The Ganymede Takeover

XI

“Neeg-parts proceeding through pine forest, grid line 27-39,” said the tracking turret mechanically. “About seven of them. Confirm, seven.”

Gus, riding in the lead ionocraft of a wing of ten autonomic ionocraft scout-bombers said into his microphone, “Keep low, out of direct line-of-sight of the target area.”

The other crafts responded with curt affirmations. They must be getting careless now that Percy X isn’t around to babysit them, Gus reflected. Coming out in broad daylight. Now that was really dumb. “Surround them.” Gus said into the microphone. “I want to spread out and when you’re in position let me know. But make sure to stay at treetop level. And keep plenty of cover between you and them.” After all, he reflected, they have those weapons.

The ten scout-bombers split up, each swinging off in a different direction. Gus brought his own craft to a hover on the opposite side of the ridge from the detected Neeg-parts. With surprise on my side, Gus said to himself, I’ll have an easy kill. Pay back those bastards for what they did to Little Joe.

The whoosh of the supporting downdraft through

the ionocraft grids sounded so faintly that Gus could make out the calls of birds in the forest around and just below him. He hoped the Neegs didn’t have the modern detection instruments needed to hear that faint whoosh, to separate it from the common wind noises of the mountain afternoon. It did not seem likely that they did.

The craft being on full automatic, Gus had nothing to do but lean back and sun himself, meanwhile smoking and daydreaming. One way or another, he said to himself, Gus Swenesgard is going to the top. And I mean the top. To succeed in wiping out the Neeg-parts where the Ganys themselves had failed . . that alone was enough to make him the most likely choice for top position in the bale—or maybe even something higher than that. Why not head wik of the whole North American continent?

He began, in his mind, to compose the expostula­tion which he would make to Mekkis once the Neegs had finally been pacified. I’m a man of the people, Gus said to his imaginary Gany audience. The com­mon man will see himself in me, identify with my aims. It’ll make people more peaceable, seeing a poor slob like themselves on the top of the heap.

That wasn’t quite right. But something like it—and Gus had plenty of time. The Neeg-parts were still alive and kicking; this, of course, was only tempor­ary. However, one had to consider it.

At that moment the signals which he had antici­pated began to float in from the other ships; when he received notice that they had all reached their posi­tions he said into his mike, “Okay; hit ’em hard!” He then signaled his own craft to rise up above the brow of the ridge, so that he could watch; he had no inten­tion of risking his own neck by joining in the attack. As he cleared the crest he saw the other scout- bombers sweep in from all directions to converge on a spot a mile away. Expectantly, Gus waited for the bomb burst.

But no bomb bursts came.

“What’s wrong?” Gus demanded into his mike.

The squeaky voice of a creech responded, “They’re gone!”

“What do you mean?” Gus said, glancing hur­riedly at his detection gear. “ I’m still picking them up from here!” But now a strange and fuzzy sensation filtered over his mind; when it had passed he looked again at the detection gear—and sure enough: no trace remained of the Neeg-parts. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, a note of panic in his voice.

As he stared fixedly in the direction of the converg­ing, now aimlessly milling ionocrafts, he saw some­thing else. Something far worse. An eye. A huge unwinking eye in the side of the mountain. Watching him. And then the mountain began to move, like a living thing. It raised a vast arm, an octopus pseudopodium, and smashed two of the ionocraft bombers with a single whip-like motion.

As he turned his own ionocraft and fled back over the brow of the hill he had, for an instant, the distinct impression that someone was sitting in the empty seat next to him. Percy X. Laughing.

“I’m sick,” the Oracle said.

“I ask you for a forecast,” Mekkis said contemp­tuously, “and all you can say is, ‘I’m sick.’ ”

“I don’t want to look in the future,” said the creech. “Looking at the future is what makes me sick.”

Mekkis did not feel to well himself. Perhaps, he thought, I’ve been reading too much. Yet I can’t stop now; somewhere in these fantastic theories of Bal- kani’s is the answer. The more I read the more I become convinced of it.

