CHAPTER V

Alan awoke after an hour of nightmare-ridden sleep. He opened his eyes and got quietly out of bed and put on his tweed suit and a pair of loafers, and walked out of the house without disturbing the slumber of Brave.

He went down to the main road and walked along it in the moonlight toward a distant group of buildings. Presently a soldier stepped into his path.

"Halt and identify yourself."

"I am Dr. Alan Rackham of Fuel Research. My security number is A10C14B44."

The soldier looked at him a moment and then his eyes glittered. "Pass, friend," he said, and standing aside he watched Alan go on toward the buildings. There was a cynical smile on the soldier's mouth.

Alan came to a squat flatroofed structure like a concrete shed. He knocked on the door. It opened and he went in. One weak bulb burned in a lamp. There was a tall man standing there in the shadows. He shook hands with Alan.

"Welcome, companion. Just sit down here."

Alan seated himself on a stool. The other passed along two walls and in succession a number of vivid lights flared out, bathing Alan in their burning radiance. He did not blink, but looked steadily and fixedly ahead.

_Greetings_, said the voice.

_Greetings, master._

_Are you happy to return to me?_

_I have never been away from you._

_That is true. Now I have things to tell you. You will not remember them consciously tomorrow, but you will obey the commands and refuse to do those things which I tell you are wrong. Understood?_

_Understood._

_Now first, slave_, said the voice coldly, anger piled on icy anger in the dripping wordless thoughts: _you have decided that there are aliens among you. A race of supermen, mutated from your own weak breed._

_Yes._

_That is untrue. Forget it._

_It is forgotten._

_Such an idea is foolishness._

_It is stupid_, said Alan, believing.

_There are no aliens. There are neither supermen nor mutants. There is no thinking race on earth but the genus Homo. The accidents are unrelated; the welder a victim of shock, the pilot merely lucky._

_I see._

_The disks are under the supervision of the government, who wished to keep their purpose secret until now._

_Security reasons_, said Alan in blind agreement.

_There is only you and there is only me, I who am you, you who are me. And this is our private knowledge and not to be spoken of._

_I would die rather than tell of it._

_Now you are mine again._

_Never anything else, master._

_Forget me._

_Forgotten._

_Go home._

_Of course._

Alan rose and passed out of the range of the lights, and the tall man nodded with approval and began to switch off his terrible lamps.

* * * * *

Alan woke in the grayness of dawn, cramped and half-chilled from sleeping in a chair. He stretched and groaned, and got up to brew some coffee. Brave woke at the clinking of china and came padding out to the kitchen.

"Up so early, commodore? You look as if you hadn't slept."

"I slept, all right, but it didn't do much good. My head's splitting."

Brave took over the coffee pot. "Any more ideas on the mutant theory?"

"Oh, hell. I guess I was wrong."

Brave turned and looked at him. "Why do you say that?"

"Well, look. The welder might have been suffering from shock. The pilot was--just lucky. And the business of the disks can be explained by obtuse government security regulations. And where does that leave our precious superman notion? Out in the cold and wet."

Brave shook his great head. "Huh-uh, son. More to it than that. Too many coincidences spoil the broth; too many queer things happening isn't right. I think you were on the trail of truth last night."

"I was talking through my ear," said Alan irritably.

Brave stared at him. A furrow appeared above the great hawk nose. He bent and pushed Alan's head back and looked into his friend's eyes. Alan tried to jerk his head away and Brave held it steady in the grip of one tough fist. He lifted Alan's lids one after the other and growled deep in his chest.

"What the devil, Brave!"

The Indian stood erect. "By the Great Spirit," he said. "Hypnotized!"

"What in hell's name are you talking about?"

"You've been hypnotized. Your pupils are swollen as big as grapes."

"You're crazy."

Brave regarded him equably. "Sure, tetrarch. Sure I'm crazy. Did you go out last night?"

"You were with me. What's wrong with you? We went to Win's."

"I mean later, when I was asleep."

