The Lost Perception

by Daniel F. Galouye

  Sickened, he envisioned a conspiracy that grew on its own strength, ruthlessly brooked no opposition, drew nourishrment from its own insidious objectives, used the advantages of hyperperception to elevate its members to the highest positions of authority in the governmental and economic institutions of all nations, and assassinate anyone in position to reveal the intrigue—as they had assassinated Simmons at Versailles and the woman in Rome’s Central Isolation Institute?

  Then he gripped the wheel in sudden distress. Forsythe was determined to master the sixth sense! And he was outside the conspiracy. Moreover, the bureau knew about him, because that knowledge was engraved on Gregson’s memory cells, which had been exposed to all the Security Bureau zylphers at Versailles. Therefore the conspiracy couldn’t tolerate Forsythe’s independent existence!

  Was that why the farm was suddenly abandoned, with no trace of Helen and BUI left behind?

  More determined than ever to reach Madame Carnot, Gregson turned into Avenue Foch, but had to reduce his speed. The sidewalks and lanes were crowded with haggard Parisians. Numb fear on their faces was starkly illuminated by glaring xenon vapor lights.

  And, in frightened anticipation, almost everyone wielded an unsheathed hypodermic syringe.

  Gregson found it incredible that so many persons were going Screamie. Then he reasoned that the raultburst which had begun on the previous day, pouring through an almost unobstructed rift in the Stygum Field, must have been the fiercest yet.

  * * *

  After having been delayed twice by ambulances, he finally turned off into Rue de la Serenite. Here it was a different world—peaceful and quiet, as the name of the street implied.

  Braking to a stop alongside the ornamental fence, he surmised the reason for such vivid contrast:

  All the buildings around No. 17 must be part of VJO Ground Control Headquarters. And they must all be within the field of a large rault suppressor. He tested his hypothesis by turning off his own suppressor. He had guessed right, for he could still zylph nothing.

  Before he left the car, he stared uncertainly at the unconscious Valorian on the rear seat. Even if he wanted to, though, there was nothing he could do for the woman now.

  On the sidewalk, he paused again, studying the steady flow of personnel into the main entrance. There was an aura of imminent happening about the building and he wondered whether it had anything to do with the sudden raultburst from Chandeen.

  He joined a group striding anxiously across the courtyard. Then, as he passed a guard at the doorway and headed unchallenged for the helical stairs, he thanked the general air of confused urgency, whatever its explanation, for his uneventful entry.

  With the others he mounted the stairway. Most of those arriving had as their destination the second-floor assembly hall, where a gathering audience confronted a still empty stage.

  In the glass-partitioned compartments of the third and fourth levels, he noticed that the walls were illuminated with projected maps of various land areas throughout the world.

  Predominating were charts representing sections of the United States and Europe.

  On the seventh floor, the huge planetary sphere that was to serve as the focal point of VJO Ground Control Operations was in darkness, as was the room itself, with all its electronic equipment and kinescopic screens.

  Considering the intense activity throughout most of the building, he was not surprised to find Madame Carnot awake—in her satin-paneled sitting room. Drapes drawn over the French windows obscured their view of the roof garden.

  Wearing silk pajamas and a robe, the withered woman sat in her wheelchair before a portable video screen and a compact control board. Each time her crippled fingers touched a button, the scene on the face of the tube shifted from one center of activity in the building to another.

  On the table beside her was a rault caster, whose green pilot bulb was now lifeless.

  That she had not zylphed his presence in the hallway was further assurance that the caster was not operating.

  But as he eased into the room she started to turn around. He lunged forward, seizing the wheelchair and pulling it away from the control board.

  Fear erupted among the wrinkles of her face and she tried to rise. But she only fell back and sat there breathing heavily. Then she clasped her robe more securely about her and seemed to draw composure from its warmth. “You are late, monsieur. I was expecting you much earlier.”

  “You knew I left Versailles?”

