Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

The Cosmic Cocktail Party

A highball on the human reality vector:

Urquhart, just returned from holiday, was staring nostalgically through the wall of his office at the silver of morning frost on rooftops. Beyond the grey rectangles of the administration complex he could see the brow of a wooded hill, its tints bleached by distance, and again he felt a curious sense of urgency.

A literary acquaintance had once told him it was not uncommon for people to experience vague stirrings when they looked through a window at a far-off hillside, especially if it had trees and sunlit slopes. Read The Golden Bough, the writer had said, and you’ll understand that the part of you which still worships at lost altars in the Cambodian rain forest becomes uneasy when reminded of how far you’ve strayed from your true destiny. Urquhart had dismissed the idea as pretentious nonsense, yet on this morning it seemed almost valid. Back in his first week at Belhampton he had decided to go to the hill and explore it on foot, but that had been six years ago, and he had done nothing about it. I’m squandering time as if it were money, he thought in sudden alarm. Tenpence fugit….

The mood of introspection faded as the silver bullet of the 9.00 monorail came sweeping along the spur line which connected Biosyn’s headquarters to the 1,000 kph London-Liverpool tubeway. A handful of passengers got out on to the elevated platform, among them a tall Negro in a flame-coloured tunic. Even at two hundred metres the powerful spread of the man’s shoulders was noticeable, and Urquhart felt a spasm of alarm as he half-identified the new arrival.

“Theophilus,” he said, addressing the admin computer. “Is Martin M’tobo in this country?”

There was a barely perceptible pause while Theophilus used a microwave link to interrogate the GPO computer in Greenwich. “Yes,” the terminal on the polished desk said.

“How and when did he arrive?”

“On the Meridian Thistledown flight from Losane, touching down at Chobham at 7.11 this morning.”

“You’re a fat pig,” Urquhart said bitterly.

“I’m a fat pig,” the computer agreed. “Go on—if this is one of your ridiculous test problems in two-valued logic I require to hear the other premises before printing out any Boolean truth tables.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Urquhart extended a freckled hand and pressed a button which connected him to Bryan Philp, who was his technical director and chief of the bionics staff. The image of Philp’s close-cropped head floated at the communicator’s projection focus.

“Martin M’tobo is outside.” Urquhart kept his voice flat. “Were you aware of this?”

“No.” Philp smiled immediately, showing unusually large and white teeth, and tilted his head back so that the lenses of his spectacles became two miniature suns. His bony face was suddenly impenetrable, inhuman. It was, Urquhart knew, a defensive move and it showed the other man felt he had been remiss in not keeping a check on M’tobo’s movements.

“He arrived in England only two hours ago and must have come straight here. Unannounced. What does that suggest to you?”

Philp’s face became serious. “Well, it doesn’t suggest he merely wants to talk to the founder and illustrious leader of his nation.”

“I agree. But it does suggest he’s losing faith in Biosyn, growing suspicious.”

Philp smiled and flashed his glasses on the instant, turning himself into a genial mechanical man. “We held Crowley as best we could, but with that personality structure he was disposed to drift. Very difficult.”

“Have you an address for him now?”

“An approximate one. We can’t locate him with much more accuracy than a decimetre or so on all three co-ordinates.”

“Can you recall him before M’tobo gets through security, say within ten minutes?”

Philp looked pained. “If we could do that there’d be no problem, would there?” The image of his head jiggled up and down slightly, and Urquhart guessed he was making violent and probably obscene gestures out of camera range, but this was no time to concern himself with trivial matters of discipline.

“Mmmmph.” He drummed his fingers as he made the decision. “I’m going to let M’tobo see the Tank.”

“Is that wise?”

“Better than letting him get the idea that Crowley’s dead. I’d like you to be there too.” Urquhart broke contact and the other man’s image dissolved into the air in swirling motes of brilliance, fugitive fireflies. He told Theophilus where he was going, then hurried out of his office and took the dropshaft to the ground floor. M’tobo’s theatrical figure was immediately discernible in the Arctic blue reception hall, his huge shoulders straining impatiently beneath the orange tunic as he headed towards the row of scanning booths which would judge his eligibility to enter the building proper. Approaching the booths from the inward side, Urquhart used his key and over-rode the security computer of one cubicle just as M’tobo was reaching it. The Negro looked mildly surprised as both doors quivered open and he saw Urquhart waiting for him with outstretched hand.

“Welcome to Biosyn, Martin,” Urquhart said cheerfully. “Why didn’t you signal you were coming and let us pick you up at the airport?”