"Certainly not. I did get up and go into the living room, though, and I fell asleep in a chair."

"Ah," said Brave. He considered a moment. "Watch the java, will you?"

Alan nodded. The Indian went out of the kitchen. Alan heard him moving things about in their little laboratory beside the plastiglassed lounging quarters. In five minutes he returned.

"Alan, you trust me, don't you?"

"My God, do you have to be reassured on that? Ever since we marched through Argentina together. Since Campana and Buenos Aires and that hell of Pergamino. I'd trust you if you told me to jump into Lower Bay."

"Okay. Now do me a favor." He gulped down a cup of scalding coffee. "Drink up and come with me."

* * * * *

Alan drank obediently, and stood and followed Brave into the lab. In a cleared space stood a pair of machines, looking somewhat like giant cameras, the lens of one covered by a multicolored disk, that of the other unshaded; there were plastic charts bolted to the sides, and dials and several types of indicator, and among all these the distinctive green and gold seal of the Institute of Psychotherapeutic and Hypnotherapeutic Research.

Alan balked. "Hold on, Brave! You aren't going--"

"You said you trust me. Do it now if never again. Sit down."

"No!" he shouted. He was not quite sure of his reasons, but he knew he must not be hypnotized.

Brave moved to shut him off from the door. "You'll sit there if I have to knock you out, boss."

Alan saw he was not joking. He said, "Where did you get the machines, Brave?"

"Had 'em around for years. I've always been intrigued by hypnosis, you know that. In fact you knew I had the machines. Will you sit down?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Damn it, you're sparring for time. If you think--"

Alan swung on him without warning, a lashing buffet that could have broken a lesser man's neck; Brave took it square on the side of his jaw and staggered back, shaking his head. Then he caught Alan's coat as the smaller man leaped for the door. He swept him around by the coat like a yo-yo on a string, and judging his blow as carefully and dispassionately as an old champion measures an upstart contender, he rammed his big fist into Alan's belly just below the ribs. It jolted Alan back and doubled him over and made him blind with agony. He could not breathe. There was no air left in his lungs and he could not suck any into them. He was going to die. He wanted to die. He was dying.

Brave dropped him, unresisting, into the chair and tied him down with a few turns of a light rope. "Son," he said, "I know that wasn't you that socked me, it was whatever creeping louse got to you last night. I'll apologize later for smacking you ... if you want me to." He went to his machines and began to turn dials and adjust gauges, and move pointers on the graduated scales. He tipped Alan's head up and clamped it firmly in the vise-like apparatus which rose from the chair's back. Alan was groggy, his breath now hissing in and out between clenched teeth. Brave went on talking.

"I could have knocked you out, and it wouldn't have hurt nearly as much; but I wanted you awake. That pain may help, too. Rob Pope was saying something the other day about intense pain being an aid in nullifying the effects of hypnosis, when allied, that is, with counter-hypnosis. We'll see. Take it easy, pup."

Your technical training could be a deterrent factor, thought Brave; you may be able to oppose the mechanical-visual patterns successfully. I hope not. It doesn't seem to me that there's a lot of time left to us, and I want you back on my side.

* * * * *

He focused the lens of one machine on Alan's half-open eyes and pressed a button. Light began to flicker across the agonized face, its color changing from second to second. Brave cut in the other beam and white light that shifted its form even as the first shifted color lanced through the blue and red and yellow. Alan shut his eyes, but immediately opened them again.

"You can't resist it," said Brave quietly. "You don't want to resist it. You like the pretty lights." The voice was an important stimulus too. "Your mind is conditioned to taking orders, isn't it, son? Somebody's been giving you evil commands. You don't like that. You'd rather listen to me." The weird patterns of the light beams held Alan's dull gaze. He was already adrift in a flashing vacuum. Brave's voice came to him slurred and without sense. Gradually he began to hear the words.

"Somebody hypnotized you last night, didn't they, son?"

"Yes. I think they did."

"Who did it?"

"I don't know. A tall man."

"Do you know his name?"

