Part 1

MO-SANSHON!

By Bryce Walton

Only Professor Ward knew they were on Earth, could almost hear them _rustling_ behind their humanoid faces. Then Red came to help him, and of course he had to trust Red. But--could he?

[Transcriber’s Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1947. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

His gaunt figure slumped wearily in the only chair in the otherwise bare cube, while the telaudio pronounced its immutable sentence.

_The world psychometric council finds you. Doctor Jonathan Ward, a paranoic with advanced delusions of persecution and of grandeur. Your belief in a super-insect menace threatening humanoid culture we find unsupported by logical evidence. You will be subjected to the reconditioning and readjustment clinics as authorized in Title C, Section 890, Article 72, Paragraph 18, Lines 72-86, Revised Solar Statutes, 2166. Section C-890-72, Article 18-1-W, Solar Statutory Psychometry._

As the dry and precise voice faded from the six-by-six screen, long suppressed panic hit Ward like a sudden sickness. He ran to the smooth panel of the door.

An irrational reflex! Both door and single exit window could be activated only from the outside. He was two hundred floors up, isolated in a Verdict Cube in Washington’s Federal Building. Administrative Guards would be here soon to take him away. And when they released him from the clinics he wouldn’t be John Ward any more. He would be someone else; it wouldn’t matter who, because by then the Mo-Sanshon would have accomplished their purpose. The solar humanoid culture would have become only a passing incident in geological history together with the giant ferns, the saurians, and now--_super insects_! God, no wonder they labeled him psycho! No one believed. It was too ridiculous. It had been trite thematic material for emotionalizing fiction for so long--

But the Martian subterranean ant-like culture, the Mo-Sanshon, were directly responsible for his failure! Somehow, he didn’t know even tentatively, they had infiltrated. They either controlled humanoids in high, influential positions by telepathy, or could, in some ingenious physiogenic way, assume human form. He knew that Vasco and Greever on the Psychometric Council had been prejudiced by some influence other than reason.

He ran to the translucent window. He pummeled his aching brain, while the polychromatic light harmonics corruscated ironically through the transparent plastic walls. His fevered eyes looked out on a black sea of velvet night and millions of splotches of cold phosphorescence. Dark air-taxis glided past on traffic beams--glided unknowingly past the imprisoned entomologist who alone out of the billions on Earth and Mars had probed the fantastic, aged secrets of the Mo-Sanshon.

He pressed his temples desperately, felt the pounding of his heart. If he’d only been able to get physical evidence of their infiltration. If they could duplicate human form, then why hadn’t any of them been captured, or have left some trace of their alien derivation?

He sagged against the wall as the photo-electric banks of the door functioned oilily, the rippling light harmonies dying to a monotone grey. Three uniformed Guards stood a moment, looking at Ward curiously while the panel closed. They were precise and mechanistic. The larger one, with an abnormally red face, said in a level, toneless voice, “Well, Doctor Ward. Are you ready?”

His vision blurred with tears as he stumbled toward them. When he stepped outside that door everything that signified Jonathan Ward would be altered. He would become a new, reconditioned personality, remembering nothing of the past he knew now, because it would no longer exist. Everything he had experienced that created the complex cause and effect mechanism of his mind would be eliminated from his psychogenes. And, like billions of other naive minions of the Solar Federation, he would be completely bewildered, surprised, horrified and subsequently annihilated or enslaved by the Mo-Sanshon.

They had stepped to either side of him. But the sound of photo-electric banks came again--from behind them--from the window. The sound was followed by a sharp, nasal voice.

“Get back against the wall, Gestapo! Unless you want to play tag with a needle-gun.”

* * * * *

Ward’s stunned brain turned him around warily, slowly. He stared and blinked. He saw one of the Guard’s hands dive for his service paralysis ray gun. There was a sharp _thunggg_ from the little wiry man crouched by the open window, and an air needle punctured the Guard’s chest. He cried out feebly as he fell unmoving at Ward’s feet.

The remaining two froze in incredulous fear. The red-faced one seemed abnormally affected; his eyes bulged, face twitched. The little man, clothed in the natty pale blue garb of an air-taxi driver, motioned with his gun. Small black eyes with rusty flecks glittered dangerously.

