The Ganymede Takeover

ONE

At three in the morning the vidphone rang on the bedtable of Rudolph Balkani, Chief of the Bureau of Psychedelic Research. It rang for a long time before Balkani answered it, though—as so often of late—he had been awake for hours.

“Yes, this is Balkani.”

“I want some information,” a worried voice on the other end of the line said. Balkani recognized the voice of the Chairman of the United Nations Security Council. “I thought we could have a little talk.

“Make it brief,” Balkani said. “I’m a sick man.”

“Did you hear the ’cast?”

“What ’cast?” He scratched his bearded chin.

“The alien ultimatum. It came over all the TV and radio—”

“I don’t waste my time with the entertainment media,” Balkani said. “What did they have to offer?”

“ ‘We bring you peace. We bring you unity.’ ”

“Spare me the propaganda. I gather they demand the unconditional surrender of Earth.”

“That’s right. But aren’t you involved in developing some sort of new mind-gadget, Doctor? Won’t that stop them?”

“True,” Balkani said with a touch of irony. “But unfortunately it will also stop us. It will, in fact, stop everything on or around this planet which happens to possess a mind.”

“I understood you could render some people immune to it. Say, vital first-line leaders.”

“Not yet. The only defense against it would be the radical psychotherapy I’m working with. If you’d give me a little time and an ample supply of, shall we say, ‘volunteers’ for my experiments—”

“We’ve got to have it now!” the Chairman of the Security Council grated. With visible effort he got control of himself; on the vidscreen his image became fixedly tranquil. “What do you advise?”

“I don’t advise,” Balkani said. “I’mjust the witch doctor in this tribe, not the chief. I make the little voodoo dolls, but it’s your job to decide whether or not to stick pins into them. However, I do have one favor to ask of you.”

“What is that?”

“If you decide to use the thing, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” Having said that Balkani hung up, rolled over and continued trying to sleep.

“Too unspecialized,” Mekkis muttered, eyeing the captive human with distaste. “However, with a little selective breeding.”

The Timekeeper fluttered near Mekkis’ ear and said softly, “Better start to ready yourself for the meeting of the Grand Council.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Mekkis said. His long, slender tongue whipped out and touched a pushbutton next to his couch. At once his dressers came scampering in, twittering excitedly to each other. Mekkis hunched himself up to make the task easier for them.

He was, like all members of the Ganymedian ruling species, legless, armless, pink and very much like a large worm in appearance. He did not need arms and legs of his own. The Creeches constituted his arms and legs; this summed up their purpose in existing. It was for that that they had been born, were bred.

Now they busily slipped him into his finest red-orange formal sack. Nothing but the best for what might well be the most important day of his career in government service. Tiny grooms skittered over his head and set to work combing his extensive lashes, while washers, with their tongues, attended to his cheeks. During this he glanced once more at the captive human. Poor creatures, he thought. You should never have called our attention to your presence in the system.

Mekkis had personally argued against the war. But—now it had been accomplished. “Too late for tears,” he murmured aloud. “And it isn’t so bad being a creech. Is it, my friends?”

“No, no it’s all right,” twittered the infinitely varied crowd of specialized beings that had gathered around him, making him ready.

“First conquer, then occupy, then absorb. That’s the way it’s done. We’ve already gotten past the initial two phases without too much difficulty . unless I’m wildy mistaken, today we pass into phase three.” And, he thought, that’s where I come in.

To make absolutely certain he called for his Oracle.

Serpent-like the Oracle approached.

“What say you for the future?” Mekkis demanded.

“For today?” the precog said. Mekkis noticed with uneasiness that the creech seemed unwilling to prophesy.

“Yes, out with it!”

“The powers of darkness gather for you. It is the day of your enemies!”

Mekkis licked his lips and said, “But after that?”

“More darkness, and greater darkness, and finally, oh my good master, darkness for us all!”

Mekkis pondered this soberly. The Oracle had advised against the invasion of Earth; hence Mekkis’ own opposition. But the invasion had been a success. There were those who doubted the power of Oracles. Perhaps, he conjectured, the future is unknowable after all. It’s easy enough to utter vague and frightening words that nobody really understands, then later on say, “You see? That’s what I meant all along.”

“These powers of darkness,” Mekkis said aloud. “Is there anything I can do to evade them?”

“Today? Nothing. But after that—a slim chance. If you solve the Riddle of the Nowhere Girl.”

“What Nowhere Girl?” Mekkis retained his composure only with great effort.

“My faculty is limited and my vision is fading. But I see something approaching from the future which I find no words to describe. It has the manner of a vast cavity that reaches out to draw us in! Already it is so powerful that it bends the stream of time. The closer you get to it the harder it will be to evade it. Oh master, I’m afraid! I, who have never been afraid before, am now eclipsed by terror.”

Mekkis thought, There’s nothing I can do to evade my misfortune today, so I might as well go forth and meet it, without flinching or blanching. I can’t control the fates, but I can control my reaction to them.

With a wave of his tongue he summoned his carriers and started for the Hall of the Grand Council.

On the wall of the Grand Council Hall hung a great clock. All those who belonged to what one might call the Progressive Faction sat on the same side of the chamber as the clock. It was the clock faction that had pushed through the war against Earth. Those who sat on the side away from the clock comprised what one might call the Conservatives. They had, unsuccessfully, opposed the war. It was to this faction that Mekkis belonged.

