Mark nodded, knowing that Omega could see him even though he couldn’t see Omega.
“At that time,” Omega went on, “I found it necessary to throw my own hypnosis wave against you in order to start you resisting me. That gave you the stimulus which enabled you to get the feel of handling your own wave. Now the point is, having developed your telekinesis center how shall we stimulate it?”
Mark was stumped.
Years ago, before his blood had become the self-rejuvenating fluid he now possessed it had been necessary for him to sleep. And he remembered that he used to dream. One of his most frequent dreams had been of flying. Sometimes he had done this by flapping his arms, as if they were wings. But more often he had just held his arms at his sides and wished — wished most mightily — that he were moving through the air. And he had moved.
He told Omega about it.
“That’s no good,” claimed Omega. “A race memory, nothing more. You humans were once flying reptiles, and you still wish you had wings.”
OMEGA was silent for a few minutes after that. And being invisible, he seemed to have left entirely. Mark was on the point of calling to him when he felt himself rise a few inches from the floor. His arms churned for a moment as he felt himself tipping sideways. It didn’t do any good; he still tipped. He buckled his knees, trying to reach the floor with his feet, but they stayed up.
He was about to relax and lean against the force which was keeping him in a slanting position, when abruptly it tipped him over in another position.
“No, you don’t!” came the voice in his ear. “Come on, use your brain. You’re standing on a tilting floor and I won’t let you off it until you manage to rise of your own accord. I won’t let you fall, but I won’t let you stand straight either.”
The tilting position was doing something to Mark’s sense of balance. Omega wouldn’t keep him tilted in one direction long enough for him to get accustomed to it, and his stomach didn’t like it a bit. Only the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything for over twelve years kept it from turning over entirely. But that didn’t prevent him from feeling quite dizzy and nauseated. He fought the sensation and tried to do something about it.
The effort was futile until he happened to think of his dreams. Then he tried placing his hands at his sides and wishing he could fly. That didn’t work either. He stayed on the invisible, tipped platform.
Experimentally he closed his eyes and tried to capture the feeling he had experienced in his dreams. Wishing alone wouldn’t do the trick, he realized. He remembered back to the days when he had dreamed those dreams. It had been during his life in the twentieth century. He hadn’t slept once since that six-thousand-year nap.
Hazily, eyes still closed, he pictured those dreams: Always he had sensed a certain liquid quality in the surrounding atmosphere. Then he remembered clearly had that property of fluidity been a latent realization of the presence of those sub-cosmic vibrations which abound in all space. Was it some race memory of a time when his ancestors had been able to utilize those waves? He didn’t know, but tried mightily to recapture the sensation.
Possibly it was because his eyes were closed; possibly because Omega knew of his struggle and was helping, but in a few minutes he became aware of the liquid quality he sought.
Immediately he imagined himself rising, and then suddenly his eyes were jarred open by a resounding thump on his head. He had hit the ceiling! That little incident unnerved him to the extent that he lost all thought of his control of the levitation principle, and he crashed to the floor in a loose heap of arms and legs and angry curses.
The chuckle that came from the air near his left ear was hearty and appreciative. “Nice doing, son,” Omega congratulated. “But you have to keep your mind on your work. Try it again, this time with your eyes open. You can feel the waves which surround you now. It’ll be easy.”
Mark scrambled to his feet, somewhat groggily. Omega was right. He could feel the waves.
Even with his eyes open and fully awake, he sensed that he was immersed in an all-pervading bath of cosmic emanations. That was the secret of the thing; the consciousness of those waves. Once you could feel them you could use them. Before he had been like a blind man, knowing that there was light but unable to see it.
Omega had made him able to see.
CAUTIOUSLY he willed to rise from the floor. Slowly but steadily the ceiling came nearer. Then he thought of stopping his ascent and moving horizontally. His body obeyed his will and approached the far wall. He stopped abruptly and descended to the floor, looking wildly around for Omega before he remembered that he was still disembodied.
“But I have no consciousness of directing these waves!” he said, excitedly. “I just thought of rising and the waves lifted me!”
“Sure, sure,” said the voice, patiently. “When you want to wiggle your fingers, your brain doesn’t consciously direct each action of all the muscles involved. You just think of it and they wiggle. A baby has to learn, of course, but after a few tries the muscles obey from force of habit. Trial and error in the beginning; later, habit.
“There is never any stage where the brain is completely conscious of all the movements of the muscles. When you move your wrist, for instance, a muscle in your forearm does the work, yet your brain isn’t aware of it. When, you take a breath you are really expanding your ribs by an action of the muscles between them. You don’t suck the air in; the enlarged chest cavity creates a partial vacuum and the air rushes in because the pressure is greater outside.
“It’s the same with telekinesis. With your consciousness of the waves comes the automatic ability to manipulate them. Later, of course, you may learn to sense some of the peculiar properties of those waves and make them do some of the things I can make them do. That, however, will take a lot of practice and you’ll have to do it yourself. I refuse to help you any more!”
