Space On My Hands

by Fredric Brown

  And everything was wonderful except that he felt so tired he could not think straight, and Jane Gordon insisted on looking on him as a brother instead of a suitor, and he was probably going to lose his job. He would be the laughing stock of Callisto if the special investigator from headquarters found some simple explanation of things that he had overlooked …

  Jane Gordon, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her, met him at the door. She was smiling, but the smile changed to a look of concern as he stepped into light.

  “Rod!” she exclaimed. “You do look ill, really ill. What have you been doing to yourself besides forgetting to eat?”

  Rod Caquer managed to grin.

  “Chasing vicious circles up blind alleys, Icicle. May I use your visiphone?”

  “Of course. I’ve some food ready for you; I’ll put it on the table while you’re calling. Dad’s taking a nap. He said to wake him when you got here, but I’ll hold off until you’re fed.”

  She hurried out to the kitchen. Caquer almost fell into the chair before the visiscreen, and called the police station. The red, beefy face of Borgesen, the night lieutenant, flashed into view.

  “Hi, Borg,” said Caquer. “Listen, about those seven screwballs you picked up. Have you —”

  “Nine,” Borgesen interrupted. “We got the other two, and I wish we hadn’t. We’re going nuts down here.”

  “You mean the other two tried it again?”

  “No. Suffering Asteroids, they came in and gave themselves up, and we can’t kick them out, because there’s a charge against them. But they’re confessing all over the place. And do you know what they’re confessing?”

  ‘I’ll bite,” said Caquer.

  “That you hired them, and offered one hundred credits apiece to them.”

  “Huh?”

  Borgesen laughed, a little wildly. “The two that came in voluntarily said that, and the other seven — Mars, why did I ever become a policeman? I had a chance to study for fireman on a spacer once, and I end up doing this.”

  “Look — maybe I better come around and see if they make that accusation to my face.”

  “They probably would, but it doesn’t mean anything, Rod. They say you hired them this afternoon, and you were at Deem’s with Brager all afternoon. Rod, this moon is going nuts. And so am I. Walther Johnson has disappeared. Hasn’t been seen since this morning.”

  “What? The Regent’s confidential secretary? You’re kidding me, Borg.”

  “Wish I was. You ought to be glad you’re off duty. Maxon’s been raising seven brands of thunder for us to find his secretary for him. He doesn’t like the Deem business, either. Seems to blame us for it; thinks it’s bad enough for the department to let a man get killed once. Say, which was Deem, Rod? Got any idea?”

  Caquer grinned weakly.

  “Let’s call them Deem and Redeem till we find out,” he suggested. “I think they were both Deem.”

  “But how could one man be two?”

  “How could one man be killed five ways?” countered Caquer. “Tell me that and I’ll tell you the answer to yours.”

  “Nuts,” said Borgesen, and followed it with a masterpiece of understatement. “There’s something funny about that case.”

  Caquer was laughing so hard that there were tears in his eyes, when Jane Gordon came to tell him food was ready. She frowned at him, but there was concern behind the frown.

  Caquer followed her meekly, and discovered he was ravenous. When he’d put himself outside enough food for three ordinary meals, he felt almost human again. His headache was still there, but it was something that throbbed dimly in the distance.

  Frail Professor Gordon was waiting in the living room when they went there from the kitchen. “Rod, you look like something the cat dragged in,” he said. “Sit down before you fall down.”

  Caquer grinned. “Overeating did it. Jane’s a cook in a million.”

  He sank into a chair facing Gordon. Jane Gordon had sat on the arm of her father’s chair and Caquer’s eyes feasted on her. How could a girl with lips as soft and kiss-able as hers insist on regarding marriage only as an academic subject? How could a girl with —

  “I don’t see offhand how it could be a cause of his death, Rod, but Willem Deem rented out political books,” said Gordon. “There’s no harm in my telling that, since the poor chap is dead.”

  Almost the same words, Caquer remembered, that Perry Peters had used in telling him the same thing.

