The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (84 page)

“Drug him. Stupefy him. Give him a sedative so his perceptions are dulled and a euphoriac so that what he does perceive will seem pleasurable. It will be temporary and harmless. If it is successful you have resources to make it permanent.”

The King’s Physician shivered, and said fearfully, “It is a great risk, but there has been no other suggestion of a diagnosis. If you will sign the prescribed treatment with me—”

Garr shrugged his shoulders. Kett wrote out the order for treatment. Garr countersigned it. The twenty greatest medical minds on Loren were conducted away to await the event of the recovery of the King’s pet. They were placed in separate luxurious suites.

Garr went to bed and seemingly to sleep. If he actually thought of his wife and children he gave no sign.

At noon next day Kett came to him, shaking all over with joy.

“It worked!” he told Garr. “The King himself asked who had cured his pet! Your name was given him with mine. Your fortune is made, Garr!”

Garr said practically, “Will my fortune let me see my family?”

“Not now. Not yet. The King has ordered you attached to the Department of the King’s Beasts that you may be at hand for other emergencies of the same sort.”

Garr was very still. This was high honor. It was also imprisonment. He had attracted the King’s attention—favorably, to be sure, but fatally. From now on, his life-work would be the curing of neuroses in the loathsome small beasts which were the King’s pets.

“If you ask quickly,” said Kett, “you can have your apparatus brought here. You will have leisure. You can do research. But you would not want your family here, of course.”

Garr shook his head. He would not want his family to share a dungeon, however beautifully decorated.

* * * *

He went about his business—the King’s business. Within a week his apparatus had been examined and cleared as containing no possibility of being used as a weapon. He received an official communication from his family. His wife was well. His children were well. They sent him greetings. He read the printed card inscrutably.

He set up the apparatus from Yorath, though it was not designed for veterinary use. It worked as well on Loren as on Yorath. It was, however, interesting to observe that animals gave no reaction in the device. But Kett, the King’s Physician, was summoned to the pleasure-palace some two weeks later. He came to Garr’s suite and the room he had cleared out for a laboratory.

Garr explained in detail the circuit which amplified impossibly small signals—of the order of ten to the minus thirteenth milliwatt-seconds. Then the King’s Physician sat down and put on the curious, filigree cap. He sat quite still for a long time. When he removed the cap he was weeping happily.

“It is true, Garr,” he said unsteadily. “There is no death! I am not afraid to die now! Not after what my mother told me! I shall welcome it! You were quite right about the device!”

“I am neither right nor wrong about it,” insisted Garr. “I said that it amplifies signals fainter than any previously detected. That is all. I do not say that it communicates with persons in an after-life.”

“But I say it!” said Kett with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I say it, Garr! I shall speak of this in high places!”

“To whom?” demanded Garr. “And what will you say?”

The King’s Physician wiped his eyes. “Such assurance of an after-life,” he said reverently, “is the greatest of possible treasures. Would not a loyal subject of the King wish to give his master such a gift?”

“You would be dismissed for talking nonsense!” said Garr sharply. “Don’t be a fool! If you must talk send me an honest man too highly placed to be dismissed. Old Sard would do, I think. He’s the Grand Chamberlain and the King’s cousin. By all accounts he’s a saintly old character. Send him to me.”

Days later the Grand Chamberlain came waddling to Garr’s suite. Kett, he said benevolently, had told him about a remarkable device that Garr had brought from Yorath. He would be glad to know just what Kett had been talking about.

Garr explained carefully and respectfully. The old man was not over-intelligent but he was an aristocrat of aristocrats and he had never been ambitious. He was perfectly happy to be Grand Chamberlain. Being a happy man he was a kindly one. He was even a good man according to his lights. Garr explained and had him wear the filigree headpiece.

When he took it off the Grand Chamberlain beamed. “My sister scolded me,” he chuckled. “She has been dead since I was fourteen but she mothered me even then. She scolded me for laziness! Kett was quite right. This device does communicate with persons no longer in the flesh—and quite content about it!”

“Sir,” said Garr urgently, “I beg Your Excellency not to speak of this! You have no need to fear a future existence. But if someone less worthy were to find himself—ah—facing unpleasantness, he would not be pleased with me.”

The Grand Chamberlain beamed on. “Ha!” he chuckled. “I shall send my nephew to you! He took a commoner’s wife the other day and the commoner was impertinent, and my nephew had him killed. I have lectured him before to no effect. Now I shall scold him and send him to you!”

Garr drew in his breath sharply.

When an imperious young aristocrat appeared and curtly demanded to learn what the machine would say to him Garr went very white. He tried to explain its scientific aspects but the young man silenced him in black fury.

Garr expected to be killed when it was finished but the young aristocrat did not even see him. His eyes were pools of pure horror. His face was gray with an ashen grayness. His garments were soaked with the sweat of fear. He stumbled from the room like a drunken man.

Two days later an order came for the surrender of the machine to the King’s Guard. Garr let it go without protest. He did not even let his eyes flash triumph. He waited, going about his duties as one of the physicians to the King’s pets.

Three days later still he faced a menacing Guard-captain in a Guard laboratory. The machine was there. Garr explained again exactly what it did. It received and amplified signals too faint to have been detected by any previous device. It also transmitted signals reduced to an immeasurably small power-content. That was all.

Yes, it had been suggested that it might be a way of communication with personalities not associated with living tissues. He did not consider the body of evidence great enough for a reasoned judgment. Yes, he would willingly use the machine, with its controls worked by a guardsman.

He did. His eyes were shining when he took off the filigree cap. A Guardsman took his place. When he removed the cap he was shaken but convinced. A second and a third. The Guard-captain himself.