The concept of selective awareness, for example. That could explain so much of what seems paradoxi­cal about these reports we've been getting about illusions that seem real. The mind selects, out of a mass of sense data, those ones of all the possible items to pay attention to, to react to, to treat as "real.” But who knows what the mind may be reject­ing, what lies unseen out there in the world? Perhaps these illusions are not illusions at all, but real things that ordinarily are filtered out of the stream of incom­ing sense data by our intellectual demand for a logi­cal and consistent world. Why were they unable, previously, to hurt us? Because, quite literally, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Being unknown to us—

Doctor Balkani!

Mekkis stared in amazement at the figure of the bearded, intense-looking man sitting in the chair across from him, smoking a pipe. As the Gany Ad­ministrator watched, the figure faded and was gone.

Shaking his entire body in a tic-like whipping mo­tion, Mekkis said to himself, I must go on. Time is growing short.

“Snap out of it, man,” Percy commanded one of his troops who seemed to have given in, for the moment, to hysteria.

“But I tell you I’m still invisible!” shouted the man.

“I turned off the projector an hour ago,” Percy said, leaning against a tree with studied casualness. “You can’t be still invisible. I can see you as plain as day.”

“But I can’t see me!” shouted the distraught Neeg-part. “I hold up my hand in front of my face and, man, there ain’t nothing there!”

“Hey, Lincoln,” Percy said, turning to his second-in-command. “You see that man standing there, don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” Lincoln said, squinting through his scratched and broken horn-rimmed glasses.

“Anybody here who can’t see this man?” Percy demanded, turning to the rest of his troops which sat and stood in a loose semicircle around him.

“We all see him okay,” they murmured.

The Neeg-part leader turned again to the “invisi­ble” man. “Now pick up your projector and let’s march.”

“No, man. I ain’t never going to touch one of those things again. Not to save my life.”

“Are you defying my orders?” Percy picked up his laser rifle.

“Easy does it, Percy,” Lincoln said, gently push­ing the rifle to one side. “I’ll carry his projector.”

Percy hesitated, then shrugged and let Lincoln have his way.

At nightfall they reached one of their forward dug- outs and there counted noses. The man who had imagined himself to be invisible was no longer with them.

“He really did disappear,” one of the men said.

“No, he didn’t,” Lincoln said. “He just left the party and headed for Gus Swenesgard’s plantation.” “What?” Percy shouted. “And you just stood there and let him go? If you knew he was a deserter, why didn’t you shoot him?”

“You can’t shoot everybody, Percy” Lincoln said grimly. “And since you’ve started using those illu­sion projectors quite a few men have gone over the hill.. .and if you don’t stop, a lot more will follow.” “I can’t stop,” Percy said. “With these weapons I can finally really make a dent in those stinking wiks; I can really hurt them. Without these weapons it would only be a matter of time before we’d be fin­ished.”

“Then.” Lincoln said stoically, “you’d better use them full force and use them now. While you still have a man or two left.”

The defectors drifted into Gus Swenesgard’s plan­tation by ones and twos at first, then in larger groups. Gus, suspecting some trick, had the first ones shot, but then, when he began to understand what was going on, started routing them into a hastily- constructed prison compound and set about person­ally interrogating them in the lobby of his hotel.

One fact became clear almost from the outset. Every one of the defectors was at least somewhat mentally disturbed—some seeming to be full-blown hallucinating paranoid schizophrenics.

Their most frequent delusion was that Percy X had not been captured but still led them, up in the moun­tains, or that he had escaped by some miracle and returned to them. Just to make sure, Gus phoned

Oslo and talked directly to Dr. Balkani; the psychi­atrist assured him that both Percy X and Joan Hiashi remained safely under lock and key.

“Just wishful thinking,” Gus muttered as he hung up the phone.

The other delusions were remarkable for their va­riety and lack of consistent pattern. If one could speak of a “typical” case one might take Jeff Berner, a one-time captain in Percy’s rag-tag army, as repre­sentative.

Gus did not need to be a mind reader to tell in­stantly, when Jeff was brought into the lobby for questioning, that here stood a very, very scared Neeg.

“You Jeff Berner?” Gus asked, lighting a cigar and settling back comfortably in an overstuffed chair. Jeff, of course, remained standing.

“That’s right.” The unhappy black man nodded.