“You, Doc!” he clipped. “Get out the window. These puppets are liable to go hysterical any minute.”

Hope spurted inside Ward, ran through his brain like a rat in a garret, as he fell away from the Guards and found himself before the open window. An air-taxi was parked there, held by the grapple rail.

The Guards were strongly conditioned, so strongly that the possibility of Ward escaping overcame their blue funk. Desperately they sprang in a half-hearted attack, whipping out their guns.

“Chicken-gutted jackasses!” spat the taxidriver, firing again and plunging the first Guard moaning on his face. The big, red-skinned Guard slewed to one side; as he fell to escape the taxidriver’s aim, he pressed the stud of his paralysis ray. The taxidriver fell clear by a hair’s breadth beneath the stream of blue fire. Another needle twanged.

What happened then would have appalled the most sanguine and capacious imagination. Ward’s brain crawled; his stomach dropped with nausea and horror. The room swirled like madness unveiling herself as the dying Guard’s mouth opened and a tattered scream pierced the confined space. And then the Guard’s body began to disintegrate.

Some chemical reaction process, working at astounding, chain-reaction speed, reduced the whole body and uniform, within a few seconds, to a small liquid puddle which vaporized leaving no sign that such a Guard had ever existed, except the paralysis gun and a few bits of alloy.

The taxidriver said casually. “The Mo-Sanshon, Doc.”

Ward gulped. “The Mo--”

“That’s the reason they’re never found out, Doc. Suicidals. When they suspect there’s even a dim possibility of discovery, they release a catalyst into their blood stream. That’s what happens.”

“But surely,” choked Ward, “someone has seen--”

“What? They can never prove they’ve seen what doesn’t exist any more. Psycho cells have always been loaded with patients who claimed to see what wasn’t there. Come on, let’s dust out of this hole!”

_Peculiarly ancient jargon_, thought Ward, _even for a taxidriver._ He stepped onto the narrow ramp. A cold night wind cooled his fever and new hope strengthened him.

“Who the devil are you?” he said faintly, as the taxidriver closed the window to the Verdict Cube and dropped down beside him in the front seat of the open air tourist taxi.

He grinned thinly, recklessly. “Another psycho the Council hasn’t labeled yet. Name’s Red. Red Formica. To be pedantic, you might call me a victim of regression, an atavist. Things have got to have a tag, you know.” He released the magnetic grapplers, and punched the controls. The air-taxi darted out into a traffic beam, and lunged downward.

Before Ward could formulate further questions the taxi dropped heavily down on a dark, small rooflanding on the lowest, cheapest level of the city. He allowed himself to be led down a shabby, creaking escalator and through a narrow corridor into an ill-lighted room, thick with the reeking heavy drug of the Venusian bluerose. The occasional gurgle of mind-burning _selir_-whiskey and the dull monody of a three-piece Ionian orchestra completed the morbid setting.

A forbidden underground escapeasy!

Here, men of the lower income brackets, who couldn’t afford the far-flung exotic worlds of the System, came to escape their monotonous, colorless lot.

Ward gaped. Back in his small, provincial midwest college laboratory he had never, of course, expected to end up in an escapeasy. Dim, lethargic shadows stirred in the drugged gloom and from somewhere a girl’s soft laughter called. The scrofulous dive was permeated with a heavy air of solemn, self-induced asphyxiation.

* * * * *

Red led Ward to a table, and they became a part of the vaporous shadows. “Two glasses of _satho_,” said Red familiarly. A vague form, apparently the barkeep, glided away and returned almost immediately with the cold, stealthy liquor.

“A toast, Doc,” said Red tightly. “To a quick victory over the Mo-Sanshon--all ten trillion or so of them.”

Ward nodded numbly, and wondered how his thirty-eight years of academic research could have qualified him for this. He had sweated out a hermit’s life on the burning Martian Deserts for four years, gathering his data on the Mo-Sanshon who filled the countless miles of catacombs under the red clay surface. And he had considered that an all time low--at the time.

He drank. The liquor scorched his throat and started quickly on his brain. He belched and wiped tears from his eyes. Finally he managed to whisper, “I’d appreciate a sort of hint as to what this is all about.”

Red’s freckled nose wrinkled. “I have a good story. Very credible. I just want to help you. Not because I give a damn about whether humanity stays around or not. But because I crave excitement. If you need a reason, that’s as good as any.” He drained his glass stoically and called for a refill.

