When Bilford's image flickered into existence, Roysland kept his mouth
shut while Kiffer showed the psychometrist the recordings of the energy
from the Enlissa projector.
Bilford listened and looked and frowned. "The recordings actually
don't make sense to me," he admitted. "I'm a psychometrist, not a
subelectronocist.
"If you could translate those recordings from subetheric to their
electromagnetic equivalents, I might be able to make something out of
it."
The conversion didn't take long; all Kiffer had to do was run the stuff
through the analyzer and punch in a correction factor.
Bilford stared at the corrected graphs and compared them with tracings
of his own.
"I don't see any correlation," he said at last. "This may take a bit of
work. There may be multiple harmonics of the basic stuff involved, of
course; but frankly I can't see that the subetherics have anything in
common with the electromagnetics as far as this area is concerned."
For the first time, Roysland spoke. "Try a combination-permutation
synthesis. See what you get--O.K.?"
Bilford nodded in agreement. "I'll try it--all the different wave
lengths involved, plus the subetheric velocity factor. If I come up
with anything, I'll let you know."
"Good enough," said Roysland.
* * * * *
The solidiphone image of General Director Eckisster stood in the center
of the room. He looked around and then focused his gaze on Roysland
Dwyn. "Listen here, Roysland," he said belligerently, "why haven't you
done anything? What's the situation now?"
Roysland looked at the general director and put on his nastiest grin.
"You've got the report; we haven't done anything. We've fired the
Enlissa projector six times. There is only a residual backwash that is
harmless. You could fire the thing in your living room if you wanted
to. Meanwhile, we want to know what the effect of the beam is."
"And why, may I ask," said Eckisster, "can't you determine so simple a
thing as that? This request is utter and absolute nonsense!" He slapped
at the papers he held in his hand.
"I knew you'd like that," Roysland said. "I thought maybe you could
suggest something else. I can't."
"As I understand it," Eckisster said testily, "you want a human
volunteer to test the Enlissa mindjammer on."
"That's right," Roysland said. "So far, all we've proven is that the
backwash from the projector has no effect on humans or animals; but we
don't know what happens to a man who's hit by the beam itself."
"Oh? We don't? I rather assumed that the fleet hospital's psychiatric
wards were full of men who have been hit by the beam."
"An unjustified assumption," Roysland snapped. "At least, so far, it's
unprovable. The point is: Do I or don't I have your permission to ask
for a volunteer?"
"Why can't you use test animals?" Eckisster asked.
"If you'd bother to read the reports I send you, you'd know. We _have_
used 'em. The beam didn't touch 'em. We sprayed one group for half an
hour; and as far as anyone can tell, we might just as well have been
shining a flashlight on them."
"Of course," Eckisster said. "The mindjammer causes a feedback loop in
the prefrontal lobes. What do you expect it to do to animals with no
prefrontal lobe?"
"My point exactly," Roysland agreed. He knew perfectly well that
Eckisster had read the report completely and thoroughly. His pretended
ignorance and snide remarks were just a mechanism he used for purposes
of his own.
"The question is," Roysland repeated, "do I have your permission to ask
for a volunteer?"
"I checked with Bilford," the general director said. "He's getting the
microwave technique worked out fairly well now; he says he can bring
a man around in twenty-five to thirty days." He stopped and looked at
Roysland closely. "Go ahead and ask for volunteers."
"Thanks," said Roysland.
Eckisster nodded as he dissolved.
Roysland reached over and punched a button. "Where's Kiffer?" he asked.
"Eating at the mess hall, right now," said a voice.
"That's what I thought. Will you have him come here, to my place, as
soon as he gets through? Say, in half an hour?"
"I'll tell him."
"Fine." Roysland lifted his finger and turned to the typer on his desk.
He wasn't used to the makeshift office, and he found himself wishing he
was back on Kandoris VI, in his own office.
He shrugged and began running his fingers over the typer. It took him
only a few minutes to put down what he wanted to say. When he finished,
he pulled the sheet from the printer tank and put it on his desk,
in plain sight. At the top, he scrawled: "To Kiffer Samm." His own
signature went at the bottom.
Then he put on his spacesuit and headed out, toward the outside air
lock.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, Kiffer Samm was reading the note. He had stepped
into Roysland's office and seen that it was empty. Assuming that his
superior would be right back, he had sat down to wait. Then he'd seen
the note.
He was halfway through it before it became perfectly clear what
Roysland was doing.
"... So you may have to take over for the next twenty-five to thirty
days. Naturally, I couldn't ask anyone else to take the risk.
"I think it may be a good idea if Bilford starts experimenting with
subetherics in an effort to snap the rest of the boys out of this
feedback loop thing. Maybe he can do it in less time.
"By the time you read this and get in a spacesuit and get out to
the firing area, I will have finished the test; don't let me die of
starvation, chum."