  Caquer nodded.

  “We’ve searched his shop and his apartment and haven’t found any, Professor,” he said. “You wouldn’t know, of course, what kind —”

  Professor Gordon smiled. “I’m afraid I would, Rod. Off the record — and I take it you haven’t a recorder on our conversation — I’ve read quite a few of them.”

  “You?” There was frank surprise in Caquer’s voice.

  “Never underestimate the curiosity of an educator, my boy. I fear the reading of Graydex books is a more prevalent vice among the instructors in universities than among any other class. Oh, I know it’s wrong to encourage the trade, but the reading of such books can’t possibly harm a balanced, judicious mind.”

  “And Father certainly has a balanced, judicious mind, Rod,” said Jane, a bit defiant. “Only — darn him — he wouldn’t let me read those books.”

  Caquer grinned at her. The professor’s use of the word “Graydex” had reassured him.

  Renting Graydex books was only a misdemeanor, after all.

  “Ever read any Graydex books, Rod?” the professor asked. Caquer shook his head.

  “Then you’ve probably never heard of hypnotism. Some of the circumstances in the Deem case — Well, I’ve wondered whether hypnotism might have been used.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t even know what it is, Professor.”

  The frail little man sighed.

  “That’s because you’ve never read illicit books, Rod,” said Gordon. “Hypnotism is the control of one mind by another, and it reached a pretty high state of development before it was outlawed. You’ve never heard of the Kaprelian Order or the Vargas Wheel?”

  Caquer shook his head.

  “The history of the subject is in Graydex books, in several of them,” said the professor. “The actual methods, and how a Vargas Wheel is constructed, would be Blackdex, high on the roster of lawlessness. Of course I haven’t read that, but I have read the history.

  “A man by the name of Mesmer, way back in the Eighteenth Century, was one of the first practitioners, if not the discoverer, of hypnotism. At any rate, he put it on a more or less scientific basis. By the Twentieth Century, quite a bit had been learned about it — and it became extensively used in medicine.

  “A hundred years later, doctors were treating almost as many patients through hypnotism as through drugs and surgery. True, there were cases of its misuse, but they were relatively few.

  “But another hundred years brought a big change. Mesmerism had developed too far for the public safety. Any criminal or selfish politician who had a smattering of the art could operate with impunity. He could fool all the people all the time, and get away with it.”

  “You mean he could really make people think anything he wanted them to?” Caquer asked.

  “Not only that, he could make them do anything he wanted. With the use of television one speaker could visibly and directly talk to millions of people.”

  “But couldn’t the government have regulated the art?”

  Professor Gordon smiled thinly. “How, when legislators were human, too, and as subject to hypnotism as the people under them? And then, to complicate things almost hopelessly, came the invention of the Vargas Wheel.

  “It had been known, back as far as the Nineteenth Century, that an arrangement of moving mirrors could throw anyone who watched it into a state of hypnotic submission. And thought transmission had been experimented with in the Twenty-first Century. It was in the following one that Vargas combined and perfected the two
into the Vargas Wheel. A sort of helmet affair, really, with a revolving wheel of especially constructed tricky mirrors on top of it.”

  “How did it work, Professor?” asked Caquer.

  “The wearer of a Vargas Wheel helmet had immediate and automatic control over anyone who saw him — directly, or in a television screen,” said Gordon. “The mirrors in the small turning wheel produced instantaneous hypnosis and the helmet — somehow — brought thoughts of its wearer to bear through the wheel and impressed upon his subjects any thoughts he wished to transmit.

  “In fact, the helmet itself — or the wheel — could be set to produce certain fixed illusions without the necessity of the operator speaking, or even concentrating, on those points. Or the control could be direct, from his mind.”

  “Ouch,” said Caquer. “A thing like that would — I can certainly see why instructions in making a Vargas Wheel would be Blackdexed. Suffering Asteroids! A man with one of these could —”

  “Could do almost anything. Including killing a man and making the manner of his death appear five different ways to five different observers.”

