Supermind, p.10
Supermind, page 10
Hanardy did not immediately realize that the threat was ended. He had fallen to the floor. From that begging position he continued his appeal. "You don't have to kill me! I'll keep my mouth shut. Who'd believe me, anyway?"
"What's normal?" The Dreegh's voice was cold and demanding. The radiation from him—uncleanness—was stronger.
"Me," said Hanardy.
"You!" Incredulous tone.
"Yeah, me." Hanardy spoke urgently. "What ails me is that I'm a low-lifer, somehow. But I'm a normal lug. Things balance out in me—that's the key. I take a drink, but not because I have to. It doesn't affect me particularly. When I was in my teens once I tried taking drugs. Hell, I just felt it didn't fit in my body. I just threw it off. That's normal. You can't do that with what you've got."
"What's normal?" Madro was cold, steady, remote.
"You're sick," said Hanardy. "All that blood and life energy. It's abnormal. Not really necessary. You can be cured."
Having spoken the strange words, Hanardy realized their strangeness. He blinked.
"I didn't know I was going to say that," he mumbled.
The Dreegh's expression was changing as he listened. Suddenly he nodded and said aloud, "I actually believe we've been given a communication from the Great Galactic. A twelfth-hour, last-chance offer."
"What will you do with me?" Hanardy mumbled.
"The question," came the steely reply, "is what is the best way to neutralize you? I choose this way!"
A metallic something glittered in the Dreegh's hand. From its muzzle a shimmering line of light reached toward Hanardy's head.
The spacemen flinched, tried to duck, had the cringing thought that this was death and stood there expecting at the very least a terrible shock.
He felt nothing. The light hit his face; and it was as if a pencil beam from a bright flashlight had briefly glared into his eyes. Then the light went, and there he stood blinking a little, but unhurt so far as he could determine.
He was still standing there when the Dreegh said, "What you and I are going to do now is that you're going to come with me and show me all the places on this meteorite where there are armaments or small arms of any kind."
Hanardy walked ahead, kept glancing back; and there, each time he looked, was the long body with its grim face.
The resemblance to Thadled Madro was visibly fading, as if the other had actually twisted his features into a duplication of the young male Klugg's face, not using makeup at all, and now he was relaxing.
They came to where the Ungarns waited. Father and daughter said nothing at all. To Hanardy they seemed subdued; the girl was strangely pale. He thought: "They do know!"
The overt revelation came as the four of them arrived in the main living quarters. Professor Ungarn sighed, turned and—ignoring Hanardy—said, "Well, Mr. Dreegh, my daughter and I are wondering why the delay in our execution?"
"Hanardy!" was the reply.
Having uttered the name, as if Hanardy himself were not present, the Dreegh stood for a long moment, eyes narrowed, lips slightly parted, even white teeth clamped together. The result was a kind of a snarling smile.
"He seems to be under your control. Is he?" That was Pat Ungarn, in a small voice. The moment she had spoken, and thus attracted the Dreegh's attention, she shrank, actually retreated a few steps, as he looked at her.
Sween-Madro's tense body relaxed. But his smile was as grim as ever. And still he ignored Hanardy's presence.
"I gave Steve a special type of energy charge that will nullify for the time being what was done to him."
Professor Ungarn laughed curtly. "Do you really believe that you can defeat this—this being—William Leigh . . . defeat him with what you have done to Steve? After all, he's your real opponent, not Hanardy. This is a shadow battle. One of the fighters has left a puppet to strike his blows for him."
Sween-Madro said in an even tone, "It's not as dangerous as it seems. Puppets are notoriously poor fighters."
The professor argued, "Any individual of the race known to lesser races as Great Galactics—which was obviously not their real name—must be presumed to have taken all such possibilities into account. What can you gain by delay?"
Sween-Madro hesitated, then: "Steve mentioned a possible cure for our condition." His voice held an edge in it.
There was a sudden silence. It settled over the room and seemed to permeate the four people in it.
The soundless time was broken by a curt laugh from Sween-Madro. He said, "I sensed that for a few seconds I seemed—"
"Human," said Pat Ungarn. "As if you had feelings and hopes and desires like us."
"Don't count on it." The Dreegh's voice was harsh.
Professor Ungarn said slowly, "I suspect that you analyzed Steve has a memory of mental contact with a supreme, perhaps even an ultimate, intelligence. Now, these earth people when awake are in that particular, perennially confused state that makes them unacceptable for galactic citizenship. So that the very best way to defend yourself from Steve's memory is to keep him awake. I therefore deduce that the energy charge you fired at him was designed to maintain in continuous stimulation the waking center in the brain stem.
"But that is only a temporary defense. In four or five days, exhaustion in Hanardy will reach an extreme state, and something in the body will have to give. What will you have then that you don't have now?"
The Dreegh seemed surprisingly willing to answer, as if by uttering his explanations aloud he could listen to them himself, and so judge them.
