"Wonder what that G.E. really went out for," the lieutenant ventured presently.
"To catch one humanoid ape—as described," the captain grinned. Then he relented. "I'll tell you one thing—it's big enough that they've put out the Fleet to blast anyone who tries to sneak off without being identified."
The lieutenant tried to look as if that explained it, but failed. Then he brightened and announced briskly: "The guy's barrier just went off!"
"All right. Give him the tractor!"
"It's—"
Up from the dock area then, clearly audible through their instruments, there rose a sound: a soft but tremendous WHOOSH! The cradle in which the slow-looking ship had rested appeared to quiver violently. Nothing else changed. But the ship was no longer there.
In white-faced surprise, the lieutenant goggled at the captain. "Did . . . did it blow up?" he whispered.
The captain did not answer. The captain had turned purple, and seemed to be having the worst kind of trouble getting his breath.
"Took off—under space-drive!" he gasped suddenly. "How'd he do that without wrecking— With a tractor on him!"
He whirled belatedly, and flung himself at the communicators. Gone was his aplomb, gone every trace of worldly-wise weariness.
"Station 1222 calling Fleet!" he yelped. "Station 1222 calling—"
* * *
While Lycanno's suns shrank away in the general-view tank before him, Iliff rapidly sorted the contents of his brief case into a small multiple-recorder. It had been a busy night—to those equipped to read the signs the Fourth Planet must have seemed boiling like a hive of furious bees before it was over! But he'd done most of what had seemed necessary, and the pursuit never really got within minutes of catching up with him again.
When the excitement died down, Lycanno would presently discover it had become a somewhat cleaner place overnight. For a moment, Iliff wished he could be around when the real Colonel Perritaph began to express his views on the sort of police inefficiency which had permitted an impostor to make use of his name and position in the System.
Terra's embassies were always ready to give a representative of the Confederacy a helping hand, and no questions asked; just as, in any all-out war, its tiny, savage fleet was regularly found fighting side by side with the ships of Vega—though never exactly together with them. Terra was no member of the Confederacy; it was having no foreigners determine its policies. On the whole, the Old Planet had not changed so very much.
When Iliff set down the empty brief case, the voice that had addressed him on his approach to the ship spoke again. As usual, it was impossible to say from just where it came; but it seemed to boom out of the empty air a little above Iliff's head. In spite of its curious resemblance to his own voice, most people would have identified it now as the voice of a robot.
Which it was—for its size the most complicated robot-type the science of Vega and her allies had yet developed.
"Two armed space-craft, Lycannese destroyer-type, attempting interception!" it announced. After the barest possible pause, it added: "Instructions?"
Iliff grinned a little without raising his head. No one else would have noticed anything unusual in the stereotyped warning, but he had been living with that voice for some fifteen years.
"Evasion, of course, you big ape!" he said softly. "You'll have had all the fighting you want before you're scrapped."
His grin widened then, at a very convincing illusion that the ship had shrugged its sloping and monstrously armored shoulders in annoyed response. That, however, was due simply to the little leap with which the suns of Lycanno vanished from the tank in the abruptness of full forward acceleration.
In effect, the whole ship was the robot—a highly modified version of the deadly one-man strike-ships of the Vegan battle fleet, but even more heavily armed and thus more than qualified to take on a pair of Lycannese destroyers for the split-second maneuverings and decisions, the whole slashing frenzy of a deep-space fight. Its five central brains were constructed to produce, as closely as possible, replicas of Iliff's own basic mental patterns, which made for a nearly perfect rapport. Beyond that, of course, the machine was super-sensed and energized into a truly titanic extension of the man.
Iliff did not bother to observe the whiplash evasion tactics which almost left the destroyers' commanders wondering whether there had been any unidentified spaceship recorded on their plates in the first place. That order was being carried out much more competently than if he had been directing the details himself; and meanwhile there was other business on hand—the part of his job he enjoyed perhaps least of all. A transmitter was driving the preliminary reports of his actions on Lycanno Four across nearly half the galaxy to G.Z. Headquarters Central on the planet of Jeltad.
There, clerks were feeding it, in series with a few thousand other current intermission reports, into more complex multiple-recorders, from which various sections were almost instantaneously disgorged, somewhat cut and edited.
* * *
"She has not responded to her personal beam," the robot announced for the second time.
"Sure she just wasn't able to get back at us?"
"There is no indication of that."
"Keep it open then—until she does answer," Iliff said. Personal telepathy at interstellar ranges was always something of an experiment, unless backed at both ends by mechanical amplifiers of much greater magnitude than were at Pagadan's disposal.
"But I do wish," he grumbled, "I'd been able to find out what made the Ceetal so particularly interested in Tahmey! Saving him up, as host, for the next generation, of course. If he hadn't been so touchy on that point—" He scowled at the idly clicking transmitter before him. Deep down in his mind, just on the wrong side of comprehension, something stirred slowly and uneasily and sank out of his awareness again.
"Correlation ought to call in pretty soon," he reassured himself. "With the fresh data we've fed them, they'll have worked out a new line on the guy."
