged from the Stygumbra a few thousand years ago. Incidentally, thanks for picking up Andelia. We zylphed her in your car just before we regrouped. And, by the way—she is
not
a hypnotist. None of the Valorians are.”

Gregson, however, wasn’t quite ready to be convinced that the aliens represented the other side of the coin. For it might well develop that the choice between the Valorians and the bureau, if fully illuminated, would merely be between the lesser of two evils. And the most invalid evidence of all might be that offered by the aliens themselves or the humans in their cells. Suppose the Valorians
were
adept at hypnotic compulsion?

“The bureau went to a lot of trouble to make us believe the Valorians were masters of the suggestive technique, didn’t it?” he said tentatively, and watched for the Englishman’s reaction.

“Did it! As you know, they even made up one of their lackeys as a heavily sedated alien so they could display him on a stage in London and have him admit to the faculty of hypnotic suggestion. Poor fool, though—he didn’t know he was going to be slain in the interest of a convincing demonstration.”

Was that what had
really
happened? Or, Gregson wondered, had the Valorians only
persuaded
Wellford to believe that version?

The Englishman shrugged. “It was all well worth their effort, however. At least, everybody was overwhelmingly conditioned to kill Valorians on sight, rather than give them a chance to speak.”

Was Wellford even now acting under compulsion—biased in such a manner that he could only advance the aliens’ cause? For the present, Gregson decided, he would appear to be convinced of whatever they told him. And his reservations would go undetected as long as they maintained their field of zylph-forbidding stygumness around the castle.

Abruptly, he recalled the impressions he had received just before being lasered at Madame Carnot’s. “There was a Nuclear Exchange!”

Wellford shook his head. “No, not an Exchange. Just an attack. The
beginning
of an attack, rather—on our Valorian establishments. That was the principal purpose of our raid—to nip their offensive in the bud. And we almost did. Only four birds got airborne. Two hit their targets, but we’d already evacuated one. The raid bought us a period of grace, however, in which we were able to evacuate all the others.”

“For a moment I thought it was ’95 all over again, rather than ’99.”

“Oh, no. That can never recur. There’s only light nuclear armament left. And all the arsenals belong to the bureau. Since the countries belong to them too, they won’t want to cause any further damage to their properties, as they did in ’95.”

“You mean the bureau…?”

“But, of course!” Wellford assured, brushing hair back off his forehead. “That was a master stroke in their strategy. It was the bureau’s finger that squeezed the nuclear trigger four years ago. And for a very practical reason. The Exchange not only reduced national authority to impotence; on top of the Screamie scourge, it also created a vacuum of fear and military incapacity. By stepping into that vacuum, the bureau was able to assume—‘benevolently,’ of course—almost unlimited power.”

Wellford ground out his cigarette and rose, staring out the window at a sun dropping low over the hills. “You must be famished. I have something prepared below.”

On the way downstairs he added, “Incidentally, I’ve some delightful news. But there’s someone more deserving than I of being its bearer.”

“Helen and Bill!” Gregson guessed.

Wellford paused on the stairs. “No, not your friends. Nor is there anything we can do about them at the moment.”

“I’d like to try to call the farm again.”

The other shook his head solicitously. “We’re operating under the strictest communications blackout. The project involved here is most crucial. We can’t jeopardize our chances by having the bureau learn where we are.”

“What’s the project?”

“A summons for help to the Valorians. Within a day or two we hope to dispatch our message. Then you may look after Forsythe and his niece.”

In an identical room on the next lower level Gregson was left alone with his meal of synthetics while Wellford went to help out with assembly of the transmitter. After he had finished eating, he searched his pockets for the rault suppressor he had taken from Versailles. But it was gone.

Lighting a cigarette, he went onto the balcony and leaned upon its stone balustrade, gazing out over a hillside now touched by moonlight. Depressed by his uncertainty, he wondered whether he shouldn’t try to escape before it was too late—before they had a chance to bring him under slavish compulsion.

Studying the inner and outer ramparts that girded the castle, he located one of the tunnels that led beneath them to the hillside. The place didn’t appear to be guarded at all.

Then his eyes were attracted by movement at the tunnel’s mouth. There was a man coming through into the inner courtyard—cautiously, crouching. He stepped into the open and moonlight glinted on the linear intensifier of his outthrust laser pistol.

Other movement, even more stealthy, drew Gregson’s attention to a figure crouching on the rampart above the tunnel exit. In the next instant it launched itself into space and hurtled down upon the armed man.

Thrashing about on the ground, they flayed at each other and the laser pistol discharged a zipping beam that sliced the tip off one of the chapel’s minarets. Then the weapon was knocked from the man’s hand and his guttural voice exploded with German expletives.

Floodlights suddenly lighted the scene and Valorians and humans alike came running out of the chapel.

Gregson backed into the shadows of the balcony so they wouldn’t know he was a witness to what was transpiring.

The intruder was now struggling in the grip of several Valorians. A stout, middle-aged man, he bellowed incessantly at his captors.

Wellford went up to him, but had to shout several times before he quietened down. Then they spoke in German.

“What does he say?” one of the Valorians asked after a while.

“He’s a tugboat skipper who lives close by. He was attracted here by our lights.”

“He’s not with the bureau?”

“I’m quite sure he isn’t. We can definitely establish that later, of course.”

The Valorian who had disarmed the German retrieved the laser pistol and brushed himself off. “I like his spirit. We could use him.”

“It’s obvious we shan’t be able to let him go,” Wellford offered.

“Then let’s keep him under guard until we have a chance to persuade him.”

They hustled the German into the chapel and the floodlights went out, leaving Gregson with an appreciation of the thoroughness with which the castle was guarded.

“He’ll be all right—as soon as he learns,” said a slight voice behind him.

Gregson started and turned to face the Valorian woman who stood in the doorway, her slim form outlined by the sparse light in the room.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she apologized. “I’m Andelia.”

Warily, he went back into the room. “And what
will
the man down there learn, Andelia?”

“Most of the things you already know—and much more that you haven’t yet become aware of.”

Even by Earth standards, she was attractive. The head bandage, sitting almost like a turban above her sleek, olive-complexioned face, imparted an Oriental quality to her appearance.

“And when we teach him to zylph,” she went on, seating herself at the table, “everything will seem credible and he will no longer doubt us.”

“You can
teach
him to zylph?”

“Quite easily. In just a short while—a few weeks.”

“You can teach anybody? Everybody?”

“But of course. That’s what we intended to do when we sent our first expedition, wasn’t it?”

This time the deception was too bold.
Nobody
could learn to tolerate the Screamies and become functionally hypersensitive in a few weeks. He could vouch for that himself.

“You saved my life,” Andelia went on pensively, “and your friend Wellford has told me that I can best express my gratitude by telling you about—Manuel.”

Gregson was astonished. “You know something about my brother?”

“He survives and is well. You will zylph him eventually.”

“How do you know? What happened?”

“Our ship detected your expedition as it left the Stygumbra. For days your crew had been fully exposed to unobstructed rault. Many had died. Some had gone mad. A few we were able to save.”

Gregson stared skeptically at the quietly spoken Valorian woman. “If Manuel had survived, he would have insisted on coming back here.”

“He cannot return. Not until your world is entirely out of the Stygumbra.”

“Why not?”

Andelia walked around the table, slowly, carefully—like a woman on a tightrope. At first Gregson was puzzled. Then he understood that a person accustomed to zylphing would not be sure-footed in the absence of rault. She would not
know
what lay before each next step.