“Real tiger-milk,” he grinned. His red hair flamed as a dancing girl slid by with a hokohloo lamp spinning its sense-drunkening harmonies in a jeweled hand.

“But how do you know so much about all this?” insisted Ward.

“We cabbies get around.” Which didn’t explain much. Or did it?

“But why should you believe me, when no one else does?”

“I just want to, Doc, that’s all. I think the old anarchistic culture was better than this puking state of the proletariat we’ve got now. Got most of my education from the past--nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. And I live in the underground ghettos of the present. Wishful thinking. I only hope you’re right, probably.”

“I assure you,” pleaded Ward. “I’m not a psycho.”

“I don’t give a damn whether you’re psycho or not. So am I. Anyway, we’re killers now, gangsters. Unheard of in our perfect little futile order. So unheard of that we’ll probably get away with it easier than we think.”

Ward shrugged. “I’ve got some equipment that must get to Mars very quickly, if my fight against the Mo-Sanshon is to be effective. Speed is essential.”

“Want to get them in the heart,” said Red.

“Why ... er ... yes. Their headquarters, their center of operation. In fact, to get the Queen Mother alone should be sufficient. The real intelligence, I believe, is only a small inner circle of mutations.”

Red leaned over the table. His rust colored eyes shown eagerly. “Then let’s go, Doc!”

Ward’s lips curled. “There wasn’t a chance before, let alone now.”

“I’ve got it all fixed, Doc,” said Red. “What do you think I brought you here for?”

“I’ve been wondering,” said Ward dryly.

“We antisocials stick together here. Kind of an underground cult, you know. And we figured it all out how we could rescue you and get you to Mars--just as a gag you know, a little excitement. That act in the Federal Building was just like an old two-dimensional movie I saw the other night at the museum. Late twentieth century I think, called, ‘Hounds of the Void.’ Got the book, too.”

“But how do we get to Mars?” insisted Ward desperately. “Was that in the movie, too?”

“Precisely,” said Red. He motioned, and Ward was stumbling and mumbling away after the red-headed taxidriver.

* * * * *

In the dim narrow sleeping cube, lit by a single ancient acho-lyte bulb, two men lay breathing feebly on the littered floor. “They’ll be out for at least forty-eight hours,” bragged Red. “I gave ’em both triple shots of parasthetic.”

“So wha--” began Ward; then, as he looked closer, he cried, “Good Lord! It’s Professor Limerick!”

Red laughed in a thin, mirthless way that sent a little tremor up Ward’s spine. “That’s right, Doc. Professor Limerick and his laboratory assistant. Educated morons who skip blithely down the perpetually dim halls of learning. They’re scheduled to leave on the _Sol_, blasting for Marsport at 2400. You know what for?”

“No,” whispered Ward faintly. “What for?”

“To study the indigenous spores of the canal peculiar to the eastern polar banks of--and I don’t know what else. Fiddlers while Rome burns. Who gives a damn about indigenous spores when the Mo-Sanshon is--?”

“You seem rather vehement, Red, for a person who only pretends to believe in the Mo-Sanshon, just for a thrill.”

Red relaxed, his obvious manic nervous system soothed slightly by the paraette smoke he inhaled in great drags. “Anyway, Doc, there’s our passports and number one priorities to Mars. We’ve got two hours to get your equipment aboard. It’s here in the city, ain’t it?”

Ward nodded. “In a locked vault. But I didn’t think anyone else knew about it but myself. If the Mo-Sanshon had--”

Red interrupted, “Wait here a minute, Doc,” and disappeared into the reeking alleyway. He was back almost at once with a quick-moving, sprightly little man with a pink face and long white hair. He carried a plastic oblong box in one hand.

“This is Alsar Alingmore,” said Red. “People’s Artist of the Inner-Planet Folk Theatre Circuits. A philosopher. We sometimes talk of the good old days as they are referred to by malcontents. This is professor Jonathan Ward, saviour of the Solar System. Maybe.”

Alingmore bowed low. “Very fortunate to meet you, Doctor.”

