Doctor Balkani!
Mekkis stared in amazement at the figure of the bearded, intense-looking man sitting in the chair across from him, smoking a pipe. As the Gany Administrator watched, the figure faded and was gone.
Shaking his entire body in a tic-like whipping motion, Mekkis said to himself, I must go on. Time is growing short.
“Snap out of it, man,” Percy commanded one of his troops who seemed to have given in, for the moment, to hysteria.
“But I tell you I’m still invisible!” shouted the man.
“I turned off the projector an hour ago,” Percy said, leaning against a tree with studied casualness. “You can’t be still invisible. I can see you as plain as day.”
“But I can’t see me!” shouted the distraught Neeg-part. “I hold up my hand in front of my face and, man, there ain’t nothing there!”
“Hey, Lincoln,” Percy said, turning to his second-in-command. “You see that man standing there, don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” Lincoln said, squinting through his scratched and broken horn-rimmed glasses.
“Anybody here who can’t see this man?” Percy demanded, turning to the rest of his troops which sat and stood in a loose semicircle around him.
“We all see him okay,” they murmured.
The Neeg-part leader turned again to the “invisible” man. “Now pick up your projector and let’s march.”
“No, man. I ain’t never going to touch one of those things again. Not to save my life.”
“Are you defying my orders?” Percy picked up his laser rifle.
“Easy does it, Percy,” Lincoln said, gently pushing the rifle to one side. “I’ll carry his projector.”
Percy hesitated, then shrugged and let Lincoln have his way.
At nightfall they reached one of their forward dugouts and there counted noses. The man who had imagined himself to be invisible was no longer with them.
“He really did disappear,” one of the men said.
“No, he didn’t,” Lincoln said. “He just left the party and headed for Gus Swenesgard’s plantation.”
“What?” Percy shouted. “And you just stood there and let him go? If you knew he was a deserter, why didn’t you shoot him?”
“You can’t shoot everybody, Percy” Lincoln said grimly. “And since you’ve started using those illusion projectors quite a few men have gone over the hill... and if you don’t stop, a lot more will follow.”
“I can’t stop,” Percy said. “With these weapons I can finally really make a dent in those stinking wiks; I can really hurt them. Without these weapons it would only be a matter of time before we’d be finished.”
“Then,” Lincoln said stoically, “you’d better use them full force and use them now. While you still have a man or two left.”
The defectors drifted into Gus Swenesgard’s plantation by ones and twos at first, then in larger groups. Gus, suspecting some trick, had the first ones shot, but then, when he began to understand what was going on, started routing them into a hastily-constructed prison compound and set about personally interrogating them in the lobby of his hotel.
One fact became clear almost from the outset. Every one of the defectors was at least somewhat mentally disturbed—some seeming to be full-blown hallucinating paranoid schizophrenics.
Their most frequent delusion was that Percy X had not been captured but still led them, up in the mountains, or that he had escaped by some miracle and returned to them. Just to make sure, Gus phoned Oslo and talked directly to Dr. Balkani; the psychiatrist assured him that both Percy X and Joan Hiashi remained safely under lock and key.
“Just wishful thinking,” Gus muttered as he hung up the phone.
The other delusions were remarkable for their variety and lack of consistent pattern. If one could speak of a “typical” case one might take Jeff Berner, a one-time captain in Percy’s rag-tag army, as representative.
Gus did not need to be a mind reader to tell instantly, when Jeff was brought into the lobby for questioning, that here stood a very, very scared Neeg.
“You Jeff Berner?” Gus asked, lighting a cigar and settling back comfortably in an overstuffed chair. Jeff, of course, remained standing.
“That’s right.” The unhappy black man nodded.
“That’s right, sir” Gus corrected sternly. You dont get nowhere with these U bang is, he said to himself, unless you get them to show you the proper respect.
“Sir,” Jeff said lamely.
“Now tell me; what made you leave the Neeg-parts?”
The ex-Neeg-part shifted nervously from one foot to the other and answered, “Them thought projectors. They did things to my mind.”
“What kind of things?” Gus made his voice kind and sympathetic; the best results came from treating Neegs as the simple children they were. Let them look on me, Gus said to himself, as a sort of father.
“Well, any kind. You turn on the machine, imagine something, and what you imagine, well, it seems to sort of come true. Only—sometimes, when you turn off the machine, the illusion doesn’t go away. You go on seeing it maybe for days.”
“And in your case what did you imagine?” This was the part of the interviews which Gus had come to enjoy the most. Each story seemed more grotesque than the last.
“Well, sir,” began the Neeg uncertainly, “it began when me and two other troops made a little raid for supplies and food, on a home on the outskirts of your plantation. We were having a hard time, see, because they, the farmer and his wife and two sons, they were keeping us off with lasers, and we thought that your troops would be on us in a few minutes with ionocrafts, so I figured I’d rustle up some reinforcements with the illusion machine, just a few extra men to throw a scare into the farmer. Well, the gadget zapped up twenty-four men and they all fought like veterans, then helped us to carry the supplies we captured up into the mountains. That was fine, I guess, except I don’t see how an illusion can lift a boxful of real canned food. The catch was that when I turned off the gadget the twenty-four men didn’t go away. They stayed with me in the hills and ate like horses, sir, like horses. But I didn’t mind. I kind of got to liking one of the guys. He was a real pal; we used to spend hours talking, and he seemed to know all kinds of things. Never met such a smart fella in all my born days. Mike Monk was his name, and he had been borned and raised in New York. Said he joined Percy X because he had a hard time getting a job; which was sort of a joke, but has some truth in it. Lots of men joined Percy because nobody else wanted them.
“Once he saved my life.Shot down a homotropic dart that acted like it had my name on it. After that I stopped thinking he was just an illusion. I just took it for granted that he was real. Well, one night we were in a dugout talking when I suddenly realized that the other twenty-three men were gone. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what’s happening, man?’ and he said, ‘Nothin’, Jeff baby,’ only I happened to notice that Mike didn’t have any feet. I said, ‘Hey, Mike, what happened to your feet?’ and he said, ‘My feet are okay, man,’ only then I sort of realized that I could see through his legs. ‘Hey, man,’ I said, ‘you know something? I can see through your legs,’ and he said, ‘How you talk, man,’ and I said, ‘Hey, where did you really come from?’ and he said, ‘Like I told you; I’m just a simple New York cat,’ only I could see his legs were gone and I could see through all the rest of him, so I said, ‘Hey, man, where you going to?’ and he said, ‘I ain’t going nowhere. I’m going to stick with you.’ His voice was getting kind of faint and faraway, so I yelled, ‘Hey, where are you?’ and I heard him say, so faint I could hardly hear it, ‘Right where I always was and always will be, standing by your ever-loving side,’ and poof, he was gone. I never seen him since.”