"Certainly."
The two turned toward the east and started to walk.
* * * * *
Five miles east of Brentwood lies a small community named Minerva.
Population: 200. The highway from Brentwood to Chicago cuts the town in
two. In the center of town, on the north side of the road, stands a new
building--the Minerva Town Hall--built the year before with money raised
by the residents. It was the largest and most elaborate building in
Minerva, which had been evacuated three days before.
On this morning the town hall was occupied by army men. Maj. Gen. Pitt
fretted and fumed at the four officers and twenty enlisted men waiting
in the building.
"It's an indignity!" he railed at the men who were forced to listen to
him. "We have orders to talk appeasement with him! Nuts! We lose a few
men, a few planes and now we're ready to meet George halfway. What's
this country coming to? There ought to be something that would knock him
out. Why should we have to send in _after_ him? It's disgusting!"
The major general, a large man with a bristling white mustache and a red
face, stamped back and forth in the council room. Some of the officers
and men smiled to themselves. The general was a well known fighting man.
Orders he had received hamstrung him and, as soldiers, they sympathized
with him.
"What kind of men do we have in the higher echelons?" He asked everybody
in general and nobody in particular. "They won't even let us have a
field telephone. We're supposed to make a report by radio. Now isn't
that smart?" He shook his head, looked the men over. "An appeasement
team, that's what you are, when you ought to be a combat team to lick
hell out of George.
"Why were you all assigned to this particular duty? I never saw any of
you before and I understand you're all strangers to each other, too.
Hell, what will they do next? Appeasement. I never appeased anybody
before in my whole life. I'd rather spit in his eye. What am I supposed
to talk about? The weather? What authority do I have to yak with a
walking collection of nuts and bolts!"
An officer strode into the room and saluted the general. "They're
coming, sir," he said.
"Who's coming?... My God, man," the general spluttered angrily, "be
specific. Who the hell are 'they'?"
"Why, George and Sergeant Matthews, sir. You remember, the sergeant who
volunteered to go into Brentwood--"
"Oh, _them_. Well, all I have to say is this is a hell of a war. I
haven't figured out what I am going to say yet."
"Shall I have them wait, sir?"
"Hell, no. Let's get this over with. I'll find out what George has to
say and maybe that'll give me a lead."
Before George entered the Council chamber, he already knew the mind of
each man. He saw the room through their eyes. He knew everything about
them, what they were wearing, what they were thinking. All had guns, yet
none of them would kill him, although at least one man, Maj. Gen. Pitt,
would have liked to.
They were going to talk appeasement, George knew, but he could also see
that the general didn't know what line the conversation would take or
what concessions he could make on behalf of his people.
Wait--there was one man among the twenty-three who had an odd thought.
It was a soldier he had seen looking through a window at him. This man
was thinking about eleven o'clock, for George could see in the man's
mind various symbols for fifteen minutes from then--the hands of a
clock, a watch, the numerals 11. But George could not see any
significance to the thought.
When he entered the room with the sergeant, he was ushered to a table.
He sat down with Maj. Gen. Pitt, who glowered at him. Letting his mind
roam the room, George picked up the numerals again and identified the
man thinking them as the officer behind and a little to the right of the
general.
What was going to happen at eleven? The man had no conscious thought of
harm to anyone, yet the idea kept obtruding and seemed so out of keeping
with his other thoughts George assigned several of his circuits to the
man. The fact that the lieutenant looked at his watch and saw that it
was 10:50 steeled George still more. If there was to be trouble, it
would come from this one man.
[Illustration]
"I'm General Pitt," the general said drily. "You're George, of course. I
have been instructed to ask you what, exactly, your intentions are
toward the United States and the world in general, with a view toward
reaching some sort of agreement with you and others of your kind, who
will, as you say invade the Earth."
"Invade, General Pitt," George replied, "is not the word."
"All right, whatever the word is. We're all familiar with the plan
you've been talking about. What we want to know is, where do you go from
here?"
"The fact that there has been no reluctance on the part of the armed
forces to talk of an agreement--even though I see that you privately do
not favor such a talk, General Pitt--is an encouraging sign. We of
Zanthar would not want to improve a planet which could not be educated
and would continually oppose our program. This will make it possible for
me to turn in a full report in a few days now."
"Will you please get to the point?"
George could see that the lieutenant was looking at his watch again. It
was 10:58. George spread his mind out more than twenty miles, but could
find no installation, horizontally or vertically, that indicated
trouble. None of the men in the room seemed to think of becoming overly
hostile.
"Yes, General. After my message goes out, there ought to be a landing
party on Earth within a few weeks. While waiting for the first party,
there must be certain preparations--"
George tensed. The lieutenant was reaching for something. But it somehow
didn't seem connected with George. It was something white, a
handkerchief. He saw that the man intended to blow his nose and started
to relax except that George suddenly became aware of the fact the man
_did not need to blow his nose_!
Every thought-piercing circuit became instantly energized in George's
mind and reached out in all directions....
There were at least ten shots from among the men. They stood there
surprised at their actions. Those who had fired their guns now held the
smoking weapons awkwardly in their hands.
George's eyes were gone. Smoke curled upward from the two empty sockets
where bullets had entered a moment before. The smoke grew heavier and
his body became hot. Some of him turned cherry red and the chair on
which he had been sitting started to burn. Finally, he collapsed toward
the table and rolled to the floor.
He started to cool. He was no longer the shiny blue-steel color he had
been--he had turned black. His metal gave off cracking noises and some
of it buckled here and there as it cooled.
* * * * *
A few minutes later, tense military men and civilians grouped around a
radio receiver in Chicago heard the report and relaxed, laughing and
slapping each other on the back. Only one sat unmoved in a corner.
Others finally sought him out.
"Well, Professor, it was your idea that did the trick. Don't you feel
like celebrating?" one of them asked.
Prof. Tomlin shook his head. "If only George had been a little more
benign, we might have learned a lot from him."
"What gave you the idea that killed him?"
"Oh, something he said about the unconscious and subconscious," Prof.
Tomlin replied. "He admitted they were not penetrable. It was an easy
matter to instill a post-hypnotic suggestion in some proven subjects and
then to erase the hypnotic experience."
"You make it sound easy."
"It wasn't too difficult, really. It was finding the solution that was
hard. We selected more than a hundred men, worked with them for days,
finally singled out the best twenty, then made them forget their
hypnosis. A first lieutenant--I've forgotten his name--had implanted in
him a command even he was not aware of. His subconscious made him blow
his nose fifteen minutes after he saw George. Nearly twenty others had
post-hypnotic commands to shoot George in the eyes as soon as they saw
the lieutenant blow his nose. Of course we also planted a subconscious
hate pattern, which wasn't exactly necessary, just to make sure there
would be no hesitation, no inhibition, no limiting moral factor.
"None of the men ever saw each other before being sent to Minerva. None
realized that they carried with them the order for George's
annihilation. The general, who was not one of the hypnotics, was given
loose instructions, as were several others, so they could not possibly
know the intention. Those of us who had conducted the hypnosis had to
stay several hundred miles away so that we could not be reached by
George's prying mind...."
* * * * *
In a pasture next to a wood near Brentwood, a metal box buried in the
ground suddenly exploded, uprooting a catalpa tree.
On a planet many millions of miles away, a red light--one of many on a
giant control board--suddenly winked out.
A blue humanoid made an entry in a large book: _System 29578, Planet
Three Inhabited_.
_Too dangerous for any kind of development._