* * * * *

Alingmore sat the black case on a table and reverently opened it. A make-up kit, complete with plastimold, syntheskin and all the accessories of modern theatre. “He’s a wizard at make-up,” bragged Red. “He passed himself off as a Venusian fishman once, at a Federation Council meeting. Got his artist’s license taken away from him. Now he haunts escapeasies. He’s going to make us look like the scholastic idiots on the floor. We’ll use their priorities and passports, and we’ll be on Mars with the _Sol_. What do you think of ‘Hounds of the Void’ now?”

“I can’t think very clearly,” murmured Ward, sitting down heavily on the pneumatic couch. “Maybe it was the _satho_....”

In a matter of moments Ward found himself aboard the _Sol_, ensconced in a special stateroom with quartzite observation dome. He was looking at a face in the three-dim reflector that resembled Professor Limerick more than Professor Limerick himself. “I don’t believe it,” he said to the taxidriver who now could have passed for the assistant’s zygote twin.

“Sure, we made it. Knew we would, Doc.” He was sprawled out on the richly furnished gravnod bed, reading a ragged museum copy of the “Hounds of the Void.” “These Guards and officials don’t know how to deal with antisocials. Not enough cases in our tired order to keep them in practice. A few old time gangsters and criminals could take over the whole System in a jiffy. These representatives of Solar law and order are phonies.”

Ward turned. “But the Mo-Sanshon aren’t so naive, Red. They know I’m aboard. My disguise probably doesn’t fool them. They know I’ve got the cage of mercenaries with me, too.” Ward looked at the plasticage on the floor among many other cases. It contained numerous air valves and was about a yard square. It was very heavy for its size but was easily carried because of the levitation plate on the bottom. From inside of it came a steady rustling and stirring.

Ward nodded. “The Mo-Sanshon will keep on trying every means they can within apparently legitimate channels to stop me before I can release those mercenaries inside their subterranean chasms. And that won’t be easy for us, either. I was there four years and couldn’t get anywhere near their headquarters. They’ve been there for centuries, aeons, before humanoid culture evolved on either world.”

“I know,” said Red. “How different and lonely their life must be--when you even compare it with ours. How envious and jealous they must be. And how they must hate us, buried as they are underground, hidden from the stars. Static, no individuality--that’s all lost in the colony. The State is all. And someday humanity may evolve into the same death trap. No wonder they want to destroy us. They can’t stand to see us keep on living, even partially free. It hurts.”

Ward nodded, surprised again at Red’s heterogeneous knowledge. “But, even assuming anthropomorphic attributes as they have somehow been able to do, they still are insects, with instinct rather than intelligence as we know it. They see the world, universe, their own culture with the same prejudice, egotism, and dogma. I doubt if they can even comprehend the physical facts of space, duration and distance, as we know it.”

“Therefore, they shouldn’t survive,” said Red with sudden savage coldness. “They can’t know this life, Doc, and they shouldn’t live. And neither should little guys like us if we can’t reach the stars. Here I am, born in an age of atomics and interplanetary travel--and I’m bored. I have to read science-fantasy from the escape literature of past centuries to keep from going psycho. Do ordinary proletarians like me get to go to Mars and Venus, or even Luna? Hell no! Have to have number one priority and who gets them? Big shots with plenty of suction, and platinum credits. Only a fraction of a percent of Earthmen have ever been outside the ionosphere. Wait’ll the revolution, Doc. There’ll be a spaceship on every roof landing, and two pressure suits in every closet!”

“Won’t have to worry if the Mo-Sanshon takes over,” said Ward as he spread some hair eradicator over his face and wiped it off with a towel. “Annihilation is a sure cure for ennui.”

“And preferable,” said Red softly. “I ought to know.”

“Almost blastoff time,” said Ward. “Let’s strap in.”

Red went to the door and adjusted the photo cell. “That’ll have to be turned back before it’ll function. Don’t open it unless you know who wants it--if it’s an officer, it won’t make any difference. Be alert, Doc. There are Mo-Sanshon on this ship!”

“Are you certain?” said Ward quickly. “How can you be?”

“I am,” said Red tensely, his lips a thin harsh line. “Very certain, Doc.”