"Departmental Lab is now attempting to get back on transmitter," the robot informed him. "Shall I blank them out till you've talked with Correlation?"
"Let them through," Iliff sighed. "If we have to, we'll cut them off—"
A staccato series of clicks conveying an impression of agitated inquiry, rose suddenly from the transmitter. Still frowning, he adjusted light-scales, twisted knobs, and a diminutive voice came gushing in mid-speech from the instrument. Iliff listened a while; then he broke in impatiently.
"Look," he explained, "I've homed you the full recorded particulars of the process they used. You'll have the stuff any minute now, and you'll get a lot more out of that than I could tell you. The man I got it from was the only one still alive of the group that did the job; but he was the one that handled the important part—the actual personality transfer.
"I cleared his mind of all he knew of the matter and recorded it, but all I understood myself was the principle involved—if that."
The voice interjected a squeaky, rapid-fire protest. Iliff cut in again quickly:
"Well, if you need it now—You're right about there not having been any subjective switching of personalities involved, and I'm not arguing about whether it's impossible. These people just did a pretty complete job of shifting everything that's supposed to make up a conscious individual from one human body to another. From any objective point of view, it looks like a personality transfer.
"No, they didn't use psychosurgery," he went on. "Except to fill in a six-months' sequence of memory tracts to cover the interval they had Tahmey under treatment. What they used was a modification of the electronic method of planting living reflex patterns in robot brains. First, they blanked out Tahmey's mind completely—neutralized all established neural connections and so on, right down to the primary automatic reflexes."
"The 'no-mind' stage?" Lab piped.
"That's right. Then they put the Lycannese Deel in a state of mental stasis. They'd picked him because of his strong physical re
semblance to Tahmey."
"That," Lab instructed him sharply, "could have no effect on the experiment as such. Did they use a chemical paralyzing agent to produce the stasis?"
"I think so. It's in the report—"
"You—Zone Agents! How long did they keep the two nerve systems linked?"
"About six months."
"I see. Then they broke the flow and had a complete copy of the second subject's neural impulse paths stamped into the first subject's nervous system. Re-energized, the artificial personality would pick up at the exact point it entered mental stasis and continue to develop normally from there on. I see, I see, I see . . . but what happened to the second subject—Deel?"
"He died in convulsions a few seconds after they returned him to consciousness."
Lab clicked regretfully. "Usual result of a prolonged state of mental stasis—and rather likely to limit the usefulness of the process, you know. Now, there are a few important points—"
"Correlation!" the robot said sharply into Iliff's mind.
The squeaky voice thinned into an abrupt high whistle and was gone.
* * *
"I'm here, Iliff! Your friend and guide, Captain Rashallan of Correlation, himself. You haven't started to close in on that Tahmey bird yet, have you? You aren't anywhere near him yet?"
"No," Iliff said. He squinted down at the transmitter and was surprised by a sudden sense of constriction in his throat. "Why?"
The Correlation man took about three minutes to tell him. He ended with:
"We've just had a buzz from Lab—they were trying to get back to you, but couldn't—and what they want us to tell you fits right in—"
"The neutralization of a nervous system that produces the no-mind stage is an effect that wears off completely within two years. Normally, the result is the gradual re-establishment of the original personality; but, in this case, there can be no such result because all energy centers are channeling constantly into the Deel personality.
"However, there's no reason to doubt that 'Tahmey' is now also present in the system—though unconscious and untraceable because unenergized. Obviously, the Ceetal could have no reason to be interested in a commonplace mentality such as Deel's.
"Now you see how it ties in! Whether it was the Ceetal's intention or not—and it's extremely probable, a virtual certainty, that it was—the whole artificial creation remains stable only so long as the Deel personality continues to function.
"The instant it lapses, the original personality will be energized. You see what's likely to happen to any probing outsider then?"
"Yes," Iliff said, "I see."
"Assuming it's been arranged like that," said Captain Rashallan, "the trigger that sets off the change is, almost certainly, a situational one—and there will be a sufficient number of such triggered situations provided so that any foreseeable emergency pattern is bound to develop one or more of them.
"The Ceetal's purpose with such last-resort measures would be, of course, to virtually insure the destruction of any investigator who had managed to overcome his other defenses, and who was now at the point of getting a direct line on him and his little pals.
"So you'll have to watch . . . well, Zones wants to get through to you now, and they're getting impatient. Good luck, Iliff!"
Iliff leaned forward then and shut off the transmitter. For a moment or so after that, he sat motionless, his yellow eyes staring with a hard, flat expression at something unseen. Then he inquired:
"Did you get Pagadan?"
"There've been several blurred responses in the past few minutes," the robot answered. "Apparently, she's unable to get anything beyond the fact that you are trying to contact her—and she is also unable to amplify her reply to the extent required just now. Do you have any definite message?"
"Yes," Iliff said briskly. "As long as you get any response from her at all, keep sending her this: 'Kill Tahmey! Get off Gull!' Make it verbal and strong. Even if the beam doesn't clear, that much might get through."
"There's a very good chance of it," the robot agreed. It added, after a moment, "But the Interstellar operative is not very likely to be successful in either undertaking, Iliff."
