Megalomania

by Ian Wallace

  Kolly downstared, thoroughly humbled, defeated, contrite, speechless.

  “It appears to me,” and now the voice had gone remorseless, “that you are thoroughly humbled, defeated, contrite, speechless. The last two conditions are appropriate, but the first two are not. You are an Astrofleet captain, Kolly Kedrin; it is inappropriate for you to be either humbled or defeated. Your comments?”

  Up came Kolly’s chin. “Mr. Chairman, I could deactivate the voder and the cabin-videoscan modules of the ship’s computer. And I think that you could not stop me. Should I do so, I would no longer be humble or contrite, and you would be speechless and defeated.”

  “Very good, Captain. Are you going to try?”

  “That depends on your attitude toward Minister Trigg.”

  “Toward Dino? It is an ambivalent attitude, Kolly. On the one hand, I cannot countenance either his hostility to his galaxy or the extravagance of this vendetta. On the other hand, apart from his vendetta, I love and admire him, and I am convinced that his outrageous change of attitude results from some weird mental trauma. Now you know my attitude. Will you now defeat and despeech me?” Silence. Kolly was agonized; Kolly was pacing. Warned the Croyd-haunted computer: “If you plan to continue your career in Astrofleet, then Astrofleet now requires decisiveness. If instead you plan to continue in the service of Dino Trigg, scrapping your Astrofleet career, then the cause of Trigg now requires decisiveness. Kolly—sixty seconds.”

  Physically motionless Kedrin was mentally far-darting.

  “Thirty seconds,” asserted the voder.

  Kolly swung to stare at the bridge-eye of the computer’s cabin videoscan. “Request added time to discuss the consequent handling of Doctor Trigg.”

  “Request denied. Twelve seconds.”

  Outswung arms, upturned hand-palms: “I opt for Astrofleet, but I request judgmental fairness for Trigg.”

  Silence.

  The computer said: “I applaud both your decision and your request, and so will Astrofleet. Kolly, confess that you’ve been had—and not by us.”

  Frowning down, Captain Kedrin enunciated with difficulty: “I have been had.”

  “Make a point of not being had again in that sense, Kolly; but I think you may have to let yourself be had again in another sense. It is crucial that we learn how far Dino will go with this before his conscience intervenes. It will serve all of us best if you will, until further notice, respond affirmatively to Dino’s leadership and even to his domination no matter how shameful. Can you swing that, Captain?”

  “No matter how shameful, Mr. Chairman?”

  But a chime diverted Kolly’s attention to one of the external visiphones. “Kedrin here,” she responded, voice-activating a connection. Dino’s face appeared on the screen, and Dino remarked: “I don’t see anybody else on the bridge. Are we private, Kolly?”

  “No body else is here,” she truthfully told him; “you may speak freely.”

  Presently she knew that compliance with Dino’s caprice was about to become shameful indeed. And she thanked any interested gods that she had the nerve and objectivity to see it through—and perhaps, with luck, even to enjoy it.

  Croyd’s control of the ship, whose computer he now inhabited, was fragmentary, beyond the voder and the audiovideo systems. It is one thing to command a computer objectively, making appropriate use of its responses: it is quite another thing to be the mind of a mighty computer, deploying it like a brain with a peripheral nervous system by intuitive empathy in order to make things happen just right throughout the body of a majestic and multipotentiary spacetime-ship and out among her satellite roboats. Even after many days of mental work in here, Croyd was still mind-performing much like a human infant finding its way around in its crib and among its toys; one difference was, that Croyd was bringing to the difficult project his intellectual-objective knowledge of what now he was teaching himself how to control subjectively.

  He could not yet fly the ship from inside her, or interfere with any physical mechanisms that Dino would be deploying, in the humanly-cosmically fearsome and loathsome business that Croyd was beginning to understand, without comprehending how Dino of all people could enter enthusiastically into such business.

  But beyond gaining control of audiovideo and voder, he had made it a crash priority to master Sterbenräuber‘s i-ray deployment—which gave her three external advantages: intimate and undetectable espionage, quasi-immediate mind-to-mind contact at a distance, and virtually instantaneous communication over astronomical distances.

