“That’s what I want to talk about.” Browne scrambled upwards until he was face-to-face with Crowley. Sweat had traced red rivers in the dust on his face. He was about fifty years old and had the flabby build of someone who ate too much and exercised too little, but his eyes shone with an uncompromising hardness.
“Do you acknowledge our Queen?” Crowley demanded.
“Let’s consider Queen Elanos for a moment,” Browne said calmly. “I’ve been thinking about her name. E-L-A-N-O-S. Don’t you notice something peculiar there?”
“Peculiar?” Crowley’s voice shook with anger. “Peculiar?”
“Yes. Don’t you see it? Elanos is an anagram of Losane—the name of the country you carved out of Rhodesia almost single-handed in what, for lack of a better term, I call your previous life.”
“I’m warning you,” Crowley said as the distant Cythian Plain momentarily reversed its colours, split into horizontal lines and reassembled itself.
“This whole fantasy in which you have embroiled us is a reenactment of your political career, Colonel Crowley. Queen Elanos is a personification of Losane—the first fragment of Africa which, thanks to you, opted to return to Imperial rule….”
“Silence—or you die now.”
“You’re a dyed-in-the-wool Colonialist, Crowley. This Queen Elanos of yours—she looks very like a former Queen of England, right? But not Elizabeth II, because she wouldn’t suit the role. Elanos resembles Victoria, doesn’t she?”
The cloudless sky above the Kingdom of Tal turned grey and a charcoal sketch of a strangely familiar, bespectacled man’s face appeared in it for an instant, stretching from jagged horizon to zenith. A voice like the echoes of far-off thunder issued from the insubstantial grainy lips. ‘… preliminary reports indicate that an unidentified spaceship has entered Earth orbit. The immense size of the vessel suggests that it is not of human origin….”
“What was that?” Crowley said, looking upwards into the sky.
“I didn’t notice anything,” Browne replied impatiently. “And consider my name, even my personal appearance. Why do you think you cast me as a villain of the piece? George Brown was a prominent member of the British Labour Government in the last century, just at the time of the final dissolution of the old British Empire, and there’s no doubt that this coincidence of nomenclature is a major …’
Contact!
A thousand years of alien existence, a mind dedicated to the incredible proposition that association should be substituted for competition, a being which controlled vast forces, including the power to make all men think alike, a being which immediately identified Crowley as its enemy, and which was coming to …
Retreat!
“What’s happening?” Crowley felt his mouth go dry.
“… principle of self-establishing circuitry has disproved the a priori or ‘wired-in knowledge’ theory concerning the human brain in favour of the tabula rasa or clean slate new brain,” Browne droned on pedantically. “In our present state the hitherto indefinable quality known as ‘will’ is translated into physical reality as a higher than normal proportion of molecular amplifiers, which is the only reason you are able to impress your dreamscapes on others. But this state of affairs depends …”
“Stop mouthing for a moment—didn’t you feel anything?”
“Of course not, because I too have gained control of my amplifiers and I’m withdrawing from this particular fantasy.”
“Fantasy?” Crowley looked down at the rifle, which promptly turned into a broom and then vanished. “I’m talking about the … real world. I … I … Something is happening out there, and I’m the only one who understands. I’ve got to speak to Philp or Urquhart immediately.”
Browne looked around him, almost regretfully, at the dissolving mountains and plains of the Kingdom of Tal. “Be careful,” he said with a strange gentleness, “you could be walking into a …”
Crowley lost contact with him as the complex electrical network which simulated his personality began establishing new circuits within the compliant matrix, recreating the channels of communication with the outside world.
A Hennessy on the human reality vector:
Urquhart fixed his gaze for a moment on the wooded hill and made up his mind to waste no more time—he would go there very soon, possibly tomorrow, or maybe the next day. He picked up a plastic reference copy of a computer programme from his desk and his eyes scanned the typed words.
“I still think the risk was too great, Bryan,” he said. “A being from interstellar space which was planning to destroy the Tank, then set up a puppet dictator to rule the world by thought control! And you actually fed this mush into the Tank on the general address system?”
“I did.” Philp smiled his dazzling smile.
“You told our clients they were in imminent danger of losing their lives?”
“That’s what I told them,” Philp said comfortably. “They didn’t believe me, of course. Bill Uvarov was on the current affairs query panel at the time and according to him it lit up like a Christmas tree in less than a second. I apologised to everyone and told them part of a spoof television show had been fed in by mistake. They took it all right—but I’ll be getting sarcastic comments for the next year.”
Urquhart set the programme down. “And the only one who was taken in was Colonel Crowley.”
“Well, in bionics and biology we use the term ’cocktail party effect’ to describe the brain’s ability to pick out a single voice from the hubbub of noise made by a large group all speaking at once—and Crowley hadn’t lost that facility. He was screening out all other communications, but when I tailored a fantasy especially for him he heard me immediately.
“All I had to do was concoct a dream which was even more attractive and stimulating for him than the one in which he was living. With his background and mental make-up he couldn’t resist the idea of saving the world from interstellar socialism.”
“And you’ll be able to hold him on station until after Losane’s general election?”
“Yes—now that we know what to expect. Dorman’s team has set up an inhibitory field which will stabilise the Colonel’s molecular amplifiers at a mean output and impair his ability to drift. He’ll get away eventually, but we’re fine for a year or so …”
Urquhart sighed contentedly and returned his gaze to the hill. “So we’ve nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not too sure about that—I think we’re going to have trouble with Browne. He now says Crowley’s fantasy world wasn’t such a bad place and battling his way out of it was the first taste of genuine involvement he’d had since he was Tanked. I heard him rambling on about deliberately staged contests of will to relieve the boredom. Computerised Olympics or something.”
“Nothing too alarming in that. In fact, he might have something.”
“There’s just one other thing,” Philp said, his eyes hidden behind blazing flakes of glass. “There are bound to be other elections in Losane, and—if I know Mason Crowley—when he eventually takes off into never-never land he’ll be saving the Earth from disaster every week, now that we’ve given him the idea.”
“So?”
“So how do we lure him back next time?”
The Happiest Day of Your Life
Jean Bannion held her youngest son close to her, and blinked to ease the sudden stinging in her eyes.
The eight-year-old nestled submissively into her shoulder. His forehead felt dry and cool, and his hair was filled with the smell of fresh air, reminding her of washing newly brought in from an outdoor line. She felt her lips begin to tremble.
“Look at her”, Doug Bannion said incredulously. “Beginning to sniff! What’d she be like if Philip was going to be away at school for years?” Looking over her as she knelt with the boy in her arms, he patted his wife on the head, looking professorial and amused. The two older boys smiled appreciatively.