Bard Lane took long seconds to organize his thinking. He said, “General, let me be presumptuous enough to summarize recent history of interplanetary travel. Ever since initial work on the old chemical propulsion V-two at White Sands over twenty-five years ago, it has been a history of failure. Those failures can be divided into three categories. One — technical deficiencies in staff and the ships. Two — espionage and sabotage. Three — weaknesses in the human factor.
“Project Tempo, General, has its own answer to each category of failure. Placing full authority in the civilian technical staff is the answer to category one. Secret location and careful loyalty screening is the answer to two. Dr. Inly and her staff are the answer to three. I am still in command, as you say. I will take Major Leeber under three conditions. One — he will not discuss technical problems or theory with any member of the staff. Two — he will wear civilian clothes and conform to all rules. Three — he will submit to class A security clearance, and to an extended stability test given all new employees.”
Leeber flushed and stared at the ceiling.
Sachson said, “Dr. Lane, do you feel you are in any position to set up those restrictions?”
Bard knew that this was the focal point of the entire meeting. If he backed down Leeber would soon acquire his own staff, a nucleus of a military headquarters, and inch by inch General Sachson would take over control. If he did not back down, Sachson might do as he threatened. Yet such a resignation would not look well on the general’s record.
“I will not accept Major Leeber on any other basis,” Dr. Lane said.
Sachson stared at him for a full ten seconds. He sighed. “I see no reason not to meet you halfway, Doctor. I do resent the implication that any member of my personal staff might be a poor security risk.”
“General, I can remember the case of Captain Sangerson,” Bard reminded him gently.
Sachson appeared not to have heard. He looked at Leeber. “Get the prisoner, Major,” he said.
Leeber opened the conference room door and spoke softly to the guard. Bill Kornal was brought in immediately.
Sharan Inly gasped and hurried to his side, examined the purple swelling under Kornal’s left eye. She turned toward the General, her brown eyes suddenly brittle. “This man is a patient, not a prisoner, General. Why has he been struck?”
Kornal grinned miserably. “Don’t make an issue of it, Dr. Inly. I don’t blame the guy who clobbered me.”
“Strike that off the record, Sergeant,” Sachson said. “Take that chair, Kornal. You are — or were — a technician.”
“More than a technician,” Bard Lane said quickly. “Kornal is a competent physicist with over five years at Brookhaven.”
“I’ll accept that,” Sachson said. His eyes were cool. “But it shouldn’t be necessary to keep reminding you, Dr. Lane, that I wish answers from the person addressed.” He turned his attention back to Kornal. “You smashed delicate equipment. Do you know the penalties for willful destruction of government property?”
“That isn’t important,” Kornal said bleakly.
General Sachson smiled. “I consider that to be a very peculiar statement. Possibly you can explain it to me.”
“General,” Kornal said, “the Beatty One means more to me than I could explain to you. I’ve never worked harder for anything in my life. And I was never happier. I don’t care if the punishment is boiling in oil.”
“You have a strange way of expressing your great regard for Project Tempo. Maybe you can tell us why you destroyed government property.”
“I don’t know.”
“Possibly you don’t want to tell us who employed you to smash the panels?” Sachson said in a silky voice.
“All I can do is tell you the way I told Bar — Dr. Lane, General. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I put my clothes on and went out for some air and a smoke. I was standing outside when all of a sudden the cigarette fell out of my hand. Like somebody took over my hand and opened the fingers. Like I was being pushed back into a little corner of my mind, where I could look out, but I couldn’t do anything.”
“Hypnotized, I suppose,” Sachson said acidly.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t like when they give you that hypnotic drug. My own mind wasn’t fogged up. Just shoved back into a corner. That’s the only way I can describe it.”
“So there you were with your mind in a corner. Continue, please.”
“I went over to where the carpenters had been putting up a new bunkhouse. The plumbers had left some lengths of pipe around. I picked up a short length and shoved it inside my belt. Then I went over to the lab and walked up to the two guards. They knew me. All this time you’ve got to understand, my body was doing things without my mind telling it to. And I had the funny feeling, sort of on the edge of my mind, that it wasn’t right to be building the Beatty One. It was nasty, somehow. Dirty. And all my friends, all the people sleeping in the area, they were enemies and not... very bright. You know what I mean?”
Sachson stared at him. “I think that needs a little more explanation.”
Kornal scratched his head. “Look. Suppose you went into an African village at night, General. They were all asleep. You would feel a lot smarter and superior to those savages, General, and yet you might be a little afraid of them waking up and ganging up on you. It was like that. I pulled out the pipe and hit the two guards, backhand and forehand. They dropped and I broke the door down. I went in, and it was like I’d never been there before. The equipment, the panels and all, they weren’t familiar to me. They were dirty, like the Beatty One, and I had to smash them. I had ten minutes in there before they got me. As soon as they grabbed me, I was myself again. I did a good job in there. Adamson cried when he saw it. Cried like a baby. The thing that took over my mind and body... it was a kind of devil, I guess.”
Bard intercepted Sharan’s quick, startled look.
“The devils had you, eh?” Sachson said, his eyebrows arching up toward his hairline in mock astonishment.
“Something had me. Something walked in and took over. There wasn’t a single damn thing I could do about it, either. After I was myself again, I tried to kill myself. But I couldn’t do it.”
Sachson turned to Colonel Powys. “What’s S.O.P., on such cases, Roger.”
Powys had a rusty, rumbling voice. “We can’t bring it to trial, General, if the suspect knows too much about any top secret project still under process of completion. When that man tried to blow up the Gettysburg Three he had almost the same story this man has. The head doctors thought up a name for it, and we stowed him away in the nut house until the Gettysburg Three took off. Of course she turned unstable at five hundred miles up and crashed off Hawaii—”
“I didn’t ask for a history of the Mars flights, Colonel. What happened to McBride?”
“Well, sir, when Gettysburg Three was done for, the head doctors said McBride had recovered and so we brought him to trial. Because he was an enlisted man, we were able to give him five years at hard labor, but as I see it, this Kornal doesn’t come under us.”
Sachson gave Powys a frigid glare. “Thank you, Colonel. Brief and to the point, as usual.”
Bard spoke to Kornal. “Bill, I think you’d better come back on the project. Want to try it?”
“Want to?” He held out his clever hands. “God, how I’d work! Adamson says four months lost. I could cut that down to less than three.”