"I couldn't see his face very well."

"What did he tell you?"

There was a long silence. Then Alan, his face contorted, said, "He didn't tell me anything. He only put on the lights. They were vivid as sin. Then there was a voice."

"What did the voice say? You can tell Brave, son. Good old Brave. You trust Brave."

He thought. "I can't tell you," he said. "Not even you. It was a voice. It was the voice. My voice. I love it."

"Isn't there anything you can repeat?"

"Yes. It said I had to forget the superman theory. It explained the accidents; and the disks. It's all natural. It isn't mutants."

Brave started to sweat. He pried at Alan's mind, learning almost everything about the night before. But he did not find out that Alan had first heard the voice at the telecast, nor did he learn that the voice and Alan were one, master and slave, but one. The earlier hypnosis had been too clever. It had struck at the roots of Alan's soul, becoming religion and truth to him, and he would not deny it or betray it.

At last realizing that he had heard all he was going to hear, the Indian gave Alan certain counter-commands. He repeated them until Alan squirmed and whimpered under the repetition. Finally Brave was satisfied. By using the powerful mechanical-visual stimuli, it was usually easy enough to plant ideas in a subject, and only infinitely stronger agents could destroy such ideas. Brave hoped that the enemy did not have stronger agents; but he knew that in the last analysis it was a timid and unsure hope indeed.

"About all I can do now," he growled low, "is stick with you as if I was a cocklebur in your hair. Till they kill me, or we beat 'em."

* * * * *

He turned off his machines and brought Alan to full consciousness. He untied him and led him into the lounging quarters, pushing him down onto a yielding sofa. "Take it easy for a while. That was quite an ordeal. I guess you have a belly-ache." He poured two long Scotches. "Now tell me what you remember."

Alan thought. "Everything," he said with surprise. "At least I suppose it's everything." He repeated the substance of what they had both said in the lab. "Right?"

"That's it. I told you to remember it all. I wanted to level with you, chief. We've got a fight on our hands and I can't have you going around in a daze. You've got to realize what happened to you last night, so you can buck another attempt like it. By the way, you couldn't tell me why you went down to that building."

"I don't know. I haven't any memory of going, or of what happened there; I simply recall telling you about it. I have a memory of a memory, I suppose you could say."

"Strong medicine those dog soldiers are using, by God," said Brave. "The more I learn about them, the surer I am that they're superior mutants."

"I think so too," said Alan. Brave grinned. His therapy had overcome the former hypnotist's commands. Alan went on. "The big question was, why have they suddenly appeared among us, why now? I think we have that answered. It isn't sudden; it may have been happening for generations. Slip-ups may have occurred as far back as history goes. One mistake might go unremarked; two might make a man wonder: then he'd investigate, and be either eliminated (they shot at me, you remember!) or hypnotized and taken under the control of the mutants."

"Bright lad! Your own experience bears that out."

"So the newest big question would be: how do we fight them? Perhaps we're the first to recognize them and retain our own wills. We can't let that circumstance go to waste, Brave. We've got to strike at them for our race's sake." He scowled. "But that leads to this: _do_ we strike at them?"

"What do you mean, Alan?"

"I mean ... well, Brave, would we be in the right to take law into our own hands and start a murder campaign, say, against them? Suppose we were fighting good, instead of evil?"

Brave looked blank.

"How do we know they're wrong?" Alan continued. "How do we know they're against us? Perhaps they are the true race of the future, and every man of intelligence should be on their side. No, this isn't an hypnotically planted theory: it's something I brooded on last night before I went to sleep. Where do our loyalties stand? If Homo superior is intelligent and self-centered, callous toward us, then obviously we fight him fang and claw. But if he is intelligent and benevolent, as you'd expect from a higher type of being, then we should ally ourselves with him."

"He shot at you. Is that benevolence?"

"I know. We might be wrong. It may have been a simple maniac who did it. Again, I think the coincidence would be too great; well, perhaps Homo superior had a good reason for it. We can't judge too deeply on insufficient evidence."