“Thanks, John.” M’tobo’s warm dry hand closed over Urquhart’s. “I didn’t want to inconvenience you—you must be very busy just now.”

“We’re never too busy to greet an old friend,” Urquhart assured him, weighing the implication that the company’s management was experiencing difficulties.

“Thank you, but this is a business visit more than anything else. Is Colonel Crowley available?” They began walking towards the glowing green organ-pipes of the dropshafts.

“Ah … no. We’re temporarily out of contact—but why didn’t you use the microwave link to call him? It would have saved you….”

“I had a feeling he wouldn’t be available, and my business is mainly with you, John. Is it safe to speak here?”

Urquhart stopped walking. “Yes.”

“The position—in a nutshell—is that a general election is being forced on my Government, probably within two months. You’ve heard about the riots in Losane?”

“We all have.” Urquhart was enveloped in the cold unease of premonition. ‘But I assumed it was merely teachers demanding equal pay with students, or something like that. I didn’t think they were serious.”

“I assure you that they are. O’ringa’s Democratic Reform party has gathered much support in the past year, so much that we have no option but to agree to an election—an election we might lose without the active support of Colonel Crowley.”

“Active?” Urquhart laughed as he glanced up at M’tobo’s glistening chestnut face above the wall-like torso. The saffron-tinged eyes were uncomfortably intent on his own.

“Active in the political sense—which means being available at all times to speak to his people and to give his overt blessing to the Loyalist Government. That is no more than we were promised by Biosyn.”

“Of course, of course.” Urquhart glanced around him at the scattered knots of people in the reception hall. “Martin, perhaps we shouldn’t talk here. I’m going to take you down to the Tank level.”

M’tobo took an involuntary step backwards and collided with a pert secretary who was wearing one of the latest vi-bras. The impact threw the tiny impulse motors in the vi-bra out of synchronisation and the girl hurried away looking disgusted as she tried to control the wild oscillations of her bosom.

“Interesting effect, that,” Urquhart smirked desperately, but the huge man’s eyes were blank and Urquhart suddenly understood a little more of what was happening in the African state he represented. If a person of M’tobo’s education and experience had doubts and fears—what would the mass of his people be like?

M’tobo recovered his composure almost immediately. He talked about inconsequentials while Urquhart used his key to get them into the special shaft which went a hundred metres down into bedrock. The drop took a matter of seconds, then they were stepping into the Tank room. It was fifty metres square and hewn from solid rock, but each wall was covered with magnified scenes brought down from the roof in light pipes, creating the impression of being in a penthouse. Urquhart glimpsed the same wooded hill in the misty morning light, his hill, and he made up his mind to go there at the weekend. The Tank itself occupied the centre of the room, its mirrored sides stretching from floor to ceiling, and desks of varying sizes formed a line around it. Most of the desks had two or more technicians seated at them.

“Martin!” Bryan Philp, teeth and glasses screening his face with light, advanced on them. “Good to see you, good to see you!”

You ham, Urquhart thought, don’t overplay the welcome. But M’tobo’s attention was held by the Tank. He took several paces towards it and stood with his back to the others. Watching him, Urquhart remembered his own early dismay, the emotional upheavals which were a result of intellect forcing instinct to accept the impossible….

“It is so difficult for me to credit this thing,” M’tobo said. “I attended Colonel Crowley’s private funeral and cremation, and yet I have to believe he is alive in there.” He seemed subdued, slightly less Herculean, and Urquhart realised that bringing him face-to-face with the Tank had been a good tactical move. M’tobo turned to speak to Philp. “The technology involved goes far beyond my understanding, and yet I wish I could learn….”

Philp’s eyes lit with excitement. “Come into my office, Martin. I’ve got something you’ll be interested in.” He took M’tobo’s elbow and steered him into his long office which had a glass partition on one side and an old-fashioned blackboard on the other. Urquhart followed with brooding suspicions that his technical director was about to go off the rails, as he usually did when not closely confined to his own work. Philp waved M’tobo into a chair and busied himself with the controls of a 3D projector.

“Bryan,” Urquhart whispered. “I hope you’re not going to show that animation I’ve heard about. The one you and your cretinous mechanics put together while you were supposed….”

“Hello,” said a pink cigar with fins at one end and a comicbook face at the other. It had appeared in the air close to the blackboard and was bowing grotesquely while introducing itself. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile and, believe it or not, I am a direct ancestor of the bionics Tank in which a human personality can be synthesised and preserved indefinitely.

“Let me tell you something about a little family problem I had a long time ago. Like all other early complex computer systems I was … well, let’s face it, I was downright unreliable. My designers did their best with my individual parts, and managed to give them a reliability factor of something like 99.9993 per cent, but even this allowed me only a reasonable chance of working properly. Increasing the reliability of individual components was an engineering dead-end, because any minute gains were more than cancelled by my growing size and complexity.”