“That’s right, sir,” Gus corrected sternly. You don’t get nowhere with these Uhangis, he said to himself, unless you get them to show you the proper respect.

“Sir,” Jeff said lamely.

“Now tell me; what made you leave the Neeg- parts?”

The ex-Neeg-part shifted nervously from one foot to the other and answered, “Them thought projec­tors. They did things to my mind.”

“What kind of things?” Gus made his voice kind and sympathetic; the best results came from treating Neegs as the simple children they were. Let them look on me, Gus said to himself, as a sort of father.

“Well, any kind. You turn on the machine, imagine something, and what you imagine, well, it seems to sort of come true. Only—sometimes, when you turn off the machine, the illusion doesn’t go away. You go on seeing it maybe for days.”

“And in your case what did you imagine?” This was the part of the interviews which Gus had come to enjoy the most. Each story seemed more grotesque than the last.

“Well, sir,” began the Neeg uncertainly, “it began when me and two other troops made a little raid for supplies and food, on a home on the outskirts of your plantation. We were having a hard time, see, because they, the fanner and his wife and two sons, they were keeping us off with lasers, and we thought that your troops would be on us in a few minutes with iono- crafts, so I figured I’d rustle up some reinforcements with the illusion machine, just a few extra men to throw a scare into the farmer. Well, the gadget zapped up twenty-four men and they all fought like veterans, then helped us to carry the supplies we captured up into the mountains. That was fine, I guess, except I don’t see how an illusion can lift a boxful of real canned food. The catch was that when I turned off the gadget the twenty-four men didn’t go away. They stayed with me in the hills and ate like horses, sir, like horses. But I didn’t mind. I kind of got to liking one of the guys. He was a real pal; we used to spend hours talking, and he seemed to know all kinds of things. Never met such a smart fella in all my bom days. Mike Monk was his name, and he had been bomed and raised in New York. Said he joined Percy X because he had a hard time getting a job; which was sort of a joke, but has some truth in it.

Lots of men joined Percy because nobody else wanted them.

“Once he saved my life.Shot down a homotropic dart that acted like it had my name on it. After that I stopped thinking he was just an illusion. I just took it for granted that he was real. Well, one night we were in a dugout talking when I suddenly realized that the other twenty-three men were gone. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what’s happening, man?’ and he said, ‘Nothin’, Jeff baby;’ only I happened to notice that Mike didn’t have any feet. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what happened to your feet?’ and he said, ‘My feet are okay, man;’ only then I sort of realized that I could see through his legs. ‘Hey, man,’ I said, ‘you know something? I can see through your legs,’ and he said, ‘How you talk, man,’ and I said, ‘Hey, where did you really come from?’ and he said, ‘Like I told you; I’m just a simple New York cat’; only I could see his legs were gone and I could see through all the rest of him, so I said, ‘Hey, man, where you going to?’ and he said, ‘I ain’t going nowhere. I’m going to stick with you.’ His voice was getting kind of faint and far­away, so I yelled, ‘Hey, where are you?’ and I heard him say, so faint I could hardly hear it, ‘Right where I always was and always will be, standing by your ever-loving side,’ and poof, he was gone. I never seen him since.”

“And then,” Gus said, “you defected?”

“No,” Jeff said. “That came later, after I used the illusion machine again.”

“What did you use it for the second time?” Gus asked, fascinated.

“Why, what would you do with a thing like that if

you was in my shoes, Mr. Swenesgard, sir? I made me a pretty little girl friend with it!”

“Then after the girl friend started to fade out—” “No, sir. Before the girl friend started to fade out. I tell you, sir, that little girl was the meanest, most complainin’ woman I ever did see! I’m no coward but, sir, that little girl went and chased me right out of the Neeg-parts.”

In a cave high in the mountains a figure lying in a sleeping bag stirred, sat up. “Lincoln,” Percy grated harshly, reaching out a hand to shake his sleeping comrade.

“Huh?” muttered Lincoln, “whazat?”

“I’ve made up my mind,” Percy said. “We’ve been on the defensive long enough. With the hardware we have now we stand a real chance to go on the offensive, to bust out of these mountains and really kill a few wiks.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Lincoln said sleepily. “As far as these weapons go we’ve hardly scratched the surface.”

