"Oh!" the Leader said triumphantly as he saw George Hanlon's start of
surprise. "I see you recognize our guest."
"Sure I know him," Hanlon snapped, rigidly forcing himself into control.
"That's Abrams. I thought I killed him."
"Ah, now, did you so?" Again the Leader smiled, but this time grimly.
"Now we come to the meat of the matter. You say you thought you killed
him, but you know you didn't. Your pretended assassination in such a
clever manner was all a ruse--you didn't poison him at all. You merely
pretended to put something in his cup."
"That's a lie. Maybe it didn't work on him, but I did ..."
"Sorry, Mr. Hanlon," the trembling Abrams whined the interruption. "I
was forced to tell the whole story to His Highness after he found out
where I was hiding."
His Highness!
So this was the fabulous monster of whom everyone was so afraid.
Hanlon's heart sank to his knees. What chance did he have now? He would
never get out of this alive, nor get his report to the Corps.
"Yes, Mr. Hanlon," that silky voice mimicked meaningly, and venomously.
"We have ... uh ... ways of making people talk. This Abrams, like a
fool, was not content to continue working as my secretary. He had to get
foolish notions of ethics and patriotism, and try to ... uh ... object
to some of my policies. Why did you let him think you were still a
Corpsman ... if you're not?" he snapped suddenly.
Hanlon made himself stare back insolently. Maybe they would kill
him ... no, be honest, undoubtedly they would ... but by the Shade of
Snyder they weren't going to make him show the fear he felt.
"Use your head, Pal. I had to make an impression on Panek so he'd
introduce me to someone here on Sime who'd show me how to make some
fast, big money, which is all I'm after," he retorted with a bravado he
certainly didn't feel, but which he hoped would make them think he did.
"When I found Panek was going to bump off Abrams, I horned in on it. And
what easier way to make Abrams play ball with me--I had nothing against
him, and didn't want to really kill him--than to let him think I was
still a Corpsman, after he'd seen me when I was still a cadet. I didn't
know he'd turn yellow and squeal."
He looked contemptuously at Abrams, then turned back to the leader and
made his voice very earnest, very emphatic. "But I've told you the
truth! I am not still connected with that rotten outfit, and you're
wrong if you think I am!"
"Don't lie to His Highness!" Panek interjected. "He don't like to be
lied to--he don't like it."
"Aw shut up and keep out of this, small fry!" Hanlon sneered, and was
rewarded with a hard blow on the side of his head that made him wince.
But His Highness intervened.
"That will do, Panek. I'll handle this. Now, Hanlon, I think you had
better do some very serious thinking. You can see why we are still
skeptical of you. Everything points against you ... uh ... except your
own word, and the fact that you so apparently did work hard and for our
best interests at the mine. That point, I readily grant you, is very
much in your favor. I am being very patient with you because, if you are
telling the truth, you can be a very valuable man to me. You do have
real ability, and other assets. But if you are not wholly for us, you
are distinctly in our way."
"I tell you ..."
"Don't interrupt, please. I might inform you that I sent you to the
other planet both to test you and to keep you out of the way while we
investigated further and I could reach a decision. You were not supposed
to come back yet. I sent Philander a letter to that effect, but he
space-radioed you were already on the way back when he read it."
A light dawned on Hanlon as memory skipped back to that take-off.
Philander had merely stuck the mail in his pocket when it was given him,
and evidently started reading it on his way back to the mine. That
explained his running back, waving a letter and trying to attract
attention just at blast-off.
That small part of his mind that was paying attention to the men in the
room heard His Highness say "take Abrams away. He ... uh ... is of no
further use to us. And wait outside until I call--all of you."
When they had gone His Highness leaned forward, and Hanlon knew he had
better pay strict attention and keep his wits about him for any opening
to improve his perilous position.
"I'll speak more frankly, now that we are alone, Hanlon. I am impressed
with you. I think you have ... uh ... tremendous abilities, and I want
you on my side. But I have to be sure. I would advise you, for your own
good, to be honest and frank with me."
"I am being, but you won't believe me," Hanlon said earnestly. "When I
take a man's pay, sir, I give him everything I've got. You gave me a
chance at the kind of money I want to make, and I'm doing everything I
can to earn both the money and your trust. I was kicked out of the
Corps, and I'll do _anything_ I can to get even!"
"As I said before, we have ... uh ... ways of making you tell us the
truth," the Leader continued as though Hanlon had not interrupted, "but
you would not be any good either to us or the Corps or yourself if we
have to use ... uh ... persuasion. I don't want to see you broken. You
may remember you once asked me if I could 'dish it out'? Let me assure
you that I can."
