Agent of Vega and Other Stories

by James H. Schmitz

  Dr. Lowry shook his head. "You can't be sure of it, Ferris!" he said. "You can't be sure of it at all."

  Weldon smiled. "No, we can't. We don't really know what would happen. But neither, you see, does the rogue."

  Lowry said hesitantly, "I'm afraid I don't follow you."

  "Ben," Weldon said, "we don't expect your diex projector will ever be put to the use we've been discussing just now. That isn't its purpose."

  Lowry looked dumfounded. "Then what is its purpose?"

  Arlene Rolf's face had gone pale. "Doctor Ben," she said, "I believe Colonel Weldon is implying that the rogue already knows about the diex projector and what might be attempted with it."

  Weldon nodded. "Of course, he knows about it. How many secrets do you think can be kept from a creature who can tap the minds of anybody he encounters? You can take it for granted that he's maintained information sources in every department of the government since the day we became aware of his existence. He knows we're out to get him. And he isn't stupid enough to allow things here to develop to the point where one of our telepaths is actually placed in front of that projector. He can't be sure of what the outcome would be. After all, it might . . . very easily . . . be fatal to him."

  Lowry began, "Then I don't . . ." He checked himself, gave Arlene Rolf a bewildered look. "Are you still with this madman, Arlene?"

  Her smile was twisted. "I'm afraid so! If I am, I don't like the situation at all. Colonel Weldon, have you people planned to use the diex projector as a trap for the rogue?"

  "As bait for a trap," Weldon said. "Ben, put yourself in the rogue's place. He regards this entire planet as his property. But now the livestock is aware of him and is restless. On the technological side it is also becoming more clever by the decade—dangerously clever. He can still keep us in our place here, and so far he's succeeded in blocking a major exodus into the solar system where his power would vanish. But can he continue indefinitely? And can he find any enjoyment in being the lord of all Earth when he has to be constantly on guard now against our efforts to get rid of him? He's blocked our first thrusts and showed us that he can make it a very costly business to harass him too seriously. But the situation is as unsatisfactory to him as to us. He needs much more effective methods of control than were required in the past to bring us back to heel."

  Lowry said, "And the diex projector . . ."

  Weldon nodded. "Of course! The diex projector is the perfect solution to the rogue's problems. The security islands which so far have been our principal form of defense would become meaningless. He could reach any human mind on Earth directly and immediately. Future plots to overthrow him would stand no chance of success.

  "The rogue has shown no scientific ability of his own, and the handful of other men who might be capable at present of constructing a similar instrument have been placed beyond his reach. So he has permitted the development of the projector to continue here, though he could, of course, have put an abrupt stop to it in a number of ways. But you may be sure that he intends to bring the diex projector into his possession before it actually can be used against him."

  Arlene said, "And he's assumed to know that the projector is now operational, aside from any faults that might still show up in the tests?"

  "Yes," Weldon said.

  She went on, "Does the fact that I was allowed to leave the project several times a week—actually whenever I felt like it—have something to do with that?"

  Weldon said, "We believe that the rogue has taken advantage rather regularly of that arrangement. After all, there was no more dependable way of informing himself of the exact state of affairs on the project than . . ."

  "Than by picking my mind?"

  Weldon hesitated, said, "There's no denying that we have placed you both in danger, Arlene. Under the circumstances, we can offer no apology for that. It was a matter of simple necessity."

  "I wasn't expecting an apology, Colonel Weldon." Her face was white. "But I'm wondering what the rogue is supposed to attempt now."

  "To get possession of the projector?" Weldon hesitated again. "We don't know that exactly. We believe we have considered every possible approach, and whichever he selects, we're prepared to trap him in the process of carrying it out."

  Dr. Lowry said, "But he must suspect that you intend to trap him!"

  Weldon nodded. "He does, naturally. But he's under a parallel disadvantage there—he can't be certain what the traps are. You don't realize yet how elaborate our precautionary measures have been." Weldon indicated the small door in the wall beyond Dr. Lowry. "The reason I use only that private conduit to come here is that I haven't stepped off a security island for almost three years! The same has been true of anyone else who had information we had to keep from the rogue . . . including incidentally Mr. Green, whose occasional 'public appearances' during this critical period have been elaborately staged fakes. We communicate only by viewphone; in fact, none of us even knows just where the others are. There is almost no chance that he can do more than guess at the exact nature of our plans."

  "And with all that," Lowry said slowly, "you expect he will still go ahead and make a bid for the projector?"

  "He will because he must!" Weldon said. "His only alternative would be to destroy this security island with everything on it at the last moment. And that is very unlikely. The rogue's actions show that in spite of his current troubles with us he has a vast contempt for ordinary human beings. Without that feeling, he would never have permitted the diex projector to be completed. So he will come for it—very warily, taking every precaution, but confident of outmaneuvering us at the end."

  Arlene asked, "And isn't it possible that he will do just that?"

  There was a barely perceptible pause before Weldon replied. "Yes," he said then, "it's possible. It's a small chance—perhaps only a theoretical one. But we're not omniscient, and we may not know quite as much about him as we think. It remains possible."