  [Readers eager to skip technicalities and get-on with the story are invited to omit the next two pages and pick-up events at that point…]

  Croyd had theorized the i-ray possibility and had invented its techniques. His approach had begun by hypothetically denying what he called the receptive or passive theory of vision, which had been the dominant category of visual theory during at least nine centuries of evolving optical science, and which held that light-rays or photons reflected off illuminated objects enter the eye to create (with brain aid) visual experiences. In place of the receptive theory, he had tentatively substituted an active-agent theory of vision: that light impinging on a retina stimulates the retina (again with brain aid) to emanate i-rays, analogous to radar rays, which, on contacting an illuminated object, return almost instantaneous visual information to the source-retina.

  Croyd had applied, to the two competing theories, the full Occam’s Razor criterion: when two or more theories concerning phenomena account equally well for those phenomena, embrace the simplest theory.

  Well: certainly the receptive theory was the simpler here, in that it required only one class of rays: those which were emanated from a star or another incandescent light-source, were bounced off the visual object (or rather, were partially absorbed by the object and then were emanated with altered frequency), and which thereafter found an eye.

  On the other hand, this receptive theory did not happily explain certain visual phenomena not apparent to John Citizen. For example, you looked (with telescope or with naked eye) at a distant star; you saw, not merely a small fraction of the star, but the entire star (or one hemisphere, anyhow); yet, with emanations from separate points on the star-hemisphere diverging from each other as the square of the distance, only a tiny area of star-surface was what you should have seen. Croyd remembered a whimsy by post-medieval astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had satirically fantasied that among the diverging star-photons, one happened to hit an eye and cried out (approximately): “Hey, boys, here’s an eye—let’s all crowd in!”

  Croyd had noticed that his active-agent i-ray hypothesis, while more complex, offered solutions to all visual problems solved by the simpler receptive theory, and also solved some others including Eddington’s. If a stimulated retina should send out rays (refracted through the eye’s lens) to the visual object, and then should bring back information (refracted through the eye’s lens) to the originating retina, every phenomenal problem would be dissolved. Not only that, but the i-ray transit might be hypothesized as all-but-instantaneous; whereas the maximum speed of rekamatic propagation was 300,000 kilometers per second, which meant that under the receptive theory, all our visual information about a star or galaxy was outdated by at least four years ranging upward to billions of years.

  So Croyd had tried it. And it had worked. This fact proved nothing one way or another about visual theory (or, as a necessary relatum, about camera-film theory), but certainly it was suggestive.

  [End technicalities; back to the action…]

  The important point here and now’ for Croyd’s mind-espionage upon Dino was, that the Sterbenräuber carried i-ray equipment.

  As the mind of the ship which was orbiting Hudibras, Croyd now deployed his i-ray ground-reconnaissance capability to pick out the Zauberger castle and then, on the veranda, Dino who was promenading with his two birdy creatures. Upon him, Croyd zeroed in subjectively and intimately.

  12. Darkside’s Flip-Flop

&
nbsp; After the Zaubergers had retired, Dino with heart joy-bursting mounted to his high place and gave rein to solitary exaltation. Safely invisible on the balcony of his private apartment in the tower, he stiffened his back and the rearwards of his thighs as he leaned on the rail with his moon-illumined hair back-blown by the wind that angered the night-sea far below. He rigidified his wide mouth and forced the corners bent-bow downward, but the deep-carved tension lines around his mouth-comers were so shaped as to reveal that he was hard-suppressing glee; his chest was tormented by the heavy breathing that flared his nostrils, a breathing required by the oxygen demands of his charging metabolism.

  Why? Because…

  As surely as the consequent of a validly premised-and-operated syllogism, the galactic system created by Croyd was destroyed—already! That was to say: Dino Trigg had constructed the mechanism for the specific and accurately aimed chain reaction, had arranged the ingredients, and—using the incomparable Zauberger musicianship, playing on Frey’s expertise as Frey played on the ultrasynthesizer—Dino was about to pull the trigger.