"But how can I prove anything when you've already made up your mind not
to believe me?" Hanlon asked plaintively. "I'm doing my best to make you
believe. I'll admit some of those points you've brought up could look
fishy if viewed from one standpoint, but I assure you you're putting the
wrong interpretation on them. If you'll look at them from my viewpoint
you'll see they are just as true."
His Highness regarded Hanlon silently but with a steady concentration
for some minutes. "That might be true. I had about begun to believe you
when we found Abrams, and when we questioned him he ... uh ... admitted
what you had done, and why. That revived my doubts. Are you willing to
be tested under a truth drug?"
Hanlon almost gasped in dismay, but stifled it. He knew only too well
the efficacy of modern truth drugs. They would reveal every thought and
bit of knowledge he had ever had--all about the Corps, the Secret
Service and everything.
That hurt look came back into his face. "You sure are asking a lot,
sir," he said. "I haven't anything to conceal from you, but no man likes
to have his whole mind invaded that way--all his private thoughts and
feelings. I don't see why you need suggest such a thing. I've told you
the truth on matters you want to know about."
"You appear to have done so, and I honestly want to believe you. For you
see, Hanlon, I want you with me. You're my kind of a man. I like you
because you have tremendous drive and imagination and ability--yes,
and perhaps a bit because you're the only man I've ever met who
wasn't ... uh ... afraid of me. I have tremendous plans for the
future--and I would like to have you as my chief aide in them. I would
train you as you've never guessed it possible for a man to be trained.
And then, _together, Hanlon, we could rule the Universe_!"
But George Hanlon was only half-listening, even to that last, that
shocking, that totally unexpected proposition, his real goal. Here was
the plot he had been seeking, the plot the Corps needed so desperately
to know. Yet his personal crisis was, for the moment, more important if
he was ever to be of any further benefit to the Secret Service or the
Corps. To use his just-discovered knowledge, something else must come
first.
His mind, therefore, was seeking a way out. He well knew that once the
truth drug was administered--and this Highness would not now be
satisfied with anything less--he was as good as dead. They would find
out the truth in minutes, and then would have no other recourse but to
kill him.
His spirits sank to nadir with the knowledge that he had
failed ... failed the Secret Service and the Corps, failed his father,
failed the Guddus, failed himself. Curiously, perhaps, at that moment
the thought of failure was far more important to him than the imminence
of death, as such.
He had half-consciously noticed when he first glanced about this room,
that there was a small ventilator near the ceiling in one corner.
Desperately he pushed his mind through it, and could sense that it
opened onto a park-like place, probably around one of the city's
palaces.
Hanlon finally heard His Highness call, "Panek, you and the others bring
me the hypodermic. We'll have to give him the truth serum. I'm sorry,
Hanlon," he addressed himself now to the young man, "but this is the
only way. I hope we won't have to use enough to harm you, but that
depends on your co-operation. If you will tell us the truth quickly and
willingly I can, as I said ... uh ... use you, and you will profit
greatly by it."
Hanlon didn't struggle when they bound him firmly in the chair with
manacles on hands and feet. He knew it would be useless anyway. He let
his body slump into his chair, and again directed his mind through that
vent. He must not let them defeat him! He had to survive--to get
word--to the Corps!
Then his searching mind contacted another--a weak, primitive one, but a
mind. Avidly he fastened onto it, merged with it ... and found himself
inside the brain of one of those Simonidean pigeons.
Ah! This is wonderful! Pigeons seldom fly alone. Where you find one you
almost always find a number. Activating the bird's brain he sent out a
call to others of its kind that it had found food in abundance. Soon
more and more of them flew down to where the now enslaved pigeon was
standing, and as each one came, Hanlon sent into its brain all of his
mind it would hold.
Inside the cellar room His Highness rose and stepped up to Hanlon's
body, the hypodermic in his hand. "Remove his coat and roll up his
sleeve," he directed Panek, and the small part of Hanlon's mind still
remaining in his body felt the latter doing so, and an instant later,
the prick of the needle.
Slowly at first, then with increasing swiftness he felt his remaining
mind growing numb and his will weaken. His body slumped against the
restraining manacles.
"Can you hear me, George Hanlon?" he dimly heard His Highness' voice.
"Yes." It sounded like a whisper.
"Are you a member of the Inter-Stellar Corps?"
"I ... I ...", he struggled not to answer.
"Tell me!"
"I ... I ..." and then, in a last desperate effort to keep from telling
what he must not tell, George Hanlon did a thing he had never dared
attempt before. He sent all the remaining parts of his mind into the
last of the pigeons.