  "Then why take even that risk?" Arlene asked. "Wouldn't it be better to destroy the projector now—to leave things as they are—rather than offer him a weapon which would reduce us all to helpless chattels again?"

  Weldon shook his head. "Arlene, we can't leave things as they are! Neither can the rogue. You know that really—even though you refuse to admit it to yourself at the moment."

  "I . . . what do you mean?"

  "This year," Weldon said patiently, "we have the diex projector. What will we have five years from now when diex energy has been more fully explored? When the other fields of knowledge that have been opened in recent years begin to expand? We could, perhaps, slow down those processes. We can't stop them. And, at any point, other unpredictable weapons may emerge . . . weapons we might use against the rogue, or that he might use against us.

  "No, for both sides the time to act is now, unless we're willing to leave the future to chance. We aren't; and the rogue isn't. We've challenged him to determine whether he or mankind will control this planet, and he's accepted the challenge. It amounts to that. And it's very likely that the outcome will have become apparent not many hours from now."

  Arlene shook her head but said nothing. Dr. Lowry asked, "Ferris, exactly what is our role in this situation supposed to be?"

  "For the next few hours," Weldon said, "you'll be instructing me in the practical details of operating the projector. I've studied your reports very carefully, of course, and I could handle it after a fashion without such help. But that isn't good enough. Because—as the rogue knows very well—we aren't bluffing in the least in this. We're forcing him to take action. If he doesn't"—Weldon nodded at the polished hardwood box on the table before Dr. Lowry—"one of our telepaths presently will be placed before that instrument of yours, and the rogue will face the possibility of being flushed into view. And there is no point on the globe at this moment which is more than a few minutes' flight away from one of our strike groups.

  "So he'll take action . . . at the latest as soon as the order is given to move
our telepath to the Cleaver Project. But you two won't be here when it happens. You're not needed for that part, and while we've been talking, the main project conduit has been shunted from our university exit here to a security island outside the area. You'll move there directly from the project as soon as you finish checking me out, and you will remain there until Operation Rogue is concluded.

  "And now let's get busy! I think it would be best, Ben, if I assumed Arlene's usual role for a start . . . secondary operator . . . and let you go through the regular pattern of contacts while I look on. What do you say?"

  * * *

  Arlene Rolf had taken a chair well back from the table where the two men sat before the diex projector. She realized it had been an attempt to dissociate herself—emotionally as well as physically—from what was being done there, and that the attempt hadn't been at all successful. Her usual composure, based on the awareness of being able to adjust herself efficiently to the necessities of any emergency, was simply gone. The story of the rogue had been sprung on them too abruptly at this last moment. Her mind accepted the concept but hadn't really assimilated it yet. Listening to what Weldon had said, wanting to remain judiciously skeptical but finding herself increasingly unable to disbelieve him—that had been like a slow, continuous shock. She wasn't yet over it. Her thoughts wouldn't follow the lines she set them on but veered off almost incoherently every minute or two. For the first time in her adult life she was badly frightened—made stupid with fear—and finding it something she seemed unable to control at will.

  Her gaze shifted back helplessly to the table and to the dull-blue concave viewplate which was the diex projector's central section. Unfolded from its case, the projector was a beautiful machine of spider web angularities lifting from the flat silver slab of its generator to the plate. The blurred shiftings of color and light in the center of the plate were next to meaningless without the diex goggles Dr. Lowry and Weldon had fitted over their heads; but Arlene was familiar enough with the routine test patterns to follow their progress without listening closely to what was said. . . .

  She wanted the testing to stop. She felt it was dangerous. Hadn't Weldon said they still couldn't be sure of the actual extent of the rogue's abilities? And mightn't the projector be luring their minds out now into the enemy's territory, drawing his attention to what was being done in this room? There had been seconds when an uncanny certainty had come to her that she could sense the rogue's presence, that he already was cynically aware of what they were attempting, and only biding his time before he interfered. That might be—almost certainly was—superstitious imagining, but the conviction had been strong. Strong enough to leave her trembling.

  But there was, of course, exactly nothing she could do or say now to keep them from going on. She remained silent.

  So far it had been routine. A standard warm-up. They'd touched Vanderlin in Melbourne, Marie Faber in Seattle. The wash of colors in the viewplate was the reflection of individual sensory impressions riding the diex field. There had been no verbalizing or conscious response from the contacted subjects. That would come later. Dr. Lowry's face was turned momentarily sideways to her, the conical grey lenses of the goggles protruding from beneath his forehead like staring insect eyes.

  She realized he must have said something to Weldon just now which she hadn't heard. Weldon's head was nodding in agreement. Dr. Lowry shifted back to the table, said, "Botucato, Brazil—an untried location. How the pinpointing of these random samplings is brought about is of course . . ." His voice dropped to an indistinct murmur as he reached out to the projector again.