The pink cigar paused to demonstrate this process by becoming a little longer and sprouting an extra fin. M’tobo stared at it fixedly.

“You’ll roast for this,” Urquhart snarled quietly in Philp’s ear. “Our PR consultants gave strict instructions that this abortion of yours was to be destroyed. Turn it off at once!”

“And yet there is one very common type of computer which has achieved the opposite effect—this is the human brain,” the cigar continued blithely, and smiled as a greenish object resembling a boiled cauliflower appeared in the air beside it.

“It consists of ten thousand million neurons, each of which is less dependable than a transistor—and still the complete system is millions of times more reliable than any of its single parts. The brain is not perfect, mind you. Being a survival device, it is somewhat inflexible as a result of its conditioning, and, quite frankly, it is not very well adapted to handling problems in logic.”

“I must agree,” the brain said in a coy feminine voice and Urquhart groaned aloud. “The problems don’t end there, either. My neurons are exactly like my friend’s electronic switches in that they have to be either on or off, with no in-between state possible—but they are very much slower in operation than switches.

“How do I overcome these drawbacks? The answer is simple—I act in parallel. Many different connections are made simultaneously, with the result that a defective biological switch is immediately outvoted, giving me high reliability. Acting in parallel also makes up for the comparative slowness of my neurons.”

“Absolutely true,” the pink cigar cut in. “With the example of the brain before them, computer designers began turning away from sequential or serial operation as far back as the Nineteen-Sixties. They investigated parallel operation systems modelled on the brain and the technique proved successful—machines capable of human-like, alogical, heuristic thinking came into being—but the biggest breakthrough of all was the development of microminiature electrochemical components.” The cauliflower-like brain abruptly vanished and was replaced by a swarm of multi-coloured specks, striped like wasps.

Urquhart made a determined effort to reach the projector’s controls, but Philp’s sharp elbow struck him painfully on the mouth. “You’re finished, Philp,” he whispered, gingerly patting his upper lip. “You leave Biosyn today.”

“Relax, John—Martin’s enjoying the show. It’s almost over anyway.” Philp flashed his outsize teeth as the cigar began to speak.

“Designers found themselves equipped with a whole new armoury of basic components—the artron, an artificial neuron with built-in logic and inhibitor gates which enabled it effectively to simulate the brain’s neuron; the neuristor, a diode which stood in for the axon, the nerve fibre which connects the neuron; the memistor, which used electrochemical phenomena to function as a memory unit.

“True artificial intelligence had finally been born—and with it the possibility that an individual human intelligence could evade the catastrophic power failure we refer to as death. This was done by sweeping the brain just before death with an ultra-fast Röntgen ray scanner, recording the electrical state of every one of its millions of components. The result was a tremendously complex programme which, when fed into the Tank, recreated the human personality in every detail.

“Thank you for listening so patiently.” The pink cigar bowed again and vanished.

Urquhart wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “How can I apologise for this childish exhibition, Martin? My colleague is obviously a frustrated washing powder salesman.”

“No need to apologise—I found it quite interesting, as a matter of fact.” M’tobo got to his feet and looked out through the glass partition towards the Tank. “I hadn’t realised the computer would be so large.”

“The matrix itself occupies only a part of the installation you see there.” Philp’s angular frame moved jerkily as he spoke. “Of course, we have almost a thousand other clients in there, but even so, Nature still has a slight edge when it comes to density. Even with the latest cyber-random, self-establishing palimpsest circuitry the best we’ve been able to achieve is five million artrons to the cubic centimetre. So Colonel Crowley’s brain is approximately twice as big as the one he had previously.”

M’tobo shook his head slowly. “Exactly whereabouts in the computer is the brain?”

Philp glanced warily at Urquhart, then switched on his smile.

“That’s the whole point,” Urquhart said. “Each client has an address—specific volume of the matrix which was assigned to him when his personality was programmed into the Tank—but circuitry of this kind is self-establishing. It is possible for a kind of osmosis to occur, for an identity to change its position.”

“When that happens you lose contact?” M’tobo’s practical mind was going to the heart of the problem.

“Well … more or less.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if you employed much smaller matrices and had only one client to each?”

“For engineering and administrative reasons, undoubtedly—but economics are involved too. We can now produce artrons for something like a penny each, but complete simulation of an adult brain calls for ten thousand million artrons. So, for artrons alone—never mind associated components—the bill for the equivalent of a man’s brain comes to a hundred million dollars.”