When Mekkis manifested himself in the hall with customary pomp he discovered no one reposing on the anti-clock side. Everyone, in entering, had gathered about the clock leaders; Mekkis, lowered to the thick carpet by his carriers, remained inert, stunned.

But he had already sworn a moral oath to himself. Painfully and steadily he made his way toward his traditional tooth-carved niche on the anti-clock side; there, alone, he took up the formal bent posture and eyed the senile idiots of the bench. And recalled, as he waited, that the expected darkness lay for him at tongue’s end.

They won the war, he thought to himself, and that gives them the fulcrum to pry the dribbling Electors into ratifying all their future connivances. I, however, will never give in. But—I will not be the order-giver. Only the order-carry-outer.

Seeing him present the Electors at the bench convened this most important session.

“In your absence,” came the thought from the Mind Group, “we initiated the distribution of Terran rulership. Your area awaits you, naturally; you have not been ignored.”

Mekkis retorted with huge irony, “And what bale is left for me?” No doubt a worthless scrap of a bale, the dregs. He experienced through the union of the Group Mind the collective sardonic amusement of the Common, directed at him; they enjoyed his frustration and impotence. “Name me that bale,” he said, and prepared to endure it, whatever it consisted of, however ignoble.

“The bale,” the Chief Elector informed him gleefully, “arranged for your management, is the Bale of Tennessee.”

“Allow me to consult my reference material,” Mekkis said, and, by telepathic communication, established contact with his librarian at his residence. A moment later there visually appeared within his brain a full description, itemization and map of the bale. And evaluation thereof.

Mekkis fainted dead away.

The next he knew he lay supine in the general chamber of Major Cardinal Zency’s residence; he had been transported to the home of his friend to recover his wits.

“We tried to prepare you,” Zency said, coiled nearby solicitously. “A little splash of brigwater and laut? It’ll clear your head.”

“The pnagdruls,” Mekkis swore thickly.

“Well, you’ll live many more years. Eventually—”

“A lifetime of work.” He managed to raise the fore-portion of his body and steady himself. “I won’t go. I’ll resign from public service.”

“Then you can never again—”

“I don’t want ever again to enter the Common. I’ll live out my life on a satellite. Alone.” He felt rotten. As if he had been stepped on by one of the clumsy enormous bi-pedal lower life forms. “Please. Give me something to lap.”

Presently an obliging staff member of Zency’s domicile placed an ornate, chaste dish before him; he lapped dully, blindly, as Zency watched with concern.

“There are,” he said presently, “unpacified Negroes in that bale. And hordes of Chipua and Chawkta Indians holed up there in the mountains. It’s the bung-hole of the conquered realms. And they know it; that’s why they gave it to me. It’s deliberate!” He hissed with wrath, totally ineffectual wrath. “More brigwater.” He beckoned to a miserably inferior species of household servant. It approached.

“Perhaps,” Major Cardinal Zency said tactfully, “it’s a compliment. The one bale which requires genuine work. the sole area our military failed to neutralize. Now they’ve given up, turned it over to you. No one else wants to handle it; it’s too tough.”

At that Mekkis stirred. The idea, although it smacked of self-serving rationalization, roused him slightly. Had he thought of it himself he would have been forced on ethical grounds to dismiss it. But Zency, whom he respected, had advanced it; that took the onus from it. But even so he did not want the task. If the military had failed, how could he succeed? Distortedly he recalled news reports about the Neeg partisans in the mountains of Tennessee, their fanatical and skillful leader, Percy X, who had eluded all the homotropic destruct devices programmed with him in mind. He could imagine himself confronted by Percy X, in addition to the demand from the Council that, as in all other bales, he carry out the customary program: destroy the local structure of government and create an overall puppet monarch.

“Tell them,” he said to the Major Cardinal, “that I’m sick; I swallowed too large a gork egg and it’s stuck along my digestive tract somewhere. I’ll be lucky if I don’t burst—you know, the way Cpogrb did last year when he consumed—what was it?— four gork eggs at a single sitting: What a sight; pieces of him turned up all over the dining room.” Memory warmed him momentarily, memory of a fine Common-mind get-together, a fusion for gaiety and pleasure, without the compulsion of duty emanating from the core of the porencephalic mind, the Electors of the Bench and the powerful entities of the clock side of the hall.

“Look at it this way,” the Major Cardinal said. “If you succeed you’ll make your military predecessor look like a fool—will make the whole military faction look like fools, in fact.”

“That’s true,” Mekkis said slowly. A plan had found its way into his mind. Tennessee was at present a hodgepodge of more or less autonomous feudal entities, each centered around some plantation owner or merchant prince, a condition which had resulted from the collapse of Earth’s central government. It would be Mekkis’ task to select one of these tiny tyrants and elevate him to sovereignty over the entire bale, above all his jealous compeers. No easy task, that; no matter whom he picked there would be objections, even hatred, from the others. But what if he picked Percy X? Who else would be more grateful for the authority and thus more docile a puppet? Naturally the merchant princes would cluck frantically, but they would no matter who was chosen; this way perhaps the Neegs and Indians could be pacified and the rulership decided all in one swift act.

“That’s true,” Mekkis said again, this time with a note of hope in his voice. There was no longer any question of backing out.

Certainly the prophet on his staff had been right; there had lain something to be wary of directly in his path today. And he had squirmed directly into it, head-on. As usual.

And, as usual, he saw a solution—to his advantage.