Kiffer punched at the communicator button, yelled orders into it, and
grabbed a spacesuit out of the locker. By the time he reached the outer
air lock, a jeep was waiting for him.
When the second jeep pulled up, Kiffer said: "You men stop at the gun
emplacement and take a look at the weapon. We'll go on to the target
tower and pick up Roysland."
The men nodded their agreement, and the two vehicles started rolling.
Theoretically, it was "evening," but the great, blue-white blaze of
Kandoris still hung in the eternally black sky. The jeep went by the
gun emplacement where the Enlissa weapon had been set up for testing.
Kiffer noticed that the snout of the ugly-looking tube was aimed at the
squat steel tower where the animal subjects had been exposed to its
radiations.
"There he is!" said the jeep's driver, pointing.
Kiffer could see a spacesuited figure on the target tower. He twisted
the dial on his chest and said to the men in the second jeep: "Check
that projector! Make sure it isn't in operation!"
"It's not," said one of the men. "He had a timer connected to the
firing mechanism. He got a ten-second burst from it, according to the
timer reading."
"Thanks. We'll pick him up, then."
* * * * *
The jeep swerved toward the tower and pulled up underneath it in a
swirl of dust that settled slowly and evenly in the low gravity of the
airless satellite. Kiffer jumped out of the jeep, grabbed the rungs
of the ladder, and lifted himself to the platform at the top of the
twenty-foot tower.
He stuck his head up over the edge and saw Roysland. The man was
sitting on a small chair with his back to the ladder. Surrounding him
were the various recording instruments that had been rigged up on the
platform for testing the animals and the effects of the beam on them.
Kiffer climbed on up and twisted his helmet phone control to Roysland's
frequency. As he put his hand on Roysland's shoulder, he said: "Stand
up, Roysland."
Roysland jerked around. "What? Oh. Hi, Kiffer; I saw you coming in the
jeep." He paused then, and though Kiffer couldn't see very well through
the heavy darkness of the helmet's glare-filtering polarization, he
could have sworn that Roysland was grinning. He would have been right.
"Oh, I get it," Roysland said. "You were expecting to find me sitting
up here with a feedback lobotomy. Frankly, so was I, a half hour or so
ago, but I'd almost forgotten it."
Kiffer took a deep breath, let it out, and said a few choice, pungent
words. "... Who would scare a guy like that," he ended.
"Sorry," Roysland said, still grinning. "But take a look at these
readings. I think you'll--"
"Wait a minute!" Kiffer interrupted. "I'm not interested in meter
readings right now! What happened or didn't happen to you?"
"_Is he all right?_"
"_What's going on up there?_"
"_Need any help?_"
The voices came almost simultaneously to Kiffer's phones. He could see
the second jeep tearing up dust between the gun emplacement and the
target tower.
"He's O.K.," Kiffer snapped. "Big false alarm! I think we ought to have
an explanation."
The answering burst of catcalling and jeers made Roysland wince. "O.K.,
fellers! O.K.! Please accept my abject and snivelling apologies."
"Explain yourself," Kiffer said in a monarchial tone. "You were
supposed to be out here testing this thing on yourself; you wrote a
very heart-rending note to that effect. I don't blame you for getting
cold feet, but you could at least have notified us."
"I didn't get cold feet," Roysland said. "Look at the cerebrograph
reading and compare it with the firing record."
Kiffer looked and then said: "Then you _did_ take it! But according to
this, all it did was cause a very faint _petit mal_ convulsion. You
probably didn't even notice it."
"I didn't," Roysland said. "I don't know what that projector is
supposed to do, but it sure isn't a mindjammer!"
Kiffer looked again at the records. "Maybe you weren't far enough away
from the projector," he said doubtfully. "Maybe the distance--"
"Impossible," said Roysland. "The beam doesn't disperse appreciably
over a distance of half a light-year; you know that. And the wave form
is exactly the same.
"No, I'm afraid we've just run up against another blind alley."
Kiffer shook his head slowly. "I don't believe it," he said. "The
Enlissa didn't have their ship armed with this thing for nothing. We
must have connected it up wrong, somehow."
"Maybe," Roysland said. "But it doesn't work as is. Let's get these
records into the jeep; I want to see what we're getting here, anyway."
They took the recordings out of the instruments and dropped them to
the three men who were waiting by the jeeps parked underneath the tower.
A few minutes later, they were heading back toward the dome.
* * * * *
Four days later, Roysland was back on Kandoris VI, ensconced firmly in
his office. Kiffer Samm stayed on Syndor, still working on the Enlissa
projector.
The first thing Roysland did was to call another staff meeting. He also
included Bilford and Commander Allerdyce.
He outlined briefly the data they had so far on the Enlissa mindjammer,
then asked for comments.