“M’tobo nodded glumly. “Then how can you … ?”

“More than one identity can occupy a given volume of the matrix at any time. That’s why we use the word palimpsest, although it isn’t strictly accurate—the old writing on the manuscript doesn’t have to be erased. With multiple usage of the components the cost is shared, and even a small and fairly new country like Losane is enabled to retain the services of its great men after they have died.” Urquhart stopped speaking suddenly. He had found himself selling the Biosyn plan to M’tobo all over again, which made it look as though he was unsure of himself.

“Yes. Colonel Crowley’s personality has been preserved at a greatly reduced cost.” M’tobo’s voice was growing more resonant as he became used to the proximity of the Tank. ‘But the point is that my Government is not acting out of sentiment. If the Colonel is not available to advise his supporters and lend visible support to the Loyalists, then he might as well be dead. From our point of view it would be better if he were dead, because the money we are paying to Biosyn could be used for other purposes.”

“I appreciate your feelings, Martin.” Urquhart glanced at Philp, whose teeth and glasses immediately blazed with morning light from the vicarious windows. ‘But let me assure you that this break in communications with Colonel Crowley is of a very temporary nature.”

M’tobo squared the massive cantilevers of his shoulders and began walking towards the door. “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve arranged for him to broadcast to the whole of Losane five days from now. If he is not available I will discontinue our bi-annual payments to Biosyn—and I will make my reasons for doing so very public’

Later, when the Losanian had been escorted to the monorail, Urquhart hurried back to the Tank level and found Philp sipping cofftea from a plastic bulb. Philp’s bony face showed concern.

“Five days,” Urquhart said. “Can you do it?”

“You fired me, remember?”

“You’re reinstated.”

Philp shrugged. “While you were up top we lost contact with two more clients—including Browne.”

“Browne! But he’s …”

“I know. Eight years in the Tank and never once strayed from his input/output station. I would have sworn he was the best adjusted of the lot—but the last thing he said to us was that Crowley has shown him there is more to existence than being a kind of intellectual sponge. I tried to hold him by increasing the input voltage at his station, but he pulled that trick of Crowley’s—overloaded most of his molecular amplifiers and used the extra energy to batter his way towards the centre of the Tank. It must have been painful for him, but he got away from me.”

Urquhart sat down and stared dully at the mirrored side of the Tank. “Perhaps we should have told M’tobo the truth.”

“We may have to, eventually—but how do you convince a patriot like Martin that the founder of his country has lost interest in it, that he has found new kingdoms to conquer?”

“New kingdoms?”

Philp studied Urquhart narrowly, as if seeing him for the first time. “I’ve been wondering how to tell you this, John. Our multiple usage scheme is not a very good idea—at least, for some types of client. Crowley, for example, was a classic, damn-the-torpedoes, statesman-adventurer who—if he’d been consulted before that car crash—would probably have blown out his own brains rather than be programmed into the Tank.

“Now, our typical client is a professor emeritus whose fee was paid by a university department which was grateful to see him finally tucked away, and who probably had been existing as a pure intellect for twenty years before his death.”

“What difference does it make? Crowley’s in there now and he’ll just have to adapt.”

“That’s what you think.” Philp snorted. “If you’d been paying attention to my animation you’d know that every neuron in Crowley’s original brain has its counterpart in the Tank. Crowley was endowed with the strong will common to his kind, which from the biologist’s point of view is another way of saying there was plenty of power available locally at his neurons to amplify weak signals and trigger off following branches of neurons.

“Translated into the electrochemical context of the Tank, our Colonel Crowley has a lot of extra molecular amplifiers which give his artron networks more zip than those of our other clients.”

“What of it?”

“I’ll tell you what of it. Crowley doesn’t just converse with other clients in the normal manner—he imposes his own thought patterns on them.”

Urquhart’s sense of alarm deepened. “That sounds bad. How long has it been going on?”

“Several weeks. Ever since Crowley learned how to screen off all normal inputs and to generate his own signals. That’s what I meant about conquering new kingdoms—he has his own private universe to occupy him.”

“You mean he’s insane?”

“Not necessarily. A psychologist might say he has prevented himself from going insane.”

“This is terrible.” Urquhart began pacing the length of the office. ‘But come now, Bryan—you’re exaggerating when you say he has a private universe. Do you mean … ha-ha … he forces some of the others to swallow his own notions about the benefits of colonialism?”

“I mean he makes them ride around a desert on green-and-red dragons while he hunts them with a rifle.”

“Jehovah’s jockstrap!” Urquhart lurched drunkenly against Philp’s workdesk and the pink cigar popped into existence above his head.