  And was it not just another instance of Dino—inspiration brought to fruition under pluperfect Trigg-control?

  In his hyper-euphoria, Dino was ready to walk on his hands atop the wrought-collodion railing of his turret-balcony. He had set up a physical certainty; and in the logic of spacetime, wherein pasts and futures are relative, any eventuality that is absolutely certain has already happened. “Done! all but done! he caroled, loudly so that he could hear the enchantment of his own lyric tenor above the thunder of the far-below surf; even so, he had to listen in his head to hear his own voice because the gusting wind, which had finally kept him off the rail of his desire, blew away his voice before it could reach his ears. Nevertheless, his impromptu chant continued, grew louder, began to be accompanied (on the scant four square meters of this balcony) by the sort of Tellenic dance which begins more slowly than a pavane but gains in velocity and exuberance until it culminates in frenzy…

  .…But before the solitary Dino-dancing reached that height of final fever, it slowed—as he became aware that another occupied this balcony.

  Stopping rigid, he turned to stare at—his other self, who sat cockily perched on that same slender rail with his feet resting on filigree and his hands folded between his wide-apart knees; who rocked back and forth irregularly, leaning back over ocean against a wind gust, straightening when it died.

  His Darkside double said in Dino’s mind: Goodness gracious, friend Dino, I do believeIhave caught you on the verge of -waylaying Croyd and announcing your intentions!

  The notion of pre-announcing to Croyd was new to Dino, it had never occurred to him. Then if his doppelganger was merely his own projection, how…But wait: perhaps Dino had entertained the idea subliminally, and his hintermind was using the projection of the golden god to make the idea explicit to his conscious apperception. Only, his double had seemed to put it to Dino as an idea that might not be very good; whereas Dino was finding it delicious, not that it was out in front of him teetering there on the rail.

  Playfully Dino demanded: “Now Darkside, if I should so choose, which I don’t, why should 1 not pre-announce to Croyd? My galactic jet-spume is a sure thing, logically an already-done thing; the Zauberger music is already in my sluiceways. Now 1 think about it, 1 could even compel Croyd to be the one who would start it—and Croyd would then enjoy the hyper-agony of watching all of it inexorably maturating by action of his own hand!”

  But how in any universe could, you compel him? Darkside demanded. You’ve already blown your charisma for him; and don’t suggest projective hypnosis, because you blew that even with board members, whereas Croyd is non-allergic to that. No, Dino, I have a better idea—will you listen to all of it?

  “Express it, and I will judge whether it is better.” Keep Croyd ignorant of your activities until you actually get your jet aimed and started— “Profoundly I thank you; that is what 1 intended to do all the time.”

  You are fretfully prone to interrupt prematurely. That way lies chronic ignorance.

  “I take your point; forgive me. Do complete your expression of your better idea.”

  Will ao. Having got your jet actually started, moderate the acceleration that you had planned for it. Give it, say, two weeks to develop before it breaks into germinality and begins to envelop Sol Galaxy.

  “Advantage?”

  Having committed your jet to irresistible growth, notify Croyd—and enjoy his two weeks of frantic and unavailing efforts to stop it before it hits his galaxy.

  Dino considered the proposal, while Croyd-projected Pseudo-Darkside, smiling friendlily, continued rocking on the rail. “And how,” presently queried Dino, “do I notify Croyd?”

  Grinning broadly, Darkside spread hands. He will naturally be concentrating his attack on the hotspot tip of the jet. You simply climb aboard the jet and ride it up to him. Fancy his amazement when you step triumphantly out of it!

  Now Dino stared, incredulous, at his golden likeness who had just delivered himself of an utter non sequitur. Was his projected image truly such a mental nothing? or was his mental image mocking him? In either case…

  Abruptly Dino was soul-and-body fury-filled. “CLOWN!” he yelped; and striding to the rail, he swung on the gold-bearded jaw of Darkside, connecting explosively hard.

  Pseudo-Darkside went spinning out into sky—and the spin slowed as the pseudo-body smallened, and presently the spin stopped, leaving a tiny upright incandescent floating Darkside grinning at his client and vanishing.