“Pass the word along. We want all the new weapons in action, except that Big Daddy up at Summit Cave. I got to admit, goddam it, man, that that thing scares me, even me. I’ll leave one day for preparation, then we hit Swenesgard with everything we’ve got. If we can take his plantation we’ll have all the first-line Gany hardware he’s got on loan from the worms, and plenty of Toms who’ll come over to our side when they see we’re winning.

“With a little bit of luck we might even be able to step on that worm, Mekkis. From what I hear

through the network Mekkis doesn’t do anything but lie around reading. He leaves all the work of running the bale of Tennessee to Swenesgard. When we take the plantation we’ll have to keep going, spreading out as fast as we can, so that if the Gany military starts hitting with nuclear missiles we won’t be all bunched up in one place. Everything depends on speed. And,” he finished, half to himself, “on illusion.”

“The Nowhere Girl is coming!” wailed the Oracle

“Don’t shout at me like that,” Mekkis snapped. “Can’t you see I’m trying to read?” All is illusion, he said to himself. Each of us is a windowless monad, without any real contact with a world outside our­selves. Balkani proves it. Why therefore should I concern myself with meaningless phantoms such as Nowhere Girls and Neeg-parts and the Great Com­mon? The world is a picture and if I wanted to change it, all I would need to do is imagine it to be different.

For instance, if I cared to I could imagine an earthquake and—

A vast tumbling-motion spilled through the room around him, a wave rolling through him and past, leaving a yawning fissure in the floor.

Mekkis gazed down at it with satisfaction while the Oracle babbled meaninglessly, hysterically.

Gus learned about Percy’s planned attack from a defector—two hours before sundown on the night of the attack. He drove at once to the office of Adminis­trator Mekkis and asked to see him.

“Mr. Mekkis,” the wik secretary said with obvi­ous relish, “has left word he does not want to be

disturbed. Under any circumstances.”

“The Neeg-parts are attacking in force tonight,” Gus said; he sweated visibly, even though the wait­ing room in which he stood was air-conditioned.

“Is that all?” the secretary said scornfully. “The Neeg-parts are always attacking something or other. Surely you can handle it.”

Gus opened and closed his mouth, turned red and then, without another word, turned and stomped out. Once in his ionocraft he took firm hold of the mi­crophone, lifted it to his lips and began rapidly to issue orders.

Within an hour the assorted forces of Gus Swenes­gard, made up of everything from small nuclear mis­sile launchers to Toms with pitchforks, moved in a jumble of confusion toward the great black shapes that now, in the moonless night, could be seen thun­dering and rumbling toward them.

The nuclear missiles were fired before the forces met, but they did not go off. The vast rolling masses of blackness seemed to swallow them up. Then the ionocraft scout bombers swept in, and they, too, disappeared.

Gus sat in his ionocraft, hovering over his planta­tion, and watched what took place through a bank of small TV monitors, mounted on the control panel, which received signals from various units of his mot­ley army. One screen in particular caught his atten­tion; it displayed a transmission from a squad of creech-operated ionocrafts that had moved nearer the enemy than any other of Gus’ units. There on the screen Gus saw, forming out of the blackness, a herd of gigantic African aardvarks as big as dinosaurs with evil, glittering eyes, huge claws and ears like circus tents, and with unbelievably long tongues that lashed out and licked ionocrafts out of the sky.

“Oh, my God,” Gus said, unable to accept the fantastic sight. “Not aardvarks!”

In the wake of the stampeding aardvarks came a battered autonomic ionocraft taxi bearing Percy X and Lincoln Shaw. “You see that?” Percy yelled. “I’ll bet they didn’t expect that.”

“It’s wild,” Lincoln said, more awestruck than enthusiastic.

“What else can you do?” asked the taxi.

“How about something really beautiful?” Percy shouted. “How about a gigantic bird all made of flame? How about a phoenix?”

