“What of it?”
“I’ll tell you what of it. Crowley doesn’t just converse with other clients in the normal manner—he imposes his own thought patterns on them.”
Urquhart’s sense of alarm deepened. “That sounds bad. How long has it been going on?”
“Several weeks. Ever since Crowley learned how to screen off all normal inputs and to generate his own signals. That’s what I meant about conquering new kingdoms—he has his own private universe to occupy him.”
“You mean he’s insane?”
“Not necessarily. A psychologist might say he has prevented himself from going insane.”
“This is terrible.” Urquhart began pacing the length of the office. ‘But come now, Bryan—you’re exaggerating when you say he has a private universe. Do you mean … ha-ha … he forces some of the others to swallow his own notions about the benefits of colonialism?”
“I mean he makes them ride around a desert on green-and-red dragons while he hunts them with a rifle.”
“Jehovah’s jockstrap!” Urquhart lurched drunkenly against Philp’s workdesk and the pink cigar popped into existence above his head.
“Hello,” it chirped. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile….”
“Try to be a bit more careful,” Philp said reprovingly, setting his cofftea down and going to the desk. He touched a button and the cigar vanished, shrinking through spurious perspectives.
“You’ve made me ill,” Urquhart accused. “What is this nonsense about dragons and hunting with a rifle?”
“Crowley has created another reality, and that’s it. I occasionally get a few details from Professor Isaacs, who was one of the first that Crowley sucked into his own orbit. The information is very sparse because Crowley keeps him pretty well occupied.”
“Then Crowley is mad. If this leaks out the company’s finished. We’ve got to get a psychiatrist here in secret, in the middle of the night, and have him talk to Crowley on the general address system.”
“I thought of that. It’s no use. The GA signals we put into the matrix reach Crowley all right, but he doesn’t want to hear anything which conflicts with his fantasy existence, so he shunts them on past him. Turns a deaf ear. We all do it to a certain extent.”
Urquhart felt his lower lip begin to tremble. He walked to one of the simulated windows and stood looking out. His distant hill glowed in afternoon sunshine, looking softer and more inviting than ever before. “A friend once told me I should read The Golden Bough because it has a message for me. So I read it—and all I can remember is a ghastly passage about young men cutting off their testicles and throwing them through people’s windows.”
“Really?” Philp sounded unsympathetic. “Are you going to try it?”
“If I thought it would …’ Urquhart turned to Philp who was draining his cofftea. “You almost seem to be enjoying this, Bryan—for a man who’s facing ruin you seem rather unconcerned.”
“Ruin?” Philp grinned broadly. “It’s a little early to speak in those terms, old son. I may be able to bring Crowley back.”
Urquhart felt his jaw sag but was unable to prevent it. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
“Well, there’s just one thing.”
“Which is?”
“I want to be managing director of Biosyn.”
‘But I’m the managing director.”
“You’re also chairman—and one of those posts should be enough for anybody.”
Urquhart brought his jaw under control and made an attempt to square it. “I’m not going to be blackmailed.”
“The board of Bristol University are coming here next week in person to pay a visit to Professor Isaacs. I’ll see if he can get down from his dragon long enough to speak to them.”
“I’d forgotten about Isaacs.” Urquhart sat down and covered his face with his hands. “All right, Bryan—managing director it is. Now what are you going to do about Crowley?”
“Thank you, John.” Philp began striding about his office. “It’s nice to get a little promotion now and then. As for Colonel Crowley—I’ve been studying his career profile and I think the best weapon we can use against him is the cocktail party effect.”
A rum on the resultant reality vector:
The Right Hon. Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lit his pipe and puffed out a luxuriant cloud of blue smoke which billowed across the spaceship’s control room.
Vaulter looked at him with six critical eyes. “Now there’s something I’d overlooked,” he said aloud.
“You surprise me,” Mr. Wilson murmured. “At this stage? What is it?”
“The smoke you puffed out was blue, but when a human being exhales the smoke which comes out is grey—moisture in the lungs condenses on the carbon particles and changes the wave-length of the light they reflect.”
“Nobody on Earth is going to notice a thing like that,” Mr. Wilson protested hastily.
Vaulter silenced him with an upraised tentacle. “Never neglect even the minutest detail—that is the recipe for success on this type of mission. I’m going to fit a water sac in your chest cavity. Please take off your clothes.”
Mr. Wilson tapped out his pipe on a glowing control panel, leaving a small heap of ash among the switches, and began removing his tweed suit, muttering angrily all the while.
“What was that?” Vaulter said.
“Nothing, nothing.”
“I thought I heard you say something about Tory misrule.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Mr Wilson snapped. He stepped out of his underpants and stood to attention while Vaulter put a tentacle on each nipple and pushed outwards. The pale flesh split easily down the line of the plastic sternum and Vaulter went to work inside the thorax. There was a long period of silence inside the spaceship, interrupted only by the faint rattling of tools and an occasional soft chiming note from the isntrument panels. Finally Vaulter began to gather up the shining implements and fit them carefully into a case.
“You may get dressed now,” he said. “Then begin smoking again—I want to check the result. If necessary I’ll fit an atomiser to vaporise the water.”
“Surely that won’t be necessary.”
“I repeat, attention to detail is necessary. The orbiting telepathic field boosters will not give you absolute control of the population of Earth—all we can guarantee is that they will generate a firm belief in the principles of Benign Socialism. If you make a mistake and people begin to suspect your origins, dangerous conflicts will be created. These people are not yet ready for full membership of the Galactic Socialist Congress, so they must believe you are a product of their world.”
Mr. Wilson re-lit his pipe and blue smoke curled upwards from the bowl. “You think they’ll swallow reincarnation? After all, the original Harold Wilson has been dead for a hundred of their years.” He breathed out and his eyes followed the smoke which ascended from his mouth, noting with evident relief that it was a satisfactory grey.
“For your information, this technique has worked on every other Grade C world. There is a strong possibility that an element of religion will assert itself, especially as the broadcasts we’ve been monitoring make frequent references to Mr. Wilson walking on water.”
“But those broadcasts are more than a hundred years out of date! Why couldn’t I have been modelled on a 21st Century Earth politician?”
There was a silence while Vaulter crossed two of his eye-stalks, his equivalent of a sigh of exasperation. I’m sorry, Harold—I keep forgetting that your mind programme is based almost entirely on that of the original Mr. Wilson. I’ll explain the astronomical background once more. The only GCG station in this region of the galaxy which is capable of building a being like you is 800 light years from Earth, and even our best ships take fifty years to cover that distance.