While Omega talked Mark exultantly wafted himself about through the air in his cell. He moved erratically, first with extreme caution, then with increasing confidence. In a minute or two he was darting from wall to wall and making abrupt turns at high speed. A bat could have done no better.
“What did my dreams have to do with it?” he finally asked.
“That’s got me stumped,” Omega confessed. “Fifty thousand years ago I left my body and started to roam around the universe. At that time the continent of Atlantis was going through the throes which resulted in its submergence to the bottom of the Atlantic. I never did get a chance to observe its peoples. Some of them escaped by reason of the fact that they were traveling in far lands at the time. They became your ancestors, no doubt.
“Maybe they had the power of telekinesis, later losing it from intermarriage with more primitive peoples and descending once again to savagery. That would account for your race memory of soaring. It’s hard to say, though. Human history is so confusing. Nothing like my own people, who developed constantly as the Moon aged, from primitive organisms to highly intelligent beings. You humans have gone up and then down again so many times that it’s hard to tell what may have happened.”
Mark described a few more revolutions about the room, too busy to make a remark. But he quickly remembered Omega when he felt himself pressed downward until he was prone on the floor, pressing against the rough cement.
“Upstart!” grated the voice in his ear. “Don’t get too cocky about all this. I’m still Jupiter around here.”
“Okay, Jupe,” gasped Mark. “You don’t have to prove it. Ease up.”
The pressure vanished and Mark bounded to his feet.
He waited for a minute and when no comment was forthcoming, he cautiously called Omega’s name. No answer; Omega had gone about his mysterious business. Mark shook his head in bafflement. Omega liked to linger and talk but sometimes he seemed to be in a burning rush. And this was evidently one of those times. Though why Omega should be in a hurry, with all eternity before him, Mark couldn’t imagine...
Chapter 7: He Floats through the A
ir
MARK idly inspected the bars of his cell. He tried to make some sense out of the various things he had learned in the short time since he had dropped in on the city of Detroit. The people, it seemed, were wholly entranced with Vargo. They not only failed to resent the fact that he had increased their working hours, but they seemed heartily to concur in the idea.
Mark scowled. Man has never been a being to like work for the sake of work. A man will labor like a beaver to better himself, but according to Dodd, these people were so absorbed in their labor that they took interest in little else. And that was certainly peculiar. It all gave Mark a definite impression that all was not jake in the metropolis of Detroit.
As long as the people were happy, though, Mark saw no particular reason to interfere. But how long would they stay that way?
Dodd had said that all this rush of industry was for the purpose of preparing for war. And war, even though it was a frequent pastime of humans, wasn’t exactly a normal condition. When the war was over, what would these people do? Prepare for another war? Each of them was happy only when engaged in working at his particular trade, Mark had gathered. And most of the trades were connected with the manufacture of war supplies. It appeared that they either had to engage in war activities, or be unhappy. Curiouser and curiouser.
There was something fishy about the whole thing. Men were essentially individuals. Mark doubted if any amount of propaganda would ever change that. And they certainly weren’t acting as individuals when they were willing to wait on a sidewalk for interminable periods while a stream of trucks sped past and offered them no chance to cross.
People hadn’t acted that way in his day. A twentieth-century pedestrian would fret on a corner waiting for a green light, and then complain bitterly that nobody was given a fair chance because the light changed to red again before anyone got further than the middle of the street. And ten minutes later in his own car, he would fume at the slow-moving pedestrians who took too long to get across a street.
Mark knew, or thought he did, that men couldn’t help being self-centered. Man invariably considered his own interests first and those of the tribe second. The interests of the tribe were considered first only when they coincided with the interests of the individual. That had been the keynote of all the speeches of statesmen and politicians, whether they were running for office or advocating a policy of statecraft. Before the people would cooperate on a matter of policy they had to be convinced that the policy was to their individual benefit. If they were being incited to war, you had to get them all wrought up about it as individuals before you could get much co-operation from them. Either by arousing their personal indignations or by scaring the pants off them.
Omega had once said sarcastically that man was always in a fever to give others the benefit of his own superior well-being. But that had, of course, been only sarcasm. For wars had always been fought because somebody thought he saw a chance of getting something.
Yet this projected war seemed to be different. The young soldier he had spoken to hadn’t mentioned a thing about personal glory or gain. He had said something about lifting the world from savagery, and the glory of his generation. Nothing personal; an ant might have said the same thing. But men weren’t ants. Rats, sometimes, or worms — but not ants.
Vargo seemed to be the seat of the trouble, but Mark didn’t intend to be hauled before the king as a prisoner. Not when there were other ways. His inspection of the cell door had revealed the fact that he wasn’t a prisoner at all. It was locked, of course, but it just wasn’t sufficiently strong to hold him if he didn’t want to be held. And Mark had decided that he didn’t want to be.
THE door was a lattice-work affair, and it wouldn’t be practical to try to make an opening large enough to pass his body through. That would necessitate ripping the thing to pieces, a feat which might have been beyond even his great strength.