* * * * *

Ward breathed easier after he awoke from the effects of the sedative and found that they had at least gotten outside Earth’s gravity without mishap. Only the Mo-Sanshon to worry about now. That was all, just the potential conquerors of the Solar System. Through the special observation dome into a mind-drowning eternity of devouring blackness, Ward gazed in awe. An expanse dotted with an eternity of coldly-cut, unshimmering dots of light. He wasn’t new to spaceflight, but the spectacle was inexhaustible, a bottomless cup of frigid infinity.

But Red appeared mesmerized. His face stuck to the quartz, he murmured dreamily, “The void ... deadly emptiness and waste ... an uncharted sea without boundaries ... when a guy’s out here, he’s a part of space and time.... God, how I’ve wanted it ... and I never thought I could have it ... my world’s a long way from any of this....” He turned slowly.

“Doc--I’d like to keep right on going, if I could. I’d go right on out beyond the Asteroids, and keep on until Jupiter faded. I’d go on out on the other side of the Life Zone until Uranus was lost. And then--well--what would be better than just to disappear in interstellar space?”

Ward swallowed a protein-vito concentrate and said he could think of a few things that might be more pleasant at the moment.

“This civilization’s bad enough,” said Red. “But the Mo-Sanshon is worse. It’s lifeless, evil and futile.”

“Right,” said Ward. “But I’ve often wondered why they haven’t conquered man before. They have the advantage of reproduction and adaptability. The Earth fly and the Martian _trunj_ can reproduce over twelve trillion in six months. Their adaptability is vastly superior. They’ve been around for a billion years or more on Earth and on Mars probably longer. And their number of species is overwhelming--somewhere close to a million on Earth, on Mars somewhat less. Their only trouble has been their static culture. Permanence. But now--”

“Bugs can have their mutations, too,” finished Red.

Ward said, “That was my starting premise. That mutant intelligence has appeared among the Mo-Sanshon and that their leadership has spread to Earth and has influenced certain species of insects there--mainly ants, termites, and bees. On both worlds, they’re now winning the battle of production. They’ll be able to starve man out by taking his plants away from him and undermine his cities, which they’re already doing at an alarming rate. Weakened by starvation, humanoids will be subject to disease, plague and pestilence, also brought by insects. This will be their _coup de grace_.”

“And yet, Doc, you’ve got a way in that cage there to stop them!” Red’s eyes were narrow lines behind dribbling paraette smoke.

“Right,” said Ward. “And these mercenaries are certain antidotes--if we can just turn them loose among the Mo-Sanshon leaders.”

“An insect menace,” said Red. “Back in the age I prefer, they even stopped publishing fantasy themes about insects--overworked and too trite. And now to be a hero of an insect menace theme--”

“Was that the reason they stopped publishing that kind of stories,” said Ward, “because it was overdone, trite? Maybe the editors were influenced by the Mo-Sanshon, even then. Charles Fort, you’ve read him? The excluded and the damned are marching.”

“Fort and Korzybski, my bibles, Doc. And that’s a good theory. The insects have been the most obvious threat to man’s dominant position, yet they were ignored, the whole idea dropped when too much publicity was current.”

Red looked at the cage. “Mercenaries,” he said. “Ingenious as hell. You’re a great brain, Doc.”

Ward studied the enigma that was labeled Red. There was no reason not to trust him now. He almost had to. “Yes. I’ve managed to breed a--”

The room’s lights glowed blue and then died. Ward turned, mouth suddenly dry and sticky. Someone was outside their door. Red’s face was twisted, his real expression showing through the plastimold and syntheskin make-up. It was one of burning hate. He leaped into the middle of the room in a half crouch. “It’s one of them!” he hissed between tight teeth. “It’s the Mo-Sanshon.”

Ward said, “How can you tell?”

“No time for dialectics,” said Red, voice trembling with emotion. “It’s the Executive Officer of the _Sol_, no less. And you can’t keep an Officer out. His keys’ll open the banks, anyway.”

Ward was getting callous. “Needle him, then. And he’ll disappear. They can’t blame us for a non-existent corpse.”

“No!” grated Red. “There are others aboard. He has others waiting in the hall. I’ve got to stay hidden, understand that, Doc. That’s the only way I can help you, and without that help, you’ll never accomplish anything. You’ve got to trust me. I’ll get the cage out of here and hide it.”

“But--” began Ward.

“I’ll hide here among these crates. You let ’em in. We’ll see what happens.”