“Hello,” it chirped. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile….”

“Try to be a bit more careful,” Philp said reprovingly, setting his cofftea down and going to the desk. He touched a button and the cigar vanished, shrinking through spurious perspectives.

“You’ve made me ill,” Urquhart accused. “What is this nonsense about dragons and hunting with a rifle?”

“Crowley has created another reality, and that’s it. I occasionally get a few details from Professor Isaacs, who was one of the first that Crowley sucked into his own orbit. The information is very sparse because Crowley keeps him pretty well occupied.”

“Then Crowley is mad. If this leaks out the company’s finished. We’ve got to get a psychiatrist here in secret, in the middle of the night, and have him talk to Crowley on the general address system.”

“I thought of that. It’s no use. The GA signals we put into the matrix reach Crowley all right, but he doesn’t want to hear anything which conflicts with his fantasy existence, so he shunts them on past him. Turns a deaf ear. We all do it to a certain extent.”

Urquhart felt his lower lip begin to tremble. He walked to one of the simulated windows and stood looking out. His distant hill glowed in afternoon sunshine, looking softer and more inviting than ever before. “A friend once told me I should read The Golden Bough because it has a message for me. So I read it—and all I can remember is a ghastly passage about young men cutting off their testicles and throwing them through people’s windows.”

“Really?” Philp sounded unsympathetic. “Are you going to try it?”

“If I thought it would …’ Urquhart turned to Philp who was draining his cofftea. “You almost seem to be enjoying this, Bryan—for a man who’s facing ruin you seem rather unconcerned.”

“Ruin?” Philp grinned broadly. “It’s a little early to speak in those terms, old son. I may be able to bring Crowley back.”

Urquhart felt his jaw sag but was unable to prevent it. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“Well, there’s just one thing.”

“Which is?”

“I want to be managing director of Biosyn.”

‘But I’m the managing director.”

“You’re also chairman—and one of those posts should be enough for anybody.”

Urquhart brought his jaw under control and made an attempt to square it. “I’m not going to be blackmailed.”

“The board of Bristol University are coming here next week in person to pay a visit to Professor Isaacs. I’ll see if he can get down from his dragon long enough to speak to them.”

“I’d forgotten about Isaacs.” Urquhart sat down and covered his face with his hands. “All right, Bryan—managing director it is. Now what are you going to do about Crowley?”

“Thank you, John.” Philp began striding about his office. “It’s nice to get a little promotion now and then. As for Colonel Crowley—I’ve been studying his career profile and I think the best weapon we can use against him is the cocktail party effect.”

A rum on the resultant reality vector:

The Right Hon. Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lit his pipe and puffed out a luxuriant cloud of blue smoke which billowed across the spaceship’s control room.

Vaulter looked at him with six critical eyes. “Now there’s something I’d overlooked,” he said aloud.

“You surprise me,” Mr. Wilson murmured. “At this stage? What is it?”

“The smoke you puffed out was blue, but when a human being exhales the smoke which comes out is grey—moisture in the lungs condenses on the carbon particles and changes the wave-length of the light they reflect.”

“Nobody on Earth is going to notice a thing like that,” Mr. Wilson protested hastily.

Vaulter silenced him with an upraised tentacle. “Never neglect even the minutest detail—that is the recipe for success on this type of mission. I’m going to fit a water sac in your chest cavity. Please take off your clothes.”

Mr. Wilson tapped out his pipe on a glowing control panel, leaving a small heap of ash among the switches, and began removing his tweed suit, muttering angrily all the while.

“What was that?” Vaulter said.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“I thought I heard you say something about Tory misrule.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Mr Wilson snapped. He stepped out of his underpants and stood to attention while Vaulter put a tentacle on each nipple and pushed outwards. The pale flesh split easily down the line of the plastic sternum and Vaulter went to work inside the thorax. There was a long period of silence inside the spaceship, interrupted only by the faint rattling of tools and an occasional soft chiming note from the isntrument panels. Finally Vaulter began to gather up the shining implements and fit them carefully into a case.

“You may get dressed now,” he said. “Then begin smoking again—I want to check the result. If necessary I’ll fit an atomiser to vaporise the water.”

“Surely that won’t be necessary.”

“I repeat, attention to detail is necessary. The orbiting telepathic field boosters will not give you absolute control of the population of Earth—all we can guarantee is that they will generate a firm belief in the principles of Benign Socialism. If you make a mistake and people begin to suspect your origins, dangerous conflicts will be created. These people are not yet ready for full membership of the Galactic Socialist Congress, so they must believe you are a product of their world.”