  Arlene roused herself with an effort partly out of her foggy fears. It was almost like trying to awake from a heavy, uncomfortable sleep. But now there was also some feeling of relief—and angry self-contempt—because obviously while she had been giving in to her emotional reactions, nothing disastrous had in fact occurred! At the table, they'd moved on several steps in the standard testing procedure. She hadn't even been aware of it. She was behaving like a fool!

  The sensory color patterns were gone from the viewplate, and now as she looked, the green-patterned white field of the projector's location map appeared there instead. She watched Dr. Lowry's practiced fingers spin the coordinating dials, and layer after layer of the map came surging into view, each a magnified section of the preceding one. There was a faint click. Lowry released the dials, murmured something again, ended more audibly, " . . . twenty-mile radius." The viewplate had gone blank, but Arlene continued to watch it.

  The projector was directed now towards a twenty-mile circle at ground level somewhere in Brazil. None of their established contacts were in that area. Nevertheless, something quite definite was occurring. Dr. Lowry had not expected to learn much more about this particular process until a disciplined telepathic mind was operating through the instrument—and perhaps not too much more then. But in some manner the diex energy was now probing the area, and presently it would touch a human mind—sometimes a succession of them, sometimes only one. It was always the lightest of contacts. The subjects remained patently unaware of any unusual experience, and the only thing reflected from them was the familiar generalized flux of sensory impressions.

  * * *

  Arlene Rolf realized she was standing just inside the open records vault of Dr. Lowry's office, with a bundle of files in her arms. On the floor about her was a tumbled disorder of other files, of scattered papers, tapes. She dropped the bundle on the litter, turned back to the door. And only then, with a churning rush of hot terror, came the thought, What am I doing here? What happened?

  She saw Dr. Lowry appear in the vault door with another pile of papers. He tossed them in carelessly, turned back into the office without glancing in her direction. Arlene found herself walking out after him, her legs carrying her along in dreamlike independence of her will. Lowry was now upending the contents of a drawer to the top of his desk. She tried to scream his name. There was no sound. She saw his face for an instant. He looked thoughtful, absorbed in what he was doing, nothing else. . . .

  Then she was walking through the living room, carrying something—the next instant, it seemed, she'd reentered Lowry's office. Nightmarishly, it continued. Blank lapses of awareness followed moments in which her mind swayed in wild terrors while her body moved about, machinelike and competent, piling material from workshop and file cabinets helter-skelter into the records vault. It might have been going on for only three or four minutes or for an hour; her memory was enclosed in splinters of time and reality. But there were moments, too, when her thoughts became lucid and memory returned. . . . Colonel Weldon's broad back as he disappeared through the narrow door in the living room wall into the private conduit entry, the strap of the diex projector case in his right hand; then the door closing behind him. Before that had been an instant when something blazed red in the projector's viewplate on the table, and she'd wondered why neither of the two men sitting before it made any comment—

  Then suddenly, in one of the lucid moments, there was time for the stunned thought to form: So the rogue caught us all! Weldon's self-confidence and courage, Dr. Lowry's dedicated skill, her own reluctance to be committed to this matter . . . nothing had made the slightest difference. In his own time, the rogue had come quietly through every defense and seized their minds. Weldon was on his way to him now, carrying the diex projector.

  And she and Dr. Lowry? They'd been ordered by the rogue to dispose of every scrap of information dealing with the projector's construction, of course! They were doing it. And after they had finished—then what?

  Arlene thought she knew when she saw Dr. Lowry close the vault, and unlock and plunge the destruct button beside the door. Everything in there would be annihilated now in ravening white fire. But the two minds which knew the secrets of the projector—

  * * *

  She must have made a violent effort to escape, almost overriding the rogue's compulsions. For she found herself in the living room, not ten feet from the doo
r that opened into the outer halls where help might still have been found. But it was as far as she could go; she was already turning away from the door, starting back across the room with the quick, graceful automaton stride over which she had no control. And terror surged up in her again.

  As she approached the far wall, she saw Dr. Lowry come out of the passage from the office, smiling absently, blinking at the floor through his glasses. He turned without looking up and walked behind her towards the closed narrow door before Colonel Weldon's nonspace conduit entry.

  So it wasn't to be death, Arlene thought, but personal slavery. The rogue still had use for them. They were to follow where Weldon had gone. . . .

  Her hand tugged at the door. It wouldn't open.

  She wrenched at it violently, savagely, formless panic pounding through her. After a moment, Dr. Lowry began to mutter uneasily, then reached out to help her.

  The room seemed suddenly to explode; and for an instant Arlene Rolf felt her mind disintegrating in raging torrents of white light.

  * * *

  She had been looking drowsily for some moments at the lanky, red-headed man who stood, faced away, half across the room before any sort of conscious understanding returned. Then, immediately, everything was there. She went stiff with shock.

  Dr. Lowry's living room . . . she in this chair and Dr. Lowry stretched out on the couch. He'd seemed asleep. And standing above him, looking down at him, the familiar rawboned, big figure of Frank Harding. Dr. Frank Harding who had walked up to the Cleaver Spaceport entry with her today, told her he'd be flying back to the coast.