“Okay,” Lincoln said. “One phoenix coming up.” He adjusted the controls on the construct in his lap and concentrated. Out of the clouds of dust that rose in the wake of the aardvarks formed an incredi­ble winged creature, more than a thousand feet in wingspread. It seemed to be made up of burning light or perhaps electricity, and all the colors of the spec­trum flickered chaotically over its feathered sur­faces. Its eyes consisted of points of blindingly bright blue white light, like twin welding torches, and, as it glided majestically ahead of them, it left in the air a trail of sparks like falling stars. The two men in the ionocraft could smell the ozone caused by its electri­cal fire, and the wind from its wings blew the iono­craft roughly about, almost overturning it. Now and then it opened its blazing beak and uttered a hoarse cry that sounded, to Lincoln, like the scream of an

ignorant and innocent thing being tortured to death.

“Isn’t it great?” Percy yelled.

“De gustibus non disputandum est, the taxi said philosophically.

“Charge!” shouted General Robert E. Lee as he galloped into battle at the head of a troop of mounted Valkyrie. Their long blonde hair streamed in the wind as they screamed ancient runic oaths and trampled beneath the hooves of their ice cream white horses creech, white and Tom, without discrimination.

A squadron of vampires dripping blood from their fangs and wearing the insignia of Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s Flying Circus flapped by overhead, while Samson, hair and all, strode past, swinging the jawbone of a duckbill platypus.

Through the milling confusion rushed a battalion of Brownie Scouts, cracking skulls right and left with overbaked cookies, while a kosher butcher, with his vorpal meat cleaver, reduced the enemy to meat knish. Redassed baboons charged in behind him, pushing supermarket carts armed with fifty caliber machine guns. A rock-and-roll group headed by a young long-hair trumpeter named Gabriel played the “jerk” while a team of trained surgeons removed one appendix after another, throwing in an occasional lobotomy to avoid monotony.

Four squealing transvestites in silk evening gowns swung, with deadly accuracy, blue-sequined purses filled with cement, while cavemen and Pygmies hurled poisoned confetti.

A dayglow orange unicorn reared up with seven soldiers impaled on his horn like so many unpaid

bills, and a man-eating plant with an Oxford accent sucked dry one spinal column after another with a sound like a rude boy trying to suck up the last drop of a milkshake. Sadistic peacocks circulated among the wounded, tickling to death the unwary with their feathers. A pregnant ten-year-old teeny-bopper, smashed on acid, mercilessly beat all comers at chess, passing the time between moves by painting pictures of her favorite celebrities, Marshal Ky, Marshal Koli and Adolf Hitler, on her naked but flat chest, with purple lipstick.

Little nude lesbians no more than one inch high scampered over the faces of the enemy removing beards one hair at a time. The Wolfman chewed contentedly on a big toe, spitting out the toenail. A brave band of lawnmowers and growling laundromat machines executed a brilliant flanking movement and attacked from the rear. Everywhere the air was filled with the ghastly sound of guttural shrieks, whoops, howls, oily laughter, gasps, grunts, lisps, drawls, yells, croaks, bellows, whines, sensual moans, brays, yaps, meows, tweets, bleats, roars and maun­dering.

But at the moment when it appeared as if the ordinary forces of Gus Swenesgard would be wiped out to a man, the fantastic hordes of Percy X began to quarrel among themselves. Frankenstein attacked the Wolfman. Godzilla attacked King Kong. The Boy Scouts criminally assaulted Girl Scouts.

The sabre-tooth tiger was blinded by the needles of shoe-making elves. A spikelet of Meadow Fescue (festuca elatior) was struck down by a cowardly blow from Bucky Bug, anthers, pistil, paleae, glume and

all. Suddenly it became a free-for-all. Every appari­tion for himself.

In an instant Percy realized that if he remained in the midst of the nightmare battle just a moment too long, he and his men would fall victim to their own phantasmagoria. In fact at this very moment a car­nivorous vacuum cleaner was attempting to break into the taxi in which he and Lincoln Shaw sat.

“Retreat!” Percy shouted into his mike. “Back to the mountains before it’s too late.”

At dawn the battlefield lay silent.

A mist hung over the scene, hiding the incredible carnage left behind by the night’s orgy of destruction. As the sun rose higher in the sky the mist began to evaporate, and with it the multitude of fantastic shapes and forms which the mist had hidden. Ghostly dead elephants and ruined tanks melted together, be­came translucent, then transparent, then faded away. Heaps of corpses, wearing the uniforms of every age and nation, blurred and shimmered and became one with the fog. Ionocrafts and creeches and Toms and Neeg-parts they, too, faded and turned to a fog, the real and the unreal meeting and blending and then vanishing together.