  “I knew you would leave. I zylphed as much when you were here two weeks ago. But you do not frighten me. For you see, monsieur, you are very close to death.”

  Her pale eyes, recessed beneath thin, gray brows, were suddenly animate with amusement over his confounded expression. “Oui, monsieur—close to death. All this day I have zylphed its nearness—in this very room. All the forces, all the patterns of matter and time spoke of it and I feared that I was sensing my own end,”

  Her smile, though feeble, was mocking. “But eventually I zylphed that it would be a violent, fiery death and I knew I was safe because no violence can befall me here. Then, when you came, I saw that the omens would be satisfied.”

  He brushed aside her shallow, obvious attempt at frightening him. “The Security Bureau wants total, permanent world control, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “We do not want that. We already have it. There is hardly a national government which does not hold its reins of power at the sufferance of the bureau. For, vraiment, we have patiently put our own men, our very own zylphers, in charge of those governments everywhere. Just as we long ago began placing our personnel in all positions of economic responsibility.”

  Gregson straightened thoughtfully, remembering that ex-Screamers in high office, both public and corporate, had long since become the pattern of society’s practical response to the plague. It had all along been the consensus that those who had survived the Screamies were best qualified to act as caretakers of the world’s governments and economic resources.

  “And the world’s wealth?” Madame Carnot went on boastfully. “We have as much of it as we now need. And the rest is assured. Through national assessments, we already take more than half of the revenues of all governments. Of course, that is but little compared with the flow we expect after we suppress the Screamies and the world recovers its productive capacity.”

  Gregson bent close to the woman. “It won’t work,” he predicted earnestly. “When that suppressor on VJO goes into operation, the people of the world will rise up and throw off the harness.”

  She shrugged. “They may try. But they won’t succeed. We have our International Guardsmen everywhere. And, should it appear that our authority is in danger, we have only to turn off the suppressor and let them have another taste of the Screamies.”

  Coercion on an astronomic scale. And Gregson saw that it would succeed—that, actually, there was little choice. Either Earth was doomed to almost total depopulation by the fatal consequences of hypersensitivity, or it had to settle for an end to the plague—for world-wide suppression of rault—on the bureau’s terms.

  * * *

  He caught her wrist. “Tell me about the Valorians. Why are they really here?”

  But she wrested her arm free. “One who can hardly zylph,” she protested childishly, “does not demand answers of Madame Carnot.” She sat there with her lips stubbornly compressed against each other.

  He snatched her rault caster from the table and twisted its knob until his glial receptors barely began responding to the assault of artificial hyperradiance. At first he zylphed only the physiological complexities of his own body, the flow of blood through minuscule capillaries, the slow catabolic attrition of dying cells, their anabolic replacement He advanced the setting another notch, until he sensed Madame Carnot’s presence in the same field. He dismissed the impulses carrying undesired major impressions—just as a person observing the totality of an intricate mosaic would ignore the whole to study detail within a
small area. And he directed his attention instead at the complex structure of her mind, trying desperately to discover the secret of sensing attitudes and thoughts.

  Vaguely, he perceived the evil, the total malignity, the lust for power that would not be blunted by senility. But there was something else in her mind—an avid anticipation that ran like a vibrant chord through the entire spectrum of her unconscious thought Something that seemed to throb with the eagerness of her malicious expectancy.

  In the next moment the rault caster was knocked from his grasp by a hand which had darted into the compact field of hyperradiance so suddenly that he had hardly had a chance to zylph it. The instrument shattered and his arms were pinned to his side by two International Guardsmen. A third bent attentively over Madame Carnot.

  “Tuez-lui! Tuez-lui!” she screamed. “Tout de suite—tuez-lui!”

  In response to her frantic order to kill him immediately, one of the Guardsmen leveled a laserifle at Gregson.