Mr. Wilson re-lit his pipe and blue smoke curled upwards from the bowl. “You think they’ll swallow reincarnation? After all, the original Harold Wilson has been dead for a hundred of their years.” He breathed out and his eyes followed the smoke which ascended from his mouth, noting with evident relief that it was a satisfactory grey.

“For your information, this technique has worked on every other Grade C world. There is a strong possibility that an element of religion will assert itself, especially as the broadcasts we’ve been monitoring make frequent references to Mr. Wilson walking on water.”

“But those broadcasts are more than a hundred years out of date! Why couldn’t I have been modelled on a 21st Century Earth politician?”

There was a silence while Vaulter crossed two of his eye-stalks, his equivalent of a sigh of exasperation. I’m sorry, Harold—I keep forgetting that your mind programme is based almost entirely on that of the original Mr. Wilson. I’ll explain the astronomical background once more. The only GCG station in this region of the galaxy which is capable of building a being like you is 800 light years from Earth, and even our best ships take fifty years to cover that distance.

“So when our observers gathered enough data to enable them to predict the abrupt decline of the native variety of Benign Socialism it took them fifty years to warn the Congress, and it has taken another fifty years to transport you to the trouble spot. Clear?”

“I don’t feel as if I’ve been travelling that length of time.”

“Because I didn’t activate you until a few days ago, stupid! I’m sorry, Harold. My nerves are a little strained, and I sometimes find it difficult to adjust to the many … ah … variegated forms of Benign Socialist leader that have sprung into existence across the galaxy.”

“It’s all right. Am I to assume that we’re close to Earth?”

“We’re in Earth orbit.” Vaulter flowed across to the instrument panels. “I’m tuning in to the orbiting telepathic field boosters now. The population of Earth has increased alarmingly in the last century, but luckily human brain dissipates only about ten watts so we still have ample power reserves. You will be able to blanket the entire planet with Wilsonian thinking.”

A faint smile puckered Mr. Wilson’s lips as he sucked noisily on the stem of his pipe.

Vaulter adjusted a series of verniers with a delicate tendril. “I’ll give the hook-up a final inspection at close range before you take over. Everything seems to be functioning smoothly with our transmitter network. Good! Now, I’ll just make sure that … No! No!” Vaulter hit a master switch with a convulsive movement of his puce-coloured body and rippled to the centre of the control room.

Mr. Wilson looked concerned. “What has happened?”

“The egotistical fools,” Vaulter said in a shocked whisper.

“What’s going on?”

“There has been an awkward development, I’m afraid. Earth technology has reached the level of the fairly complex computer, and they’ve been misusing the techniques to try immortalising selected individuals.”

“How does that affect me? I mean, us.”

“The computerised identities operate at vastly higher voltages than they did in the biological state and we can’t influence them. They will create huge pockets of resistance to your telepathic control.”

Mr. Wilson’s face darkened. “That’s bad.”

“There’s worse to follow. One of the identities appears to have screened out all local data inputs which normally render any sentient being insensible to telepathic probing. I made direct two-way contact with him for an instant. I’m afraid, Harold, that he may be on to us.”

Mr. Wilson’s pipe fell from his mouth and bounced on the floor, creating further little heaps of ash. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he said bitterly. “I just knew it.”

Vaulter remained motionless for a second, and when he spoke his voice was firm. “We aren’t giving up so easily. Benign Socialism deplores the use of violence, but technically speaking these individuals are already dead. I don’t think I would be violating the code of the Galactic Congress if I destroyed the computer installations at once, before any alarm can be raised.”

“I too deplore violence, naturally,” Mr. Wilson grated. “But I do see what you mean.”

A cognac on the computer reality vector:

Colonel Mason Crowley unsheathed his bolt rifle and climbed down from the huge dragon’s back. He had been riding hard for two days and his thigh muscles were aching from the effort of retaining his seat while Shalazzar bounded over the broken, ochreous landscapes of Tal. Now his quarry was trapped and the hunt was almost over.

“Do we rest here?” Professor Chan Isaacs, his lieutenant, wiped his face with a rag as he reined in his mount on the rocky ridge where Crowley had stopped.

Crowley pointed at the rag and issued a sharp command. “No textiles!”

“But how do I get rid of this filthy dust?”

“You don’t—not till we reach water.”

For a moment Isaacs looked as though he might rebel, then he held out the stained scrap of red cloth and let it fall. It fluttered downwards slowly and vanished before touching the ground. The coating of saffron dust reappeared on Isaac’s round face, turning it into an Oriental mask.