  At the same instant, Dino awoke to the agony in his knuckles, and looked at them, and saw that they were bleeding, and awoke dismayingly to comprehension that this Darkside had to be objectively real!

  Soul-chilled Dino felt his energies oozing out of him; or perhaps his energies were contracting with the cold of his soul.

  But Dino had recognized during many years that his personality was cycloid, alternating prolonged manic phases with perilous depressions. His major acquired self-discipline was to channel his manias into constructive hypo-euphoric moods, and to explode his depressions into compensatory hyper-mania which would gradually subside into upbeat normality. Now, on the high balcony, he reached deep into himself for the dynamite.

  Successfully, it blew!

  Thoroughly steamed up, he went into leonine balcony-pacing—which several times apotheosized itself into an actual hand-walking of the thin rail while carnivorous waves fifty meters below him slammed themselves white-foaming on rocks in feeding frenzy which upside-down he watched in crashing empathy: Back to Hell with you, Darkside or Lucifer or whoever you are! I am a big shit, you are only a little shit! Your intricate Croyd-ploy was tempting indeed; it was precisely that, temptation, and extremely dangerous, it could have ruined everything, indeed the proposal to enter my created jet-spume and fly outward was sheer insanity, I mean yesIam sure that I could do it butIwould not try, my own plan is most definitive, I do not propose to complicate it with aesthetic diversions,Iwill hew to the main line…

  Let’s get it going!

  Howling “YO! YO! YO!” in wild climax, he rushed into his tower apartment, raised the Sterbenräuber and Flaherty on ivisiradio, issued orders to Kolly and to Flaherty, then ran downstairs and through corridors to the master bedroom on whose door he pounded. When Frey sleepily opened, Dino yelled at him: “Now hear this! Roll out tomorrow morning at five—at FIVE, dja heah me? We lift off aboard Flaherty at seven for the Sterbenräuber, we’ll bring along your musical flakes, we’ll invade a kind of space that you never dreamed of, you’ll be listening while 1 broadcast into that wonderful space all your masterly performances—and you can watch the results in space! THIS IS IT, Frey Zauberger—the culmination of all you’ve been working toward: ultimate celestial creativity! And when all that is done, up and out we’ll fly for holiday among stars!”

  Dino crashed the door shut in Frey’s paralyzed face, backran corridors and stairs, reentered his tower suite, set b
eside his bed an unopened bottle of dirado for now and some restorative pills for tomorrow, tore off his clothes, leaped naked into bed, opened the bottle, drank off the dirado, set down the bottle, passed out with the lights on.

  13. Great Communication

  Via ivisiradio, almost instantaneously across 200,000 light-years: “Tannen—”

  “Cheers, Croyd. Where are you, there?”

  “Inside the ship’s computer, here. I’m dying to know what sort of image of me you’re getting.” “A wire-worm tangle, of course. How’s your control, in there?”

  “Well, I can do this. And—were you watching my fiasco with Dino, when I played Darkside?”

  “I thought it was a nice piece of work, my friend. Particularly that final system of illusions: hard physical jaw-impact, bogus Darkside-body receding into space, outside blood and inside pain on and in the Trigg-knuckles—”

  “I thought I blew it.”

  “How?”

  “I was being too damn subtle. 1 knew he wouldn’t accept straightforward negative advice from Darkside—it would be too much of a flip-flop to be credible. So I tried the device of recommending that his vendetta be carried to a point of ultimate absurdity: actually riding the jet that he planned to create. Result: I got punched, and now I’ve lost him.”

  “You planted a seed, it may yet germinate. Stay with it.”

  124

  “But will the seed fly—you should excuse that mix?”

  “Not a mix; there are seeds that fly. But—yes, that is uncertain indeed, my friend: this I understand. So does most of our board. So do most of our ministers, including, thank God, Security. We are taking maximum physical precautions, inadequate as they may be. Astrofleet is deploying itself in three ranks across the Dorado longitudes—” “Between 0500 and 0600 hours?” Croyd was naming celestial coordinates, not a time interval.