  Caquer whistled softly. “And including playing nine-man Morris with soapbox radicals — or they wouldn’t even have to be radicals, but just ordinary orthodox citizens.”

  “Nine men?” Jane Gordon explained. “What’s this about nine men, Rod? I hadn’t heard about it.”

  But Rod was already standing up.

  “Haven’t time to explain, Icicle,” he said. “Tell you tomorrow, but I must get down to — Wait a minute, Professor, is that all you know about the Vargas Wheel business?”

  “Absolutely all, my boy. It just occurred to me as a possibility. There were only five or six of them ever made, and finally the government got hold of them and destroyed them, one by one. It cost millions of lives to do it.

  “When they finally got everything cleaned up, colonization of the planets was starting, and an international council had been started with control over all governments. They decided that the whole field of hypnotism was too dangerous, and they made it a forbidden subject. It took quite a few centuries to wipe out all knowledge of it, but they succeeded. The proof is that you’d never heard of it.”

  “But how about the beneficial aspects of it?” Jane Gordon asked. “Were they lost?”

  “Of course,” said her father. “But the science of medicine had progressed so far by that time that it wasn’t too much of a loss. Today the medicos can cure, by physical treatment, anything that hypnotism could handle.”

  Caquer, who had halted at the door, now turned back.

  “Professor, do you think it possible that someone could have rented a Blackdex book from Deem, and learned all those secrets?” he inquired.

  Professor Gordon shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “Deem might have handled occasional Blackdex books, but he knew better than try to sell or rent any to me. So I wouldn’t have heard of it.”

  At the station, Lieutenant Caquer found Lieutenant Borgesen on the verge of apoplexy.

  He looked at Caquer.

  “You!” he said. And then, plaintively, “The world’s gone nuts. Listen, Brager discovered Willem Deem, didn’t he? At ten o’clock yesterday morning? And stayed there on guard while Skidder and you and the clearance men were there?”

  “Yes, why?” asked Caquer.

  Borgesen’s expression showed how much he was upset by developments.

  “Nothing, not a thing, except that Brager was in the emergency hospital yesterday morning, from nine until after eleven, getting a sprained ankle treated. He couldn’t have been at Deem’s. Seven doctors and attendants and nurses swear up and down he was in the hospital at that time.”

  Caquer frowned.

  “He was limping today, when he helped me search Deem’s shop,” he said. “What does Brager say?”

  “He says he was there, I mean at Deem’s and discovered Deem’s body. We just happened to find out otherwise accidentally — if it is otherwise. Rod, I’m going nuts. To think I had a chance to be fireman on a spacer and took this damned job. Have you learned anything new?”

  “Maybe. But first I want to ask you, Borg. About these nine nitwits you picked up. Has anybody tried to identify —”

  “Them,” interrupted Borgesen. “I let them go.”

  Caquer stared at the beefy face of the night lieutenant in utter amazement.

  “Let them go?” he repeated. “You couldn’t, legally. Man, they’d been charged. Without a trial, you couldn’t turn them loose.”

  “Nuts, I did, and I’ll take the responsibility for it. Look, Rod, they were right, weren’t they?”

  “What?”

  “Sure. People ought to be waked up about what’s going on over in Sector Two. Those phonies over there need taking down a peg, and we’re the only ones to do it. This ought to be headquarters for Callisto, right here. Why listen, Rod, a united Callisto could take over Ganymede.”

  “Borg, was there anything over the televis tonight? Anybody make a speech you listened to?”

  “Sure, didn’t you hear it? Our friend Skidder. Must have been while you were walking here, because all the televis turned on automatically — it was a general.”

  “And — was anything specific suggested, Borg? About Sector Two, and Ganymede, and that sort of thing?”

  “Sure, general meeting tomorrow morning at ten. In the square. We’re all supposed to go; I’ll see you there, won’t I?”