“That’s better,” Crowley said, checking the fuel cell output of his rifle. “Just remember—no wool-bearing fauna, no fibrous plants, therefore no textiles.”

Isaacs looked tired. “How about artificial fibres?”

“There is no plastics industry,” Crowley reminded him. “Tal is still in an early agrarian phase of its development.”

“Then, for Christ’s sake, how can you have that fancy rifle?”

Isaacs’ angry words ripped into Crowley’s consciousness, and the distant ramparts of the Mountains of Morida swam like reflections on the surface of a lake. You’re dead, a cold grey voice told him. You’re dead, and your soul is trapped in a black box. Queen Elanos does not exist…. He took a deep shuddering breath and pointed at Isaacs, who had dismounted from his dragon.

“Isaacs,” he said harshly. “You had a fall yesterday. Your left arm is dislocated at the elbow.”

Isaacs’ face twisted in sudden pain as the dark mounds of bruises appeared on his arm. “No! There was no fall. My arm is all right.”

“Then heal it.”

Black smears of dried blood changed their shape beneath the coating of dust on the swollen arm as the wills of the two men clashed, but after a few seconds Isaacs submitted. “My arm is out of joint,” he muttered. “And it hurts like hell.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Crowley said. “We’ll put a bandage on it as soon as we’ve dealt with Browne.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

Crowley walked to the southern side of the ridge and shaded his eyes from the lowering sun. The plateau sloped away gently for less than a kilometre, then there was a sheer drop of a thousand metres to the Cythian Plain. Browne, the rebel, was trapped somewhere in the triangular area of rocks and stunted trees, and his dragon was too exhausted to make a successful break past the hunters.

“I’ll go forward alone on foot. Queen Elanos has given me personal responsibility in this matter, and I want it ended before dark.” Crowley signalled his dragon to rest and the huge beast settled on its haunches, electric-green and magenta scales clicking as the sack-like belly flattened out on the ground.

“Good luck,” Isaacs said drily.

Ignoring him, Crowley set the bolt rifle for maximum charge and moved downwards into the triangle. He had discarded all clothing except for a breech clout of fine leather, and the heat of the rocks seared through his skin at every contact. The hunt had taken more out of him than he liked to admit, but he had the consolation of knowing that Browne must be in worse condition. Browne was tenacious, but he had no experience in this type of country which was remarkably similar to Crowley’s native Losane. Losane? Repetition of the name caused an obscure flickering pain far back in Crowley’s mind. That can’t be right. I was born in Perigore, in the castle of Rembold the Bright, and I was called to Tal from afar by Queen Elanos to defend her against …

Something moved in the rocks and scrub a hundred paces to Crowley’s right. He instinctively dropped into a crouch, and levelled the rifle as the figure of an almost naked man appeared from behind a dessicated tree. It was Browne—but unarmed, and without his dragon.

“Crowley!” The man’s voice was faint. “I want to talk to you.”

Crowley straightened up, still aiming the rifle. “Here I am, traitor, and I advise you not to try any of your tricks.”

“No tricks—I simply want to speak to you.”

“Do you acknowledge the sovereignty of Queen Elanos?”

“That’s what I want to talk about.” Browne scrambled upwards until he was face-to-face with Crowley. Sweat had traced red rivers in the dust on his face. He was about fifty years old and had the flabby build of someone who ate too much and exercised too little, but his eyes shone with an uncompromising hardness.

“Do you acknowledge our Queen?” Crowley demanded.

“Let’s consider Queen Elanos for a moment,” Browne said calmly. “I’ve been thinking about her name. E-L-A-N-O-S. Don’t you notice something peculiar there?”

“Peculiar?” Crowley’s voice shook with anger. “Peculiar?”

“Yes. Don’t you see it? Elanos is an anagram of Losane—the name of the country you carved out of Rhodesia almost single-handed in what, for lack of a better term, I call your previous life.”

“I’m warning you,” Crowley said as the distant Cythian Plain momentarily reversed its colours, split into horizontal lines and reassembled itself.

“This whole fantasy in which you have embroiled us is a reenactment of your political career, Colonel Crowley. Queen Elanos is a personification of Losane—the first fragment of Africa which, thanks to you, opted to return to Imperial rule….”

“Silence—or you die now.”

“You’re a dyed-in-the-wool Colonialist, Crowley. This Queen Elanos of yours—she looks very like a former Queen of England, right? But not Elizabeth II, because she wouldn’t suit the role. Elanos resembles Victoria, doesn’t she?”