He said, "My colleagues will have arrived by then."
"So then you're all in the trap," said Professor Ungarn. "I think your safest bet would be to kill Pat and me right now. As for Steve—"
Hanardy had been listening to the interchange with a growing conviction that this melancholy old man was arguing them all into being immediately executed.
"Hey!" he interrupted urgently. "What are you trying to do?"
The scientist waved at him impatiently. "Shut up, Steve. Surely you realize that this Dreegh will kill without mercy. I'm trying to find out why he's holding off. It doesn't fit with what I consider to be good sense."
He broke off, "Don't worry about him killing you. He doesn't dare. You're safe."
Hanardy felt extremely unsafe. Nevertheless, he had a long history of accepting orders from this man; so he remained dutifully silent.
The Dreegh, who had listened to the brief interchange thoughtfully, said in an even tone that when his companions arrived, he, Hanardy and Pat Ungarn would go to Europa. He believed Pat was needed on such a journey. So no one would be killed until it was over.
"I'm remembering," Sween-Madro continued, "what Steve said about the Great Galactic noticing something. I deduce that what he noticed had to do with Steve himself. So we'll go to Spaceport and study Steve's past behavior there. Right now, let's disarm the entire place for my peace of mind."
Clearly, it would not be for anyone else's.
From room to room, and along each corridor, silently the three prisoners accompanied their powerful conqueror.
And presently every weapon in the meteorite was neutralized or disposed of. Even energy sources that might be converted were sealed off. Thus, the meteorite screens were actually de-energized and the machinery to operate them, wrecked.
The Dreegh next cut off escape possibilities by dismantling several tiny space boats. The last place they went, first Hanardy, then the professor, then Pat, and finally SweenMadro, was Hanardy's space freighter. There, also, all the weapons were eliminated, and the Dreegh had Hanardy dismantle the control board. From the parts that were presently lying over the floor, the gaunt man, with unerring understanding, selected key items. With these in hand, he paused in the doorway. His baleful gaze caught Hanardy's shifting eyes. "Steve!" he said. "You'll stay right here."
"You mean, inside my ship?"
"Yes. If you leave here for any reason, I'll kill you. Do you understand?"
Hanardy glanced helplessly toward Professor Ungarn and then back at the Dreegh. He said, "There's some work the professor wanted me to do."
"Professor Ungarn"—it was the vampire's harsh voice cutting across Hanardy's uncertain protest—"tell him how unimportant such work is."
Hanardy was briefly aware of the old man's wan smile. The scientist said wearily, "Pat and I will be killed as soon as we have served our purpose. What he will eventually do with you, we don't know."
"So you'll stay right here. You two come with me," Sween-Madro ordered the professor and his daughter.
They went as silently as they had come. The airlock door clanged. Hanardy could hear the interlocking steel bolts wheeze into position. After that, no sound came.
The potentially most intelligent man in the solar system was alone—and wide awake.
XVI
Sitting, or lying down, waiting posed no problems for Hanardy. His years alone in space had prepared him for the ordeal that now began. There was a difference.
As he presently discovered when he lay down on his narrow cot, he couldn't sleep.
Twenty-four earth hours ticked by.
Not a thinking man, Steve Hanardy; nor a reader. The four books on board were repair manuals. He had thumbed through them a hundred times, but now he got them out and examined them again. Every page was, as he had expected, dully familiar. After a slow hour he used up their possibilities.
Another day, and still he was wide-eyed and unsleeping, but there was a developing restlessness in him, and exhaustion.
As a spaceman, Hanardy had received indoctrination in the dangers of sleeplessness. He knew of the mind's tendency to dream while awake, the hallucinatory experiences, the normal effects of the unending strain of wakefulness.
Nothing like that happened.
He did not know that the sleep center in his brain was tunelessly depressed and the wake center tunelessly stimulated. The former could not turn on, the latter could not turn off. So between them there could be none of the usual interplay with its twilight states.
But he could become more exhausted.
Though he was lying down almost continuously now, he became continually more exhausted.
On the fourth "morning" he had the thought for the first time: this is going to drive me crazy!
Such a fear had never before in his whole life passed through his mind. By late afternoon of that day, Hanardy was scared and dizzy and hopeless, in a severe dwindling spiral of decreasing sanity. What he would have done had he remained alone was not at that time brought to a test.
For late on that fourth "day" Pat Ungarn came through the airlock, found him cowering in his bunk and said, "Steve, come with me. It's time we took action."
Hanardy stumbled to his feet. He was actually heading after her when he remembered Sween-Madro's orders to him, and he stopped.
"What's the matter?" she demanded.
He mumbled simply, "He told me not to leave my ship. He'll kill me if I do."
The girl was instantly impatient. "Steve, stop this nonsense." Her sharp words were like blows striking his mind. "You haven't any more to lose than we have. So come along!"