By noon the mist and what the mist had hidden had both disappeared without a remnant, and in the shuddering mid-day heat nothing remained but weeds and the bent, upward-poking stalks of grass.

Paul Rivers did not face the man; instead he stood gazing out the hotel room window at the seamy side of Knoxville, Tennessee, as it baked in the afternoon heat. Everything he says is true, Paul thought to himself. And yet—

“There are only two possible outcomes to the situation up there in the hills,” Dr. Martin Choate, Paul’s immediate superior in the World Psychiatric Association, said. ‘‘Percy will not use the hell- weapon, and he will lose his pelt and the ego of the human race will be lost with him, or Percy will use the hell-weapon and that will be the end for all of us. Don’t you see that?”

Paul did not speak; he only nodded. Yes, he thought, I see that. But I can’t accept it.

“Then you must also see,” Dr. Choate said, “that we have no choice but to kill him and to burn his body, making it look as if he died in action— heroically. Our organization has already begun to make its move. Seven high-ranking wik officials have already killed themselves under hypnotic sugges­tions implanted by their psychotherapists. Other more complex plans have already been set in motion,

but we must have a martyr; we must have our John Brown, our crucified Christ, if we hope to gain the support of the broad masses of people. Isn’t the freedom of most of the human race more important to you than the life of one man, one murderous fanatic?”

Paul said, “Why me?”

“Because he trusts you. You saved him from Bal­kani. We don’t have anyone else who could get near him.”

“That’s the problem,” Paul said. “He trusts me. That’s why I can’t do it.”

“He won’t be able to probe you telepathically. We can hypnotically implant a cover story in your mind, a story you’ll believe yourself until the moment comes to strike. He’ll never know.”

But, Paul thought, I’ll know. “I’ve got to have time to think,” he said aloud.

Choate hesitated, then said, “All right. We can let you have a few days.”

They shook hands and Dr. Choate left without a backward glance. Everyone says "we” these days, Paul thought absently. Nobody says "I.” Everyone represents some formless, irresponsible group and nobody represents themselves.

Stepping out of the bedroom, Joan Hiashi said, “I want some growing things.” She smiled at him un­certainly. “May I?”

“Okay,” he answered, and then experienced a sudden upsurge of spirit, a sudden sense of freedom. “Let’s go out and buy up a whole garden.”

Ed Newkom met them in the hall as they were going out. “What’s up?” he asked, surveying their faces.

“We’re going to do a little shopping,” Paul said; he glanced over his shoulder and saw Ed gazing after them in bewilderment. It was Dr. Rivers who thought with pleased satisfaction, Joan is showing signs of returning to the world of common experience. She wants something. It was, however, just plain Paul who, as he and Joan emerged from the hotel en­trance, glanced up at a white cumulus cloud that towered like a god over the dirty slum and thought, Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

“Joan?” Dr. Balkani said.

“Yes, Rudolph,” said the robot Joan Hiashi, sit­ting on the analyst’s couch in Balkani’s poorly-lit office. Every day contained the same elements, now; Balkani could see no more change in his patient that he could in his massive bronze bust of Sigmund Freud. Except that sometimes he received the im­pression that the bust smiled at him. It was in no respects a pleasant smile.

Balkani said, “Joan, is there anything you want?”

“No, Rudolph.”

Eyeing her, he said, “Then you must be happy. Are you happy?”

“I don’t know, Rudolph.

“You are,” he said. Puffing angrily on his pipe, he paced the floor. Joan did not follow him with her eyes; she continued to stare straight ahead. Abruptly he stopped pacing; he seated himself beside the robot and put his arms around it. “What would you do if I kissed you?” he said. It did not respond. “Put your arms around me,” he barked at it, and it obeyed. He kissed its lips for a lengthy time, but it was boring; up on his feet again he said, “That was boring!”

“Yes, Rudolph.”

“Take off your clothes!”

The robot disrobed, quickly and without wasted motion. Balkani also disrobed, almost falling on his face when he got his feet caught in his pants.