The cloudless sky above the Kingdom of Tal turned grey and a charcoal sketch of a strangely familiar, bespectacled man’s face appeared in it for an instant, stretching from jagged horizon to zenith. A voice like the echoes of far-off thunder issued from the insubstantial grainy lips. ‘… preliminary reports indicate that an unidentified spaceship has entered Earth orbit. The immense size of the vessel suggests that it is not of human origin….”

“What was that?” Crowley said, looking upwards into the sky.

“I didn’t notice anything,” Browne replied impatiently. “And consider my name, even my personal appearance. Why do you think you cast me as a villain of the piece? George Brown was a prominent member of the British Labour Government in the last century, just at the time of the final dissolution of the old British Empire, and there’s no doubt that this coincidence of nomenclature is a major …’

Contact!

A thousand years of alien existence, a mind dedicated to the incredible proposition that association should be substituted for competition, a being which controlled vast forces, including the power to make all men think alike, a being which immediately identified Crowley as its enemy, and which was coming to …

Retreat!

“What’s happening?” Crowley felt his mouth go dry.

“… principle of self-establishing circuitry has disproved the a priori or ‘wired-in knowledge’ theory concerning the human brain in favour of the tabula rasa or clean slate new brain,” Browne droned on pedantically. “In our present state the hitherto indefinable quality known as ‘will’ is translated into physical reality as a higher than normal proportion of molecular amplifiers, which is the only reason you are able to impress your dreamscapes on others. But this state of affairs depends …”

“Stop mouthing for a moment—didn’t you feel anything?”

“Of course not, because I too have gained control of my amplifiers and I’m withdrawing from this particular fantasy.”

“Fantasy?” Crowley looked down at the rifle, which promptly turned into a broom and then vanished. “I’m talking about the … real world. I … I … Something is happening out there, and I’m the only one who understands. I’ve got to speak to Philp or Urquhart immediately.”

Browne looked around him, almost regretfully, at the dissolving mountains and plains of the Kingdom of Tal. “Be careful,” he said with a strange gentleness, “you could be walking into a …”

Crowley lost contact with him as the complex electrical network which simulated his personality began establishing new circuits within the compliant matrix, recreating the channels of communication with the outside world.

A Hennessy on the human reality vector:

Urquhart fixed his gaze for a moment on the wooded hill and made up his mind to waste no more time—he would go there very soon, possibly tomorrow, or maybe the next day. He picked up a plastic reference copy of a computer programme from his desk and his eyes scanned the typed words.

“I still think the risk was too great, Bryan,” he said. “A being from interstellar space which was planning to destroy the Tank, then set up a puppet dictator to rule the world by thought control! And you actually fed this mush into the Tank on the general address system?”

“I did.” Philp smiled his dazzling smile.

“You told our clients they were in imminent danger of losing their lives?”

“That’s what I told them,” Philp said comfortably. “They didn’t believe me, of course. Bill Uvarov was on the current affairs query panel at the time and according to him it lit up like a Christmas tree in less than a second. I apologised to everyone and told them part of a spoof television show had been fed in by mistake. They took it all right—but I’ll be getting sarcastic comments for the next year.”

Urquhart set the programme down. “And the only one who was taken in was Colonel Crowley.”

“Well, in bionics and biology we use the term ’cocktail party effect’ to describe the brain’s ability to pick out a single voice from the hubbub of noise made by a large group all speaking at once—and Crowley hadn’t lost that facility. He was screening out all other communications, but when I tailored a fantasy especially for him he heard me immediately.

“All I had to do was concoct a dream which was even more attractive and stimulating for him than the one in which he was living. With his background and mental make-up he couldn’t resist the idea of saving the world from interstellar socialism.”

“And you’ll be able to hold him on station until after Losane’s general election?”

“Yes—now that we know what to expect. Dorman’s team has set up an inhibitory field which will stabilise the Colonel’s molecular amplifiers at a mean output and impair his ability to drift. He’ll get away eventually, but we’re fine for a year or so …”

Urquhart sighed contentedly and returned his gaze to the hill. “So we’ve nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not too sure about that—I think we’re going to have trouble with Browne. He now says Crowley’s fantasy world wasn’t such a bad place and battling his way out of it was the first taste of genuine involvement he’d had since he was Tanked. I heard him rambling on about deliberately staged contests of will to relieve the boredom. Computerised Olympics or something.”

“Nothing too alarming in that. In fact, he might have something.”

“There’s just one other thing,” Philp said, his eyes hidden behind blazing flakes of glass. “There are bound to be other elections in Losane, and—if I know Mason Crowley—when he eventually takes off into never-never land he’ll be saving the Earth from disaster every week, now that we’ve given him the idea.”

“So?”

“So how do we lure him back next time?”