One of the first birds he had already sent into the ventilator so he
could look through it into the room below. He got it there just in time
to hear the Leader's gasp of dismay as he saw Hanlon's body slump still
further in apparent lifelessness.
"Is he dead, Boss, is he?" he heard Panek's anxious cry.
His Highness felt the pulse in Hanlon's wrist and the one in his throat.
"No, he's still alive."
The man stood there in deep thought, his forehead creased with a frown
of concentration. "There's something peculiarly wrong here," the Leader
finally said aloud. "Something very wrong and very strange. This isn't
an ordinary fainting spell. It's ... uh ... beyond my previous
experience."
He straightened and addressed Hanlon's body once more. "Can you still
hear me, George Hanlon?"
There was no answer, no slightest indication that his words were heard.
He reached forward and lifted the body into a more upright position in
the chair. "Answer me, George Hanlon. Do you hear me? I command you to
tell me, are you a Corpsman?"
Still no answer, no twitch of muscle, no movement of awareness. He shook
the body a little, and raised his voice still more.
"I demand an answer, George Hanlon! The truth drug must make you speak!"
But only silence, and when he let go of the body it fell backward into
the chair, and the head lolled forward as though the neck was broken.
"Let me work on him, Boss," Panek pleaded. "Let me give him a going
over, let me."
Barely waiting to see that His Highness did not forbid it, the thug
raised a short, ugly piece of rubber hose, and struck the unresisting
body again and again--across the face, over the top and back of the
head, vicious blows at the ribs and even in the groin.
But he might as well have been pounding a sack of meal. The body sagged
beneath the blows, and became bloody and discolored, but no movement--no
conscious movement--did it make.
"That will do, Panek," His Highness finally commanded. "That
does no good. This I cannot understand, but I do know there
is ... uh ... something most peculiar here. It is almost as
though ...", he paused and frowned again. "But that is ridiculous!"
"What's ridiculous, Boss, what is?"
"It is almost as though there was ... uh ... no mind left in the body,"
His Highness said slowly. Then, abruptly, "Are you sure that was
truth-serum in that hypodermic?"
"You fixed it yourself, Boss."
His Highness wheeled suddenly, rudely awakened from his thinking by the
loud _shoo_-ing noise one of the guards was making. He was astonished to
see the man making vain motions toward a pigeon whose head was sticking
through, the ventilator vanes.
But the bird didn't leave.
"Stop it!" the Leader commanded impatiently. "We've more import ..."
He checked himself, and turned back to stare wonderingly at the bird,
which peered back at him with apparently unfrightened, beady eyes,
turning its head to first one side and then the other, as though better
to see all that was going on.
"That's peculiar," His Highness said thoughtfully. "I never saw a bird
act like that before. Hmmm, I wonder?... But no, that's absurd."
He turned back to Hanlon's body as though disgusted with himself for
entertaining such a fantastic notion. Hands behind his back, that scowl
of concentration engraving deep lines on his face, the Leader paced
forth and back across the floor of the little room, his glance ever and
again returning to stare in exasperation at that slumped-over,
dead-but-alive body.
Who was this amazing young man? What sort of talents and abilities did
he possess, that he could react thus to a truth-serum? Had he been so
treated by the Corps experts that his mind would be blanked out in such
emergencies? Was he some kind of a mutant with powers never before
known? Or--startling thought--was he actually a human being at all?
Better than anyone else, His Highness could appreciate the fact that the
universe contained many types of sentient and highly mental life other
than those originating on Terra. Since he had come here to Simonides,
and had wormed his way into the very highest position beneath its
emperor--a weak old man he had had no trouble dominating--he was
naturally suspicious of anyone who might be attempting to discover and
wreck his carefully-laid plans.
Such a one, he was now convinced, was this young Hanlon. It would be the
simplest thing to kill this almost-dead body now, but that would not
solve this baffling problem. If Hanlon, perhaps others of the Corps had
similar powers. No, one with such abilities must not be killed. He must
be kept and studied, and the secret learned if possible.
But his thoughts were interrupted by Panek. "That fool bird's still
there, still there. Is it another of your pets, Boss?"
His Highness wheeled. He had forgotten the bird. Was it possible that
Hanlon had, in some inexplicable manner, transferred ... on the surface
it was an absurd concept. But, there were magicians on his home planet
who could do things almost as unfathomable.
He suddenly made up his mind. "Kill it!" he commanded.
Whatever else he was or was not, Panek was fast with a gun. The words
were hardly spoken when he had drawn and fired.