Astounding – June 1957
(1957)*
Randall Garrett
illustrated by Emsh
The Aliens had a weapon that was a deadly thing—yet seemingly was useless to them! How do you solve a problem when you don't know what it is, and your enemy doesn't know he's doing it, though ...?
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"The principal difficulty in the case ... lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant."
Sherlock Holmes
They just didn't give a damn. The first load of survivors brought back after the Battle of Leymon's Star had been short-circuited somewhere, and they didn't give two hoots whether they lived or died.
The same thing happened to the crew of the GSS Bedevin after the skirmish in the Great Rift. The Bedevin was found drifting along, out of control, after having demolished an enemy vessel with a blast of the new aj guns.
It was a case of "the operation was a success, but the doctor died." Or might as well have.
The crewmen of the fighting ships were in a state of semi-catatonia.
The alien ships were burned and blasted out of space, with the exception of those which turned tail and ran. The survivors in the human ships were picked up and taken to Kandoris VI, the Galactic Main Base of the Interstellar Fleet.
Fleet Commander Allerdyce hospitalized the men and turned the problem over to the Civilian Research Corps. General Director Eckisster frowned over the whole mess, fired out assignments right and left, and dumped the bulk of the responsibility into the lap of Roysland Dwyn, chief of the Special Weapons Group.
Dwyn immediately asked for a specimen from the Fleet Hospital Psychiatric Ward.
Bilford, the chief psychometrist, brought one of the crew members from the Bedouin into the office of the head of Special Weapons four days after the survivors had been picked up.
Roysland Dwyn glanced up from the work at his desk when Bilford entered. Behind the huge plastic block of the desk, he looked no larger than the average man. It was only when he stood that it became apparent that Roysland Dwyn was two sizes larger than the average man, regardless of where you measured.
Bilford walked on into the office. "You wanted to see Captain Gisser, Roysland?"
Roysland nodded his massive head. "Bring him in; I want to get the whole picture on this business."
Bilford nodded and turned back toward the door. His eyes looked sad and pitying, and he ran a lean, nervous hand through his bushy gray hair as he called out: "All right, Captain Gisser—come in here."
As Captain Gisser strolled in from the outer office, Roysland watched him carefully.
Gisser was tall and graceful, in the near-perfect physical trim of a fighting man. He moved with military precision, but without the stiff rigidity of formal marching. He took one step through the door—and stopped.
Roysland narrowed his gray eyes and looked at the captain's lace. The expression on it was definitely not the sleepy, glazed look of the hypnotic catatonic. After a moment, Roysland decided it could be described as a sort of apathetic introspection.
"How long will he stand like that?" he asked Bilford.
Bilford spread his hands. "Until someone tells him to move or he collapses from lack of food or sheer fatigue."
"Have him sit clown over there." Roysland pointed. "No use making the poor guy stand up."
"Go over to that chair and sit down," Bilford told the captain. Gisser did as he was told.
Bilford pulled up another chair and sat down. "Why'd you want to see him?" he asked. "I mean, do you have anything in mind?"
Roysland shook his head. "Nothing specific; I'm just trying to see every angle of this. The Enlissa have a new weapon; we've got to do something to counteract it. So far, we don't know anything about it except that it bollixes up the brain—and that isn't very useful. It's like trying to deduce the existence of a pistol from the holes in the target."
"Worse," Bilford said gloomily; "we don't even have a hole to analyze."
"Yes, we do. A psychic hole." Roysland gestured toward the silent captain. "Are they all like that?"
"Essentially, yes," Bilford said.
"Can he hear what I'm saying? I mean, can he understand me?"
"That's a hard question to answer. I should say that the understanding was of a very low level. Here, I'll show you what I mean." He turned and looked directly at the seated spaceman.
"Captain Gisser, how old are you?" he asked in a firm, clear voice.
There was no answer.
"Gisser, when were you born?"
Still no answer.
"Gisser, tell us when you were born."
"Twelve, Eight, Seven sixty-four," Gisser said promptly.
Bilford looked back at Roysland. "He won't do anything on his own; there's absolutely no conscious volition. He has to be told what to do.
"Just asking him a question isn't enough; you have to insist on the answer. That's what I meant by saying that his understanding is on a very low level. He can't even deduce the presence of an unspoken command."
Roysland frowned and started to say something, but he was interrupted by a flicker of light on his desk panel.
He looked at Bilford. "The boss," he said dryly. Then he pressed a stud.
Light flickered in the air and coalesced into the seated figure of a portly, smiling, middle-aged man. The image wavered a little, then settled into an illusion of material solidity.
General Director Eckisster smiled and said: "Are we getting anywhere, gentlemen?"
"We're just getting started," Roysland said.
Eckisster nodded. "I see." His eyes lit on the captain, who was still sitting in the same position he had taken when he was ordered in to the chair. "Is this one of the Bedouin's men?"
It was Bilford who answered. "Yes, sir. Captain Gisser, Prime Officer."