The Captain came out sweating and grim. “Enough!” he said thickly to Garr. “Back to your kennels!”

* * * *

Garr went back to his duties. His eyes glowed a little, as he waited for the inevitable, logical result.

Just after sunset, he heard the sound of fighting in the Palace. Hand-guns and stabbing beams made a tumult in which the screams of dying men could barely be heard.

He heard the shouts, “For the King! For—” They proved that what he had planned and anticipated even back on Yorath—without ever daring to breathe one syllable to any other person about his hopes—had come to pass. The King had used the machine.

When the fighting spread all through the Palace in monstrous confusion he very practically hid under his bed. And there he listened as the slaughter went on.

* * * *

It was three months before he reached the capital city again. He was thin and footsore and half-starved. He arrived on foot, and when he saw that the Palace lay half in ruins his heart seemed to stop. But then he saw that the Quarter of the Palace Domestics was untouched. He went stumblingly toward it and there were no guards at the gate. That was astounding.

He went in and a thin-faced man came out of a door at ground-level and started toward a battered ground-car. Garr blinked at him. All was strange, but this was strangest of all,—for a man to come out of the ruined Palace as if it were any ordinary building.

Then he recognized the man—Sortel, the friend who had waited on a balcony to take a picturescope scene of him as he arrived from Yorath. His friend from long years past.

“Sortel!” cried Garr.

The other man turned, saw Garr and ran. He seized Garr by the arms, and hugged him.

“Garr, you scoundrel!” he cried joyfully. “You were in the Palace of the Azure Sea and we thought you were dead! Everybody died there! Your wife was half mad—but she was half mad when you were promoted, too. She’s all right!” he added quickly. “So are the children! I’ll take you to them! Instantly!”

Garr went weak with relief and then managed to smile. “It was a bad gamble,” he said unsteadily, “I did not expect to win. But it was a gamble that had to be made.”

Sortel helped him across the grass to the battered ground-car. He helped him into the seat beside the driver. The ground-car shot into motion.

“There were thirty of us who lived,” said Garr. “Everybody else died. The King, too. After it was over there was no way to leave the island, so we had to build a boat with planks we tore off the buildings. And then we had to sail to the mainland. And then I came here. Was it very bad?”

“Was it bad?” Sortel laughed without mirth, yet in bitter satisfaction. “The estimate is two million total deaths—because the King went insane!”

“No,” said Garr. “Not at all.”

“He didn’t?” asked Sortel ironically. “He had to be crazy! He sent orders for mass executions of half his Guard! He said they were traitors to him. But he didn’t send them orders to submit, so they wouldn’t believe it. They thought their executioners were rebels talking nonsense and fought them—for the King.

“The King ordered half his family killed for plotting against him and the survivors led what Guards they could muster against the supposed assassins. The air-cruisers beamed the fighting and then beamed each other for beaming the wrong part of the fighters. The King’s Guard was ready to die for the King. It did!”

“To be sure,” said Garr. “In the palace on the island, part of the Guard fought to protect the King from the rest and the rest fought to rescue him from the first lot. But—”

“He went mad,” said Sortel grimly, driving the ground-car. “He went mad and he had too much power. His own commands killed two million people and it was pure luck that they were mostly his Guards instead of us commoners. If his insanity had ordered the extermination of the commoners the Guard would have obeyed him! That will never be possible again!”

“But he wasn’t mad!” said Garr. “He was wholly sane and absolutely logical. I brought back a machine from Yorath. I meant to get the King to use it if I could. I played my cards right, and he did.

“It’s a device that picks up signals fainter than have ever been picked up before. It translates the signals to sights and sounds and smells. Nothing in our cosmos is like the sights it made you see.

“And there were people. I used it myself and I had a long talk with my father, who advised me to be a good boy. My father is dead. The Grand Chamberlain used it, and his dead sister scolded him for laziness. Guardsmen used it and they got advice, no doubt—”

“Are you mad, too?” demanded Sortel apprehensively.

“Not yet,” said Garr mildly. “The machine—you know we never had a device that would detect thought. Muscular impulses and brain-waves, yes, but never thought. It was either a kind of energy we couldn’t handle or the signals were so faint we couldn’t pick them up. It turned out to be the latter. The device I brought back from Yorath would pick up thought.”

Sortel looked blankly at him, then turned back to his driving.

“And,” said Garr rather awkwardly, “there are three levels of thought in our brains. There’s the subconscious, which is utterly immoral and thinks only of our desires. There’s the ego, or conscious self, which is the level of which we’re aware.

“And there is the super-ego, or censor, which uses our notions of right and morality and all our fears to battle with our subconscious for control of what we do. It happened that it was the third level the device picked up and amplified.”

“But—” protested Sortel blankly.

“The third level,” said Garr, “masquerades in dreams and apparitions and fantasies and illusions. It presents our hopes and fears with great vividness, to mould us to its own desire. I—I have always wished I could live up to my father’s exaggerated hopes for me.

“When I used the machine from Yorath my super-ego—my censor—seized its chance to present a beautiful and quite logical dream. My father approved of me with reservations and I would soon be free.

“When Kett used it he was soothed by his dead mother, who had always meant security and comfort to him. The Grand Chamberlain was scolded by a dead sister who had expressed her fondness by scolding.

“But his nephew had done wrong and the third level of his brain pictured hellfire and an eternity of suffering as the only way to control his actions.”

The ground-car swerved. It moved on a side highway toward small new dwellings, hastily erected.

“Each of them believed,” said Garr, “that what they saw and heard and felt was a world after death, brought to communication by a miracle of science. That idea was my contribution. It is, I think, a full justification for my existence.