There was another pause before Iliff replied.
"No," he said then. "I'm afraid not. But she's a capable being—she does have a chance."
* * *
FOR DISTRIBUTION AT AND
ABOVE ZONE AGENT LEVELS
Description: . . . mind-parasite of extragalactic origin, accidentally introduced into our Zones and now widely scattered there . . . In its free state a nonmaterial but coherent form of conscious energy, characterized by high spatial motility.
. . . basic I.Q. slightly above A-type human being. Behavior . . . largely on reflex-intuition levels. The basic procedures underlying its life-cycle are not consciously comprehended by the parasite and have not, at present, been explained.
Cycle: . . . the free state, normally forming only a fraction of the Ceetal life-cycle, may be extended indefinitely until the parasite contacts a suitable host-organism. Oxygen-breathing life-forms with neural mechanisms in the general class of the human nervous system and its energy areas serve this purpose.
On contacting a host, the Ceetal undergoes changes in itself enabling it to control the basic energizing drives of the host-organism. It then develops the host's neural carriers to a constant point five times beyond the previous absolute emergency overload.
In type-case Ceetal-Homo-Lycanno S-4, 1782—a drastic localized hypertrophy of the central nerve tissue masses was observed, indicating protective measures against the overload induced in the organism.
The advantages to the parasite of developing a host-organism of such abnormal potency and efficiency in its environment are obvious, as it is indissolubly linked to its host for the major part of its long parasitic stage and cannot survive the host's death. Barring accidents or superior force, it is, however, capable of prolonging the host's biological life-span almost indefinitely.
At the natural end of this stage, the Ceetal reproduces, the individual parasite dividing into eight free-stage forms. The host is killed in the process of division, and each Ceetal is freed thereby to initiate a new cycle.
CHIEF G.Z.: FROM CORRELATION
F. The numerical strength of the original swarm of free-stage Ceetals can thus be set at approximately forty-nine thousand. The swarm first contacted the Toeller Planet and, with the exception of less than a thousand individuals, entered symbiosis with the highest life-form evolved there.
The resultant emergence of the "Toeller-Worm," previously regarded as the most remarkable example known of spontaneous mental evolution in a species, is thereby explained. The malignant nature of the Super-Toeller mirrors the essentially predatory characteristics of the Ceetal. Its complete extermination by our forces involved the destruction of the entire Ceetal swarm, excepting the individuals which had deferred adopting a host.
G. Practical chances of a similar second swarm of these parasites contacting our galaxy are too low to permit evaluation.
H. The threat from the comparatively few remaining Ceetals derives from the survivors' decision to select their hosts only from civilized species with a high basic I.Q., capable of developing and maintaining a dominating influence throughout entire cultural systems.
In the type-case reported, the Ceetal not only secured a complete political dominance of the Class-Twelve System of Lycanno but extended its influence into three neighboring systems.
Since all surviving Ceetals maintain contact with each other and the identity and location of one hundred and eighteen of these survivors was given in the Agent's report, it should not be too difficult to dispose of them before their next period of reproduction—which would, of course, permit the parasite to disperse itself to a dangerous extent throughout the galaxy.
The operation cannot be delayed, however, as the time of reproduction for the first Ceetals to adopt hosts of human-level I.Q. following the destruction of the
Toeller-Worms can now be no more than between two and five years—standard—in the future. The danger is significantly increased, of course, by their more recent policy of selecting and conserving hosts of abnormally high I.Q. rating well in advance of the "change."
The menace to civilization from such beings, following their mental hypertrophy and under Ceetal influence, can hardly be overstated.
The problem of disposing of all surviving Ceetals—or, failing that, of all such prospective super-hosts—must therefore be considered one of utmost urgency.
* * *
"They're telling me!" the Third Co-ordinator said distractedly. He rubbed his long chin, and reached for a switch.
"Psych-tester?" he said. "You heard them? What are the chances of some other Ceetal picking up U-1?"
"It must be assumed," a mechanical voice replied, "that the attempt will be made promptly. The strike you have initiated against those who were revealed by the Agent's report cannot prevent some unknown survivor from ordering U-1's removal to another place of concealment, where he could be picked up at will. Since you are counting on a lapse of two days before the strike now under way will have yielded sufficient information to permit you to conclude the operation against the Ceetals, several of them may succeed in organizing their escape—and even a single Ceetal in possession of such a host as U-1 would indicate the eventual dominance of the species. Galactic Zones has no record of any other mentality who would be even approximately so well suited to their purposes."
"Yes," said the Co-ordinator. "Their purposes—you think then if U-1 got their treatment, being what he is, he could take us?"
"Yes," the voice said. "He could."
The Co-ordinator nodded thoughtfully. His face looked perhaps a little harsher, a little grayer than usual.
"Well, we've done what we can from here," he said presently. "The first other Agent will get to Gull in eleven hours, more or less. There'll be six of them there tomorrow. And a fleet of destroyers within call range—none of them in time to do much good, I'm afraid!"
"That is the probability," the voice agreed.
Agent of Vega and Other Stories Page 5