"And you haven't found out anything about him yet? Don't you know what's wrong with these men?" Eckisster's voice was bland on the surface, but there was a biting hardness underneath.
"We know what's wrong with them, sir," Bilford said stiffly; "we just don't know what caused it."
"According to the electroencephaloscope readings, the electrical activity of the prefrontal lobes is exhibiting a loop-feedback pattern. It's going around in circles without getting anywhere. As far as the nerve impulses are concerned, these men have been effectively lobotomized—almost completely so."
"I see." Eckisster looked at the captain again. "Captain, stand up." The captain stood. "Sit down." The officer sat. Eckisster rubbed a plump finger over his chin. "That's according to the report, at least. Would he kill himself if I asked him to?"
"Not if you asked him to," Bilford said coldly. "He might if you told him to. Do you want me to try it?"
"Don't be ridiculous!" the general director snapped. He looked at Roysland, who had been sitting quietly, waiting for Eckisster to finish. "Roysland, do you have any idea of the nature of this weapon?"
"None, sir," Roysland said quietly. "Neither I nor the psychologists have any idea what could do this to the human brain."
"Oh, no?" Eckisster's plump face smiled. "Haven't I heard something about microwaves at high intensity?"
Roysland nodded. "Sure. I know what you mean. But I was talking about doing it over a range of seven hundred million miles.
"We know that it can be done, but we don't know how the enemy did it. Look at it this way: If we'd found every one of these men with his skull bashed in, we could say that it had been done with a club. But that still wouldn't explain how it was done from better than a light-hour away."
"Besides," Bilford chipped in, "high intensity microwaves don't have that effect. They affect the brain, sure—but not that way."
Eckisster nodded and folded his hands placidly. "I understand. Well, gentlemen, I—" He stopped suddenly and looked to one side, out of the range of his pickup. A voice said: "This facsimile just came in on the ultrabeam, sir."
A hand materialized out of nowhere, holding a fac sheet; Eckisster took it, unfolded it, and read it. His eyes opened a trifle wider, and he looked up at Roysland.
"Roysland, they've used it again. The Killiver was picked up this side of the Noir Nebula, near Poulderr. They found her because of the automatic signals. Every man aboard was just like Captain Whatsisname, there. They're bringing the ship here, to Kandoris." He paused and looked at both men in turn. "If this keeps up," he said, "they'll have us whipped. It's your job to keep them from doing that. Now, you've got several trails to follow. Follow them, and get some answers; that's all."
His hand touched the arm rest of his chair, and abruptly the image dissolved into transparent air.
Bilford looked at Roysland. "I don't like the way he keeps needling people," he said. "It gets under my skin."
Roysland stood up. "He thinks that's the best way to get things done. Maybe it is; I really don't know. I do agree with him in one respect: we have to do something—what, I don't know, but something.
"We've been fighting the Enlissa for eighteen years. Up until last year, when we invented the aj gun, there hadn't been an improvement on either side; they were winning because they had more ships.
"Then we get the aj gun functioning, and use it against them; and when we do, it turns out that they have an even better weapon. I know what they mean when they say war is hell."
He stopped and looked at the captain. "Well, let's get on with it; I want to ask him a few questions."
Eighteen years of fighting hadn't seriously damaged either side, insofar as actual loss of life was concerned. Men in ships had been killed, of course, but no civilian had yet lost his life as a direct result of the Enlissa-Human war. The Enlissa hadn't gotten in close enough to occupied planets—yet.
But, until a year ago, it had seemed inevitable that they would. The screen of ships that ranged around the periphery of the human-inhabited section of the galaxy was getting thinner all the time. The Enlissa had more ships, and, rather than make a direct attack, they seemed to prefer to punch at the screen, weakening it steadily.
But the Enlissa had underestimated human ingenuity. Both sides had been relying on the ultralight torpedoes to knock each other out of the sky, and humanity had realized that they had to have something better. So they had come up with the aj projector. If matter can be projected through the no-space of ultralight velocities, why not energy?
The result was as devastating a hefty beam as any dreamer could logically expect; all the energy of a nuclear reaction focused along a narrow locus of no-space toward the enemy ship. Even a shielded hull gives under bombardment like that.
It looked as though the war was won. That is, it did until ships came back with mindless crews.
The Killiver was sitting in its launching cradle at the far side of the ten-mile-square Grand Port of Kandoris. Roysland didn't bother to take the tubeway; he flashed his credentials and commandeered a surface jeep. Bilford had already taken charge of the crew, but Roysland wasn't worried about them; he wanted a look at the ship.
The Killiver was swarming with inspectors and special government investigators. Roysland jumped out of the jeep as it slowed near the giant sphere of the ship, and strode toward the ring of guards that surrounded the globe.
One of the guards looked up at Roysland's huge frame and said: "May I see your pass, sir?"
Roysland pulled out his pass and handed it to the guard.
...
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