  “Yeah,” said Lieutenant Caquer. “I’m afraid you will. I — I got to go, Borg.”

  Rod Caquer knew what was wrong now. Almost the last thing he wanted to do was stay around the station listening to Borgesen talking under the influence of — what seemed to be — a Vargas Wheel. Nothing else, nothing less, could have made police Lieutenant Borgesen talk as he had just talked. Professor Gordon’s guess was getting righter every minute. Nothing else could have brought about such results.

  Caquer walked on blindly through the Jupiter lighted night, past the building in which his own apartment was. He did not want to go there either.

  The streets of Sector Three City seemed crowded for so late an hour of the evening. Late? He glanced at his watch and whistled softly. It was not evening any more. It was two o’clock in the morning, and normally the streets would have been deserted.

  But they were not, tonight. People wandered about, alone or in small groups that walked together in uncanny silence. Shuffle of feet, but not even the whisper of a voice. Not even —

  Whispers! Something about those streets and the people on them made Rod Caquer remember now his dream of the night before. Only now he knew that it had not been a dream. Nor had it been sleepwalking, in the ordinary sense of the word.

  He had dressed. He had stolen out of the building. And the street lights had been out too, and that meant that employees of the service department had neglected their posts. They, like others, had been wandering with the crowds.

  Listening to last night’s whispers. And what had those whispers said? He could remember part of it …

  “Kill — kill — kill — You hate them …”

  A shiver ran down Rod Caquer’s spine as he realized the significance of the fact that last night’s dream had been a reality. This was something that dwarfed into insignificance the murder of a petty book-and-reel shop owner.

  This was something which was gripping a city, something that could upset a world, something that could lead to unbelievable terror and carnage on a scale that hadn’t been known since the Twenty-fourth Century. This — which had started as a simple murder case!

  Up ahead somewhere, Rod Caquer heard the voice of a man addressing a crowd. A frenzied voice, shrill with fanaticism. He hurried his steps to the corner, and walked around it to find himself in the fringe of a crowd of people pressing around a man speaking from the top of a flight of steps.

  “ — and I tell you that tomorrow is the day. Now we have the Regent himself with us, and it will be unnecessary to depose him.
Men are working all night tonight, preparing. After the meeting in the square tomorrow morning, we shall —”

  “Hey!” Rod Caquer yelled. The man stopped talking and turned to look at Rod, and the crowd turned slowly, almost as one man, to stare at him.

  “You’re under —”

  Then Caquer saw that this was but a futile gesture.

  It was not the men surging toward him that convinced him of this. He was not afraid of violence. He would have welcomed it as a relief from uncanny terror, welcomed a chance to lay about him with the flat of his sword.

  But standing behind the speaker was a man in uniform — Brager. And Caquer remembered, then, that Borgesen, now in charge at the station, was on the other side. How could he arrest the speaker, when Borgesen, now in charge, would refuse to book him. And what good would it do to start a riot and cause injury to innocent people-people acting not under their own volition, but under the insidious influence Professor Gordon had described to him?

  Hand on his sword, he backed away. No one followed. Like automatons, they turned back to the speaker, who resumed his harangue, as though never interrupted. Policeman Brager had not moved, had not even looked in the direction of his superior officer. He alone of all those there had not turned at Caquer’s challenge.

  Lieutenant Caquer hurried on in the direction he had been going when he had heard the speaker. That way would take him back downtown. He would find a place open where he could use a visiphone, and call the Sector Co-ordinator. This was an emergency.

  And surely the scope of whoever had the Vargas Wheel had not yet extended beyond the boundaries of Sector Three.

  He found an all-night restaurant, open but deserted, the lights on but no waiters on duty, no cashier behind the counter. He stepped into the visiphone booth and pushed the button for a long distance operator. She flashed into sight on the screen almost at once.

  “Sector Co-ordinator, Callisto City,” Caquer said. “And rush it.”

  “Sorry, sir. Out of town service suspended by order of the Controller of Utilities, for the duration.”