At that instant, out of the darkness ahead appeared a high-tension power line. At the speed which he was traveling Paul did not have a chance to react to, let alone dodge, the oncoming obstacle; he could only hang on as the ionocraft struck the wires with an impact that smashed his head forward against the wheel, almost knocking him unconscious. But, though his mentation had become dazed and confused, the habit-patterns imprinted in his subconscious by years of flying high-velocity ionocrafts under all sorts of conditions remained functioning; he fought frantically to regain control as the vehicle spun wildly and lost altitude. Another crash shuddered through him as the ship struck the top of a sandy hill and bounced once again into the air.
Now, miraculously, Paul managed to get the ship under control and, still swerving erratically, to regain a little altitude. He glanced briefly at Joan, Ed and Percy X. All seemed stunned, perhaps unconscious. The ion grids of the ship had suffered severe damage and threatened to break off at any moment; the ship appeared to be losing power. He realized with reluctance that he would be able to keep it in the air only a few minutes more. I guess, he thought bitterly, we’ll have to get out and walk.
Just then the radio spewed forth another message. “Unidentified ionocraft surrounded! Close in, all patrol craft, and shoot on sight!”
“It has become time,” said the Timekeeper, “to key into the Common Mind broadcast from the home world, sir.” The nervous little creech gestured toward the surge-gate amplifier in the corner of the Administrator’s office.
“Eh?” muttered Mekkis in response.
“Sir, this is the third time this month that you have failed to join the fusion. How will you know what is happening back home?”
“I have more important matters to attend to. Anyhow I know what is occurring back home. My enemies are enjoying themselves at my expense. Why should I plug in just to empathize with their gloating?”
The Oracle chimed in gloomily. “It is not from the home world that the darkness approaches.”
The Timekeeper slunk off in silence and Mekkis returned to his “more important matters.” This consisted of a reading of the entire published works of the brilliant but verbose Terran psychiatrist, Doctor Rudolph Balkani; Mekkis had secured microfilm copies of all the books available through the channels of the Bureau of Cultural Control and had devoted virtually his complete attention to them. Never before had he encountered a thinker that so obsessed him. The very first sentence of the initial book had passed through him like a shot.
“The number of men on this planet is great but finite. The number of potential men within me is infinite. I am, therefore, greater than the entire human race.”
This thought would never have occured to a being accustomed to the telepathic melting together of the Great Common, and yet there was something about it, a certain incredible yet plausible egotism, a fantastic daring that seemed to speak to a deep, hitherto untouched part of Mekkis’ spiritual mind. It seemed somehow to explain the painful state of affairs existing between himself and the other members of the Ganymedian ruling class. They all, every last one, he thought, are against me; yet I know I am right—that in fact I’ve been right all along. How can such a condition occur unless Balkani is correct; unless one being really can be greater than the entire race from which it comes?
Balkani’s method struck him as outrageous. Instead of performing systematic experiments, cautiously moving the boundary of knowledge forward inch by inch, Balkani simply looked within his own unique mind and described what he saw, brushing aside whole schools of psychiatry with a single snide remark, making not even a feeble attempt at politeness, let alone scientific fairness. Yet his theories produced results. Balkani, the master, lurched drunkenly into the unknown, carelessly tossing off dogmatic statements as if they were proven facts simply because they seemed to him, intuitively, to be true. Then others could follow behind him, picking up his ideas and testing them scientifically, and produce miracles.
A method of training latent telepathic ability that really worked.
A type of psychotherapy that seemed to be a brutal, all-out attack on the patient’s ego, yet which cured in weeks supposedly impossible-to-cure mental illnesses such as drug addiction and far-advanced schizophrenia.
An electromagnetic theory of mind function that opened the way for partial or complete control of the mind by electromagnetic fields.
A way of measuring the presence of Synchronicity generated by schizophrenics—an acausal force which, by altering consistently the patterns of probability, made the objective world appear to collaborate with the psychotic in the creation of the half-real world in which his worst fears would, against impossible odds, come true.
Was it these results that impressed Mekkis, or was it the example of Balkani the man? The latter. Mekkis had begun to see himself in the Terran psychiatrist, feeling at one with this man who had set himself up in opposition to his entire race.
It would be interesting, Mekkis mused, if I turned into a Ganymedian Doctor Balkani.
Glancing up for a moment he discovered that one of his wik secretaries had been trying, for almost a minute now, to attract his attention. “Gus Swenes-gard is here, Mr. Administrator,” the secretary declared.
“I haven’t time to see him. What does he want? Did he say?”
“He wishes more fighting units in his Neeg hunt in the mountains. He claims he can clean out the whole lot of them if he just has a little Gany first line hardware.”
He did not want to think about the Neegs; he was struggling to understand a particularly fine point in the illogical logic of Dr. Balkani’s “Centerpoint, Action at a Distance and ESP.” Aloud he said, “Give him what he wants. Keep an eye on him though. And don’t bother me about it.”
“But—”
“That’s is all.” Mekkis flicked the switch with his tongue, the switch that turned the microfilm viewer to the next frame.
With a shrug the wik departed. Mekkis instantly forgot the exchange as he buried himself once again in the twilight world of “Geffterpoint Paraphysics.”
When Gus Swenesgard heard the Administrator’s decision, as relayed to him by the wik secretary, he said rapidly, “Mekkis says I get anything I want?”
“That’s correct,” the secretary said.
“First off,” Gus said with an expansive smile, “I’d like all the Gany fighting units in the bale transferred to my command. Then—” He pondered a moment, dreamily. “—I’d like to do a little reorganization in the governmental structure.”
“Who do you think you are?” the wik secretary said dryly.
Gus chuckled, slapping the somewhat annoyed secretary on the back. “I’m the Kingfish around here now, sir. That’s who I am.” He then left the Gany HQ building. Whistling contentedly; he knew exactly what he had—for reasons unknown to him— achieved.
There, up ahead, Paul Rivers made out a highway, and on the highway a huge trailer-truck zoomed through the night. He hauled back gently on the controls of the ionocraft and thought, Why not? The craft responded sluggishly but he found himself swinging down behind the truck, approaching it, as he intended, from the rear.
Now, he said to himself, and cut the grids. On the last dying power he sailed in through the open upper half of the trailer and settled on its cargo with a crash. The driver spun around, startled, and gazed back through his cab window as Paul took aim with a very mean-looking laser rifle. “Keep driving,” Paul said, over the roar of the truck engine.
“You’re the boss, man,” the driver said with a sheepish grin; he turned his eyes back on the road. He must think, Paul realized, that we’re hijackers; the first chance he gets he’ll try to signal the law. And the law, of course, would be here in a second.