  But just then the entire room came ablaze with a tremendous burst of rault and abruptly Gregson was zylphing the whole building—everyone in it, all the electronic activity in every circuit of each computer and switchboard and automatic projector.

  Madame Carnot screamed in terror, her eyes turned upward as though looking through the ceiling.

  Then Gregson sensed the source of the fierce surge of hyperradiance. There was a powerful rault caster aboard a long-range hopper which was even now verticaling down to the tiled floor of the roof garden. As it landed, crushing tropical plants and scattering terrace furniture, the Guardsmen opened fire.

  Valorians and humans alike poured from the hopper. The French windows burst open and laser rays sliced into the room. Caught in the crossfire, Gregson dropped to the floor.

  Two of the guards collapsed and Madame Carnot, raked by several beams, slumped in the chair. Her brief, agonizing death scream lashed out like chalk screeching on a blackboard.

  Even in the confusion of the moment, however, Gregson could zylph several outrageous things hurtling through the night sky, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles away. His attention had been demanded by their enormity, their deadliness, their brutal purpose. And he could sense the nuclear nature of each payload.

  “Gregson! Gregson!”

  It was visually that he recognized Kenneth Wellford, his British friend who had bought the Screamie package in London.

  Gregson started to rise.

  And Wellford tried but failed to knock aside the rifle in the hand of the Valorian next to him. Its linear amplifier spat out a beam that caught Gregson full in the chest.

  INTERLUDE

  Suspended over the Atlantic Ocean more than twenty-two thousand miles out in space, the massive, wheeling hulk of Vega Jumpoff Station lumbered through its synchronous orbit.

  Laboring at but fractional efficiency, its life support systems were nagging inconveniences. As soon as qualified personnel was obtained by the Security Bureau’s Space Division, however, deficiencies would be eliminated. It could then be expected that the air would be purer in recycling, spin stabilized for a constant G factor, and radiation dampers brought up to more than minimum allowable efficiency.

  Critically needed were technicians who knew how to operate the systems without having to rely on rault to zylph their designs and purposes. For Vega Jumpoff was even now generating the embryonic field of stygumness that would be expanded to blanket all Earth. And so strong was the field, already, that localized casters could produce no zylphable hyperradiance within hundreds of miles of its center.

  In Command Central, August Pritchard, the Security Bureau’s assistant space director, confronted the bank of telescreens, fascinated with the surface scenes they were relaying.

  But he paused long enough to address the intercom: “What’s your guess on the radius of our field now, Swanson?”

  “About five thousand miles,” came the prompt reply. “We’ll have to ship more generator units up here and hook them into the suppressor circuit before we can enlarge it beyond that.”

  Pritchard undid the top brass button of his uniform blouse and the loose flesh of his neck, until then bulging out over the stiff collar, sagged comfortably.

  “How soon before we run another output test?” Swanson asked.

  “There’s a shuttle craft on the way up. He’ll give us a ‘mark’ as soon as he enters our stygumness.”

  Pritchard ran an impatient hand over his bare scalp. His nose wrinkled as he sniffed air that seemed once again to be cycling on the foul side. And, crossing back to the telescreen bank, he found his steps becoming disturbingly heavier. Station spin, still not under proper reciprocating control, seemed to be speeding up somewhat.

  Damn! When would they send someone who could straighten out the whole mess?

  They had said something about a man named Gregson. Used to be project engineer in charge of systems aboard VJO. Now there was someone who could help out! The hatch swung open to admit a gangling man whose height was only exaggerated by his high-neck uniform blouse bearing the Space Division insignia. Five stars on his collar identified him as director of that division.

  “Test ship approaching,” General Forrester announced. “We can watch it on No. 13 telescreen.”

  Pritchard energized No. 13 and its tube instantly showed the craft superimposed upon the blue-green pastel of Earth.

  “We’re still out of contact with Paris Ground Control,” Forrester disclosed. “Wonder what’s happened.”