Nor could he see the arrangement of the tumblers, and operate them by telekinesis. But there was a much simpler system, in the case of this particular door. The latch was of the sliding variety and although he couldn’t slide it free of its socket, he could do the next best thing. He grasped the center bar in both hands, placed a foot on each side of the door, and pulled. His muscles writhed beneath his bronzed skin and bunched themselves in knots.
The door slowly bent in the middle. As it did, the latch slid out of its socket. In a few seconds he was free. Mark had always been athletic and strong, but he never could have done that in the old days, before he’d taken Omega’s mental course in muscle-building.
He stepped swiftly down the corridor, looking in all the cells until he came to the elderly Dodd. The old man was seated on a bench, sobbing softly, his face buried in his hands.
“Take it easy, pop,” Mark advised. “All is not as bad as it seems.”
Dodd looked up incredulously, blinking his eyes. “Are you a man or a god?” he gasped.
“Man, mostly,” chuckled Mark, applying himself to Dodd’s cell door. “Me, Tarzan,” he grunted and thumped himself on the chest. Dodd obviously thought he was crazy. “Sic transit Weissmuller,” Mark murmured and got back to work on the door.
The old man, muttered to himself as he saw the door bend gradually outward until it no longer was locked. Mark didn’t hear the words but he gathered that Dodd had already deified him. He found that apotheosis no longer embarrassed him. The Norse had done it too when they had seen his extra-human abilities. If he explained to people about Omega, and about his radio-active blood and its properties, nobody would understand, and he’d find himself deified anyway. And it made little difference, anyhow.
Men either worshiped him or fought him, for one reason or another.
“Do you have any place to go where you’ll be safe?” he asked the old man. “Somewhere that you can hide for a few days?”
Dodd looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, then nodded. Mark led him down the corridor to the door through which they had entered.
“The driveway is only a few feet from the sidewalk,” Mark reminded him. “Just walk out naturally and nobody will notice you. Don’t run or attract any attention. Good luck.”
Mark waited until the old man was safely away and then strode down the corridor to the door at the other end. For an instant he hesitated; then, just to reassure himself, he levitated to the ceiling and down again to the floor. Satisfied, he flung the door open to confront four guards, only just more surprised than he. He really hadn’t expected to see anyone behind that door, for he had heard no voices through it. “Soundproof, huh?” Mark said.
Surprised as they must have been, the guards’ actions were automatic. With scarcely any hesitation they all drew their pistols.
“Put those things down!” yelled Mark. “They’ll bite you!”
Their gun butts began to wiggle in their hands. They gawped in amazement, did a spontaneous quartet in high B-flat, and hurled their weapons down. “Jeeps, snakes!” said one.
Mark wondered idly if a bite from one of the four vipers that the men were convinced they saw, could harm them to any extent. He concluded that it probably would, for hypnotic suggestion is a powerful agent.
Next time he’d use something else. Fuzzy caterpillars would be nice.
“BUNCH of snake-charmers, eh? Very nice,” he remarked. “Where can I find Vargo? I’m tired of waiting.”
One of the guards pointed shakily through a window, before he remembered that Mark was supposed to be a prisoner and that the drinks were definitely not on the house.
Glancing through the window, Mark saw, across a greenly wooded square, portions of what seemed to be a very ornate and pretentious mansion. Vargo’s palace, without a doubt.
He turned to the guards, who were recovering from their awe at the peculiar activities of their guns, and fixed them with eyes gleaming faintly with amusement.
“When was I to be taken before Vargo?”
Eyes a-popping, one of the men managed to stammer something intelligible.
“Tomorrow morning, when he stands trial over those who would hamper the progress of our great city.”
“What is he doing now?”
“He confers with the ancestors at this hour, in his palace.”
“Those are the lads I want to have a look at.”
Mark left by way of the front entrance and crossed the street toward the iron fence which enclosed the palace grounds. The four guards would awaken in a few minutes utterly devoid of any memory of either Mark or Dodd. Happily, they would also forget about their guns.
“No sense climbing,” Mark said and called on his newly-gained talent. Somewhat awkwardly, he floated over the iron fence. Then with more assurance, he soared rapidly toward the palace. This, he reflected, was much better than walking, and decidedly more impressive. At the moment it was the latter that counted. Vargo must be impressed. Mark didn’t enjoy being arrested every time he turned around; made a prisoner at every turn, and he certainly didn’t intend to waste time by going through the normal but probably complicated procedure to obtain audience with the king.
At the outer door stood two guards, each with a long rifle in addition to his side arms. At the sight of Mark, speeding toward them with his feet elevated a full foot from the ground, each leveled his rifle and fired. It came so suddenly that Mark was almost caught off guard.
He had expected anyone who saw him to be so astounded at his spectacular form of locomotion that he would be momentarily paralyzed. But not these two.
They acted quite as quickly, and with as few signs of awe, as if he had come up on roller skates. He had barely time to act before the rifles rang out sharply, and the singing bullets whined just beneath his feet. Mark had moved upward.
The Best of Argosy #7 - Minions of Mercury Page 5