* * * * *

Brave said, "I see what you mean, Alan, and in abstract theory I agree with it. If the mutants are a good breed, a real improvement on our own kind, then we owe them the allegiance of intelligent underlings. But concrete evidence says they're not good. They shoot at you; they employ the most malefic and vicious kind of hypnotism on you, where a simple conditioning to the fact of their goodness would have brought you around to their side just as easily--and with twice the value. They aren't good. They are villainous." He grimaced. "I can see you hate the idea. Why? What's on your mind that I don't know about?"

Alan turned a haunted face to him. "Brave," he said, "Brave, Win's one of them."

The Indian said, "No. You're wrong. Not Win."

"That's what I repeated a couple of hundred times last night. Not Win, not Win. But I mashed out a cigarette on her arm--accidentally, of course--and she didn't feel it. It left a hell of a burn. But she never felt it. She can't feel pain. _She's mutant._"

Brave laid his hands on his thighs and shook his head and could say nothing. Alan went on. "Has she been playing with me, then? Or can they get physical pleasure from us? Or was it her job to watch me for signs of awareness?"

"Not that. You've been engaged too long for that."

"Well, what is the reason? Is it possible that she could actually be in love with me? Me, a member of a lower species! I've asked myself, could I fall in love with an orangutan? A fairly bright, good-looking orangutan? The answer always comes out _no_."

"Hardly a fair comparison."

Alan glanced over at the mirror that formed the west wall of the otherwise plastiglassed-in room. He saw himself haggard, gray in the face, with bloodshot pouched eyes, and clad in tweeds that had obviously been slept in. "Hardly fair to the ape," he said, grinning a little.

"I can't believe Win is one of them," said Brave stubbornly.

"And I can't find any other explanation. If I make sure she is, and if we find they're evil, as we think, then I know what's the first thing I'll do." He looked his friend in the eyes. "I'll kill her, Brave. I'll cut her damned lying throat!"

* * * * *

Then he stood up. "Enough of that. There are bigger things at stake than Win right now. I think we may take it as a truism that you and I can't hinder the superman's plans worth a whoop. Nor could we get to more than one or two people in authority before we were found out and stopped. Lord, the very ones we'd naturally go to are probably mutants themselves! So there's just one thing to be done. Enlist the fellows we know are all right. There's Don Mariner, for a start. He's plump and balding and looks ineffective but he's as smart a lad as we have on the Project. Then there's Rob Pope; he was in the hospital last month when he cut himself badly on a hot sheet of plastiquartz. He's in the plastic chemistry section, but he knows a lot about hypnotism and such-like, so he'd be an asset."

"Can we trust him just because he cut himself? He might have faked the pain."

"Brave, we've got to trust somebody! All we can do is grasp at little indications of true humanity. Let's see. Who else is there?"

"Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man. He was at Oxford with me. Rhodes scholar, prince of a guy, and abnormally sensitive--I've seen him throw up when a dog was run over. He's no callous mutant."

"Good deal. That's five of us. Any more?"

They thought hard. Mentioning names, discarding them as unsure risks, they ran through all their acquaintances. No more potential allies could they find till Alan said, "Jim McEldownie!"

"What do we know about Jim?"

"That he's uglier than the Duchess in _Alice_. Look at the mutants we've recognized: the welder, a well-set-up Tarzan type; the pilot, a clean-cut handsome dog; and Win, a raving belle. Does Jim fit in with them? My sainted grandmother, no! And if we convince him of our belief, he might put us on TV to broadcast it to the country. _Worlds of Portent_ has a huge following, and people believe what they see and hear on it. Then afterward, if _they_ get us, we won't have wasted what may be the first and last opportunity men have had to publicize the presence of the enemy among us."

Brave went to the visiphone. There was an atmosphere of tense disquiet in the room now, as though things were about to burst out in violence and passion at any second. The Indian talked with Don Mariner and Pope and Thihling, who all agreed to come over within the hour; then he called McEldownie. Shortly the lanky announcer was looking quizzically at him from the screen. "How, Lo." He shuddered. "How low can you reach for a gag? What's up?"