“All right, now kiss me again.”

They kissed again.

After a few moments Balkani shouted. “It’s still boring!” He pushed her roughly down on the couch and kissed her one more time, but it was still boring. Untangling himself from the robot’s arms he sat with his back to her at the foot of the couch. He felt old. Why do I love her so much? he asked himself. I never loved anybody so much. Getting to his feet he rum­maged in his clothing until he found his pill-box; opening it he shook out all the pills, the entire as­sortment of all colors and shapes—without water he gulped them down. “You see?” he said to the robot Joan. “I don’t care whether I live or die. And neither do you; right?”

“Yes, Rudolph.” Tonelessly she spoke, as before. Emptily.

“There’s one emotion I’ll bet you can still feel. Fear. ” He lurched over to the bookcase and, with a harsh, labored grunt, hauled down the bust of Freud. “I’m going to kill you. Don’t you even care about that?”

“No, Rudolph.”

Balkani, in anguish and fury, lifted the massive bronze bust high over his head; he moved back to­ward the couch. She did not flinch; she did not, in fact, even seem to notice. He brought the bust down on her skull with all his strength. Her cranium burst.

“I only meant to—” he began numbly as the robot Joan Hiashi slid from the couch and fell, sprawling, onto the floor. And then he saw within her head—not formless organic tissue—but a crumpled turret of printed microminiaturized circuits and solid-state cerebro-spinal axis components, as well as delicate sweep-range surge gates, low-temp liquid helium battery conduits, homeostatic switches—with por­tions of the circuitry grotesquely still functioning, including the standard feedback networks for the master turret which, though it hung out of her skull and dangled down her cheek, continued ticking like some debrained reflex-arc crayfish-thing. And he recognized the handiwork which had gone into the building of the thing as his own.

“Joan ?” he whispered.

“Yes, Rudolph?” answered the robot faintly, and then its power failed.

“Joan?” Paul Rivers said.

Sitting on the bed of their Knoxville hotel room, in the hot red light of sunset, Joan Hiashi said, “Yes, Paul.”

“Is there anything you want?”

“No, Paul.” She studied the windowbox that now rested just inside the window of their room, and at the tropical plants that grew there. Then she smiled, and Paul Rivers smiled, too.

The therapy may be slightly unorthodox, he re­flected, but it’s working. Now if she can only start caring about—not only plants—but people and the world of a common, shared reality.

“They want you to kill Percy X, don’t they?” she

said. “I overheard. I wanted to hear.”

He said, “That’s right.” And did not look at her directly.

“Are you going to do it?” she asked, without emotion.

“I don’t know.” He hesitated, then said, “What do you think I should do?” A new twist, he thought acridly; the doctor asking the patient for advice.

“Be happy,” Joan said. Getting up, she walked over to her newly purchased windowbox of plants, where she knelt and played in the dirt with her fin­gers. “All these political movements and philosophies and ideals, all these wars—only illu­sions. Don’t trouble your inner peace; there’s no right and wrong, no win or lose. There’s only indi­vidual men and each one is completely—completely! —alone. Learn to be alone; watch a bird fly without telling anyone about it or even storing it up to tell someone about it in the future.” She turned toward him, her voice low and intense. ‘‘ Let your life remain the secret it is. Don’t read the homeotapes; don’t watch the newscasts on TV. Don’t—”

Escapism, he thought as he listened to the hyp­notic voice. I’ve got to be on my guard; it’s compel­ling but false. “Okay,” he said to her, breaking into the flow of her words, “while I sit here staring stupidly at the back of. my hand, what happens to my patients? What happens to the people I could have helped?”

“They go on in their insanity, I suppose,” Joan said. “But at least you don’t join them in it.”

“You have to face reality.”

“My hand is real. It’s the war that’s a dream.”

“Doesn’t it matter to you that the whole human race is enslaved by creatures from another planet? Doesn’t it matter to you that we may all soon be dead?”

“I planned on dying sometime anyway. And when I’m dead, what’ll it matter to me whether others go on living or not?”