Bilford grabbed the floor first. "I did the correlation you wanted, and
I came up with some answers, but they're not the right ones as far as I
can tell.
"As far as the backwash on the _aJ_ gun is concerned, I think you can
rule that out. After converting to electromagnetic equivalents, I find
that the frequency of the backwash is much too low to have any effect
on the brain. That is, assuming that subetherics have any effect on
the mind at all--and, of course, assuming that there is any analogy at
all between the function of subetheric vibrations and electromagnetic
vibrations. After all, analogue reasoning has its limitations, too,
just as logical reasoning does.
"The captured Enlissa projector is another problem. Unlike the _aJ_'s
backwash, it isn't a noise; it's a definite, although complex, tone. I
say complex because--and again my reasoning is analogical--because the
frequency is not a pure sine wave, but a combination. It's analogous to
the difference between the vibration of a tuning fork sounding middle C
and, say, a violin sounding the same note.
"Even so, I think we can say that the captured projector is _not_ the
mindjammer; the frequency is much too high. It's on the order of hard
X-rays. If the analogy holds, the subetheric beam should be capable of
disrupting certain molecules, but it most certainly couldn't have the
mindjamming effect on the human brain."
He sat down and rubbed his hands together nervously.
Commander Allerdyce stood up. Normally, the fleet commander did not
kowtow to anyone, but his automatic respect for the big man in the
chair at the head of the table came to the fore. As a matter of fact,
the commander didn't think of it as kowtowing; he merely acknowledged
the superior abilities of the man he was facing.
"All I've got is statistics, Roysland. I wouldn't have noticed it
without your hint, but we've worked out a new strategy that has reduced
casualties by better than sixty per cent." He reached down and picked
up a pile of report sheets.
"It stacks up this way: About thirty per cent of the Enlissa ships that
attack have the habit of coming in without firing anything. What the
reason is, I don't know, but they do it. Therefore, we have a good
chance of getting the enemy with torpedoes alone if he doesn't fire
first.
"A ship equipped with _aJ_ projectors has about a seventy per cent
chance of winning. The other thirty-odd per cent of the time, they're
mindjammed.
"The chances of a conventionally armed ship coming through is better
than sixty-two per cent.
"But here's the gimmick: In taking the action of the Enlissa fleet into
account, we can reduce the casualties tremendously. About thirty-two
per cent of them come in without firing. By taking that into account,
we can increase our own chances of survival tremendously."
Roysland nodded. "Good; I'd like to see the statistics on that. Would
you mind sending over the full report?"
"Not at all," said Commander Allerdyce. He sat down.
Taddibol stood. "I think I can speak for Vanisson, Mardis, and myself.
According to the evidence we have, the Enlissa are capable of picking
out a ship with _aJ_ guns _before_ they fire. We think that there must
be some residual emanation from the _aJ_ that is detectable by the
enemy. No other hypothesis fits the facts."
Vanisson was standing before Taddibol had finished. "I'd like to make
it clear that, although I agree with Taddibol Vlys, the evidence is
still a necessary part of the hypothesis. We've--"
The emergency buzzer sounded, and everyone at the table turned to look
at Roysland as he swore roundly and jabbed the stud. General Director
Eckisster had barely begun to solidify before Roysland said: "Can't I
have any peace? Must you continually and forever be looking over my
shoulder?"
"No," said Eckisster calmly. "Yes. If that answers your questions, may
I say something? I'm sorry I had to interrupt a staff meeting, but I
felt that this would be the perfect time to inject this bit of data.
"As I see it, you weren't satisfied with human volunteers for the
Enlissa weapon; you asked that two of the aliens also be subjected to
the beam from their own gun."
"That's right," Roysland said. "According to Bilford, two of them have
been rendered sane by the treatment of the microwave frequencies. I
didn't think you'd reject using the Enlissa captives on humanitarian
grounds."
"I didn't," Eckisster said. "Your man, Kiffer, claimed that further
information could be gained by subjecting the alien brains of the enemy
to the radiation from their own projector. Since the psychological
department has now discovered a method of bringing back the functional
ability of the brain after exposure to the mindjammer effect, I didn't
think it would be harmful to allow two of the aliens to be subjected to
it again. Unfortunately, they died."
"They _what_?" Bilford shouted the question.
"Died, Bilford, _died_," Eckisster said. "They are both as dead as the
surface of Syndor."
"Good God!" Bilford said. "Perhaps a second exposure--" Suddenly he
jammed a finger down on his cutoff, and his image vanished from the
conference room.
"What was the reason for that?" Eckisster wanted to know.
"He's just released the first batch of men from the hospital for
active duty," said Fleet Commander Allerdyce. "If that thing _is_ the
mindjammer, and those men are exposed again--Excuse me." His own finger
touched the cutoff, and his image flickered out.