  “Nothing significant, I’m sure. They’ve probably had their hands full pulling the string on those Valorian bases of operation.”

  “I suppose so. But what puzzles me is the fact that we’ve launched only four of our nuclear birds. I thought we had twenty-two Valorian cells staked out to smash.”

  “Takes time, I guess. We’ll get around to the others before the night’s out.”

  “But that’s just the point. We were supposed to hit them all at the same time so that none would get away.”

  Pritchard turned back to the array of telescreens. On the right, in the sunlit hemisphere, he watched a nuclear cloud boiling up over the Southern Ukraine; another in Egypt, east of Cairo. On the left, in the black of Earth’s night, two patches of residual nuclear fury coruscated against ebony velvet—one in Quebec and the other northwest of the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Makes a nice show,” Pritchard observed.

  “I’d enjoy it better if we could count more of them,” Forrester said uneasily.

  The intercom rasped, “Shuttle nearing stygumness field.”

  Pritchard glanced at the test ship, looming large now against a small Earth.

  Shortly, thereafter they received their “mark” from the craft as it climbed into Vega Jumpoff’s immense field of stygumness.

  “How about a range reading?” Pritchard called into the intercom.

  After a moment came the answer: “Eight thousand miles!”

  Pritchard grinned and nodded. “All we have to do is extend our radius to a little better than twelve thousand.”

  “Then we can move VJO down into a lower orbit and keep Earth perpetually—within its field—shielded from all hyperradiance.”

  “Only one hitch,” Pritchard reminded. “We need Gregson to get this wheel down there safely and stabilize the thing in its new orbit.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Gregson rolled over on taut canvas and winced from a deep ache in his chest. Then he remembered Madame Carnot’s and the laser fight and he sat up on the cot, shaking his head.

  All around were masonry walls damp with age and mottled by mold. The room was immense. A stairway hewed out of stone blocks climbed into the chamber along one wall, reversed itself and continued upward.

  Gripping his chest, he stumbled to a window. Below stretched a panorama of tumbled ramparts and battlements, surrounded by an outer moat. There were several smaller buildings, turrets, lesser embankments, bastions projecting into an inner moat. All was vine-covered, weed-infe
sted and crumbling with decay.

  Beyond the peripheral ditch, a wooded hill climbed toward blue sky. In the other direction, the same slope, mantled now with scraggly, neglected grapevines, continued on down to the bank of a broad, swift river.

  This could only be the Rhine Valley. And he was in a room halfway up the central tower of a medieval castle.

  Motion in the inner moat attracted his gaze and he peered through scrub trees growing from the ramparts and almost completely concealing two long-range hoppers. Then he remembered his glial cells and sensitized them. But he could zylph nothing in the stygumbraic blackness.

  Seconds later, however, a powerful surge of hyperradiance assaulted him. It had not been synthetically produced, for he could zylph its emanation from Chandeen. Someone had turned down a suppressor that had, up until then, been canceling out all rault and cloaking the castle in a field of artificial stygumness.

  Visually, he directed his attention at the two men who could be seen through the open hatch of the nearer hopper. Yet he could not zylph them, for the craft was concealed in a sphere of metadarkness which expanded and shrank in his hyperperception. Evidently, the fluctuating field was the same one that had recently enveloped him.

  Gregson turned his transsensory attention on the castle. It was fully abandoned except for two areas. In a decrepit chapel in the courtyard, several men were assembling components into a massive and complex device that very evidently, at first zylph, was designed for long-range, hyper-electromagnetic communication—a cosmic transmitter meant to function on a principle involving a tight-beam rault carrier signal.

  Two of the men were Valorians. Even from this distance it was not difficult to zylph their twin hearts. Scattered about the chapel and still producing hyperradiance, even though the artificial field of stygumness had recently collapsed, were several casters. They were like reassuring lanterns hung on the wall of a cave, Gregson thought, to push back the awful, threatening darkness.