"Mac, can you get here right away?"

"Unholy cats--apologies to Unquote--why the rush?"

"Just say we need a good man in a hurry."

The other cocked an eyebrow. "I detect the aroma of butter, salve, and the old oil. Okay, I'll take an air taxi. Heat up any spare steak you have lying around. I haven't eaten breakfast."

"Naturally," said Brave, and turned off the visiphone. "There," he said to Alan, "now all we have to do is convince them."

* * * * *

It took two hours to convert the four men to their views. Don Mariner, because of his own findings, was with them from the first exposition; Pope was intrigued but skeptical; Thihling was frankly incredulous; and McEldownie was scornful and astonished by turns. At last the fierce earnestness of Brave and Alan had its effect, and all of them were on their feet, pacing up and down, shouting at one another, smacking their fists into their palms and proposing unworkable plans at random.

Alan argued with Jim about the telecast. Finally the lean man said, "All right. I'm wacked. We're all wacked. They'll take away my job, my license, and my reputation. They'll toss us all in the hatch. Maybe we'll be lucky and get a room together. We can sit in a ring and make faces at each other for the next fifty years." He shrugged. "Nevertheless, we'll do it. We'll do it tonight. If things are coming to a head, we've got to step high and swift. I'd scheduled the Secretary of State tonight, but he'll have to wait. I'll go down and make arrangements. Won't say anything to the sponsors, naturally, or the staff. They trust me ... they've done it for the last time, I imagine. Well, I've had five good years on TV. Let's finish it in a real crackerjack blaze of the well-known glory, gents. Here we go round the loony bin."

"You, boy," said Alan fervently, "are okay."

"I'm a living doll," said McEldownie moodily, and left.

Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man, a compact sturdy pocketsized fellow about Brave's age--thirty-six or -seven--said, "Now let's have some action. Let's _do_ something."

"First thing we do is swallow some antigues," said Brave, going into the kitchen for the bottle. Antigues were anti-fatigue tablets, on which a man could keep fresh and intelligent for seventy-two hours without sleep. "I have an idea that sleep will be a myth and a vagrant memory for us before too long."

"And then," said Don Mariner, "we catch one of the supermen and beat some truth out of him."

Alan laughed hollowly, reminding himself of a character out of _MacBeth_. "Beat it out of him? Torture a being that doesn't feel pain?"

"Kill him, then," urged Rob Pope. "It's simple bloodthirst, but we've got to make a beginning. Perhaps it'll make his cousins fret a little. Bring 'em into the open."

"We don't even know they can be killed. A thousand-pound 'sword' couldn't faze the pilot of that disk. What could _we_ do?"

"We can try! It's no good our arguing back and forth; we haven't any real data. The only thing to do is kidnap one of _them_, see what makes him tick, and then do our planning."

"I'm for that," said Don. "Which one shall we take?"

"The welder's vanished, and we can't very well torture, or try to torture, Win Gilmore. Too rough on Alan. Let's have in the pilot of the wrecked disk."

"He wouldn't come here if we called him: too suspicious a request," said Alan. "Kidnapping's the thing."

"Pope and I can handle that," said Thihling. "Anyone know his name?"

"Erin Grady," said Don Mariner. "Judas, isn't that a handle!"

Rob Pope, a big rangy man built in the style of a woodsrunner out of early America, said, "Ho for Erin Grady, then. And if he tries any of his damn superman's hypnosis, I'll fling it in his own teeth. I know a trick or two in that line myself."

The two of them left the house. Brave began to mix three stiff highballs, and Don Mariner took out a harmonica and played Bach, with only a few sour notes per bar. Alan picked up the cat Unquote and fondled her. But his thoughts were grim. All he could see was a beautiful girl who he longed to hold in his arms. A beautiful girl with a cigarette burn on her arm. A girl who felt no pain. Win....