Paul Rivers felt a wave of sick frustration sweep over him. She’s so imperturbable, he thought feverishly, so safe behind her schizoid defenses. Be­hind that saintly facade what absolute selfishness—what smug egotism. Looking down at his hands he saw that his fists were clenched. My god, he thought; what am I doing? I don’t hit pa­tients; I help them. She must be getting to me, reach­ing some deep wall of repressed Balkani-ism within me. Across from him he saw that she watched alertly, perceived the frustration, anger and—fear.

“What far bigger struggle?”

Wordlessly, Joan pointed to the windowbox; among her flowers, a contingent of red ants and an­other of black ants were engaged in a fracas. For the moment Paul gazed into the turmoil of writhing bodies and crunching mandibles—then he looked away, unable to speak. Is it I, he asked himself, who’s living on dreams and comforting illusions? Am I, in the end, the real escapist?

Joan, he realized, was still watching the ants. But not with anguish; on her Buddha-like face he saw a faint, gentle smile.

Rudolph Balkani sat at his elaborate, solar-battery-powered, justifying typewriter and let the

words pour from his fingers. More than two days without sleep, but what did it matter? The metham- phetamine tablets in his silver pill-box would keep him going until he had finished.

Only a single light burned in the room: the un­shaded bulb over the cluttered desk on which he worked. The rest of the room, including the sprawled figure of the ruined robot Joan Hiashi, lay in shadow. It seemed to him as if the single bulb held back, with steadily diminishing strength, a blackness so heavy and thick as to be almost touched.

He had locked the door; several times people had knocked on it but Balkani had told them to go away. They had. Both the intercom and the vidphone had been carefully smashed. The bust of Freud had done them in, too.

Now the bronze, frowning father-figure lay face­down on the floor, its anger spent. The time had arrived for the son to create a universe. Feverishly Rudolph Balkani labored on? giving birth in the form

of a book to the new universe that would displace the universe of Freud, together with all the other uni­verses before it. A generation of young people would take this book as their Bible in the revolution of youth against age.

As he worked he hummed a snatch of a tune, always the tune of one of the advertising jingles which he had collected and studied in his early years. How much he had learned from TV commercials! While others turned down the TV set when the com­mercials came on, Balkani turned them up. The pro­grams had nothing to sell but middle-class morality, a dreary product at best, but the commercials offered a

world where dreams were for sale, where youth and health came in a box, and all pain and suffering were smoothed over with long, beautiful, slow-motion hair. Avant-garde films? Balkani jeered at them. Nothing lay in the most surrealistic of them to com­pare with the charisma of TV commericals. The work of the dedicated shoestring movie-makers of the ’six­ties and ’seventies was now mercifully forgotten, but video-tape copies of erotic soap and beer commer­cials from the same period now brought bids of up to two hundred UN dollars from collectors.

At this moment Balkani stood ready to finish his masterpiece, Oblivion Therapy. Why not? The Joan Hiashi case, the one remaining piece in the cosmic crossword puzzle, had fallen—in an unexpected way, to be sure—in place. All alone in his office, Balkani laughed aloud. How simple it had become, after all. A gigantic shaggy dog story, where the whole point of the joke consisted in the fact that no point existed.

What lay behind it all?

Oblivion.

Suddenly Balkani stopped. The last sentence which he had typed had a ring of finality to it. Yes, he had written the concluding sentence of this, his life’s magnum opus. Carefully he removed the sheet from the typewriter and placed it with the rest of the man­uscript; he then wrapped the manuscript with care and precision and addressed it to his New York pub­lisher. He placed the package in the out-going mail tray and the autonomic mechanism of the tray at once whisked it from the room. So that was that.

Shuffling wearily, he made his way over to the

ample medical supply cabinet, feeling at last the ef­fects of so much lack of sleep. An overdose of quinidine, he said to himself as he lifted out the hypodermic; that should provide the necessary car­diac arrest.

With a grunt, he sat down at the foot of his analyst’s couch, rolled up his sleeve and gave himself the injection. His arm, from so many previous injec­tions, had become insensitive; he felt nothing.

The needle broke as it fell to the floor from his suddenly stiffening fingers, and, with a sigh, he slid back onto the couch.

His subordinates were so much afraid of him that they did not break in and find his body until a day and a half later.