And she started back through the airlock. Hanardy stood, stunned and shaking. In a single sentence, spoken in her preemptory fashion, she challenged his manhood by implication, recognized that the dumb love he felt for her made him her slave and so re-established her absolute ascendency.
Silently, tensely, he shuffled across the metal floor of the airlock and moments later was in the forbidden meteorite.
Feeling doomed.
The girl led the way to what was, in effect, the engine room of the meteorite.
As Steve trailed reluctantly behind her, Professor Ungarn rose up from a chair and came forward, smiling his infinitely tired smile.
His greeting was, "Pat wants to tell you about intelligence. Do you know what your I.Q. is?"
The question barely reached the outer ramparts of Hanardy's attention. Following the girl along one corridor after another, a fearful vision had been in his mind, of Sween-Madro suddenly rounding the next corner and striking him dead. That vision remained, but along with it was a growing wonder: Where was the Dreegh?
The professor snapped, "Steve, do you hear me?"
Forced to look at him, Hanardy was able to remember proudly that he belonged in the 55th percentile of the human race, intelligence-wise, and that his I.Q. had been tested at 104.
"The tester told me that I was above average," Hanardy said in a tone of pleasure. Then, apologetic again, he added, "Of course, beside you guys I'm nothing."
The old man said, "On the Klugg I.Q. scale you would probably rate higher than 104. We take into account more factors. Your mechanical ability and spatial relations skill would not be tested correctly by any human I.Q. test that I have examined."
He continued, "Now, Steve, I'm trying to explain this all to you in a great hurry, because some time in the next week you're going to be, in flashes, the most intelligent man in the entire solar system, and there's nothing anybody can do about it except help you use it. I want to prepare you."
Hanardy, who had anxiously stationed himself so that he could keep one eye on the open door—and who kept expecting the mighty Dreegh to walk in on the little conspiratorial group of lesser beings—shook his head hopelessly.
"You don't know what's already happened. I can be killed. Easy. I've got no defenses."
He glumly described his encounter with the Dreegh and told how helpless he had been. "There I was on my knees, begging, until I just happened to say something that made him stop. Boy, he sure didn't think I was unkillable."
Pat came forward, stood in front of him, and grabbed his shoulders with both hands.
"Steve," she said in an urgent voice, "above a certain point of I.Q. mind actually is over matter. A being above that intelligence level cannot be killed. Not by bullets, nor by any circumstance involving matter. Now listen: in you is a memory of such an intelligence level. In manhandling you, the Dreegh was trying to see what limited stress would do. He found out. He got the message from the Great Galactic out of you.
"Steve, after that he didn't dare put a bullet into you, or fire a death-level energy beam. Because that would force this memory to the surface!"
In her intense purposefulness she tried to move him with her hands. But that only made Hanardy aware of what a girlish body she had. So little body, so much imperious woman—it startled him for she could barely budge him, let alone shake him.
She said breathlessly, "Don't you see, Steve? You're going to be king! Try to act accordingly."
"Look—" Hanardy began, stolidly.
Rage flashed into her face. Her voice leaped past his interjection. "And if you don't stop all this resistance, in the final issue I'll put a bullet into your brain myself, and then you'll see."
Hanardy gazed into her blue eyes, so abruptly furious. He had a sinking conviction that she would do exactly what she threatened. In alarm, he said, "For Pete's sake, what do you want me to do?"
"Listen to what dad has to say!" she commanded. "And stop looking the other way. You need a high-speed education, and we haven't got much time."
That last seemed like a total understatement to Hanardy. His feeling was that he had no time at all.
Awareness saved him, then. There was the room with its machinery, and the old man and his daughter; and there was he with his mind jumping with the new fear of her threat. Hanardy had a flitting picture of the three of them lost forever inside this remote meteorite that was just one tiny part of Jupiter's colossal family of small, speeding particles of matter—a meaningless universe that visibly had no morality or justice, because it included without a qualm creatures like the Dreeghs.
As his skittering thought reached that dark depth, it suddenly occurred to Hanardy that Pat couldn't shoot him. She didn't have a gun. He opened his mouth to tell her of her helplessness. Then closed it again.
Because an opportunity might open up for her to obtain a weapon. So the threat remained, receded in time . . . but not to be dismissed. Nonetheless, he grew calmer. He still felt compelled, and jittery. But he stayed there and listened, then, to a tiny summary of the story of human intelligence and the attempts that had been made to measure it.
It seemed human intelligence tests were based on a curve where the average was 100. Each test Professor Ungarn had seen revealed an uncertainty about what constituted an intelligence factor, and what did not. Was the ability to tell left from right important to intelligence? One test included it. Should an individual be able to solve brain twisters? Many testers considered this trait of great importance. And almost all psychologists insisted on a subtle understanding of the meaning of words and many of them. Skill at arithmetic was a universal requirement. Quick observation of a variety of geometric shapes and forms was included. Even a general knowledge of world conditions and history was a requirement in a few tests.
