The Ganymede Takeover

by Philip K. Dick

  “I notice the same thing,” Percy X said. “It’s as if something is wrong with time, like there’s no clear separation between past and future.” He had a puzzled expression on his face; his eyes worked, darting and penetrating, as he considered the matter. Then all at once he started visibly. “You know what it means, don’t you Paul?”

  “No,” Paul said guardedly, never once taking his eyes off the crouching Neeg-part leader.

  “I’ve already won,” Percy X said. “Somewhere up ahead of us in time I’ve already turned on the machine, and as we get closer to it we begin to feel its emanations. Didn’t Balkani say that space and time are just illusions produced by selective attention? This proves it, don’t you see? And it proves there’s no way to stop me.” My turning on the machine is inevitable.

  There’s only one thing I can do, Paul Rivers realized with dismay. If I’m going to keep him from killing us all I’ve got to shoot him. But I can’t, not unarmed and helpless as he is.

  “Helpless?” Percy X said sardonically. He started to his feet.

  Paul pulled the trigger, but when the searing blast bored a hole through the rock behind Percy X the man was not there; an instant before he had sprung out of danger, rolling over once and leaping to his feet, just a little closer to Paul.

  “You see?” Percy X said, taking another step forward.

  There was something wrong with the light. Instead of coming straight down it seemed bent, as if forming a cone of force between Percy X and himself. And at the same time Paul felt a curious numbness descending over his mind; he had to fight to keep his attention on what he intended to do.

  Percy X took another careful step forward. “Go ahead, Paul buddy. Shoot me if you can.”

  Paul fired again. This time Percy jumped slightly to one side, graceful and lithe.

  “Hey, Paul buddy,” Percy gasped, “you know something? Mekkis is tuned in on me now, watching you through my eyes, ready to link up with the Ganymedian group mind just before I turn on the machine. We’re really going to zap them, man; we’re really going to give it to them. He tells me that space looks funny where he is, too, and time seems to be getting mixed up. He says that he had an Oracle who said this would happen, so it’s going to happen, Paul baby, and you better believe it.”

  Percy X took another step forward. He stood, now, perhaps nine feet away. One good leap, Paul realized, and he’s got me.

  “You are so right, man,” Percy said, and tensed for the leap.

  Paul fired, just burning Percy’s shirt, then fired again, missing him completely. He had no opportunity to fire a third time; Percy X felled him with a judo chop that sent him sprawling in the dust, virtually unconscious. The last thing Paul saw before he blacked out was Joan Hiashi frowning at him and saying, “Watch out; you almost fell on the anthill.”

  They’re so careless, Joan Hiashi thought. She watched without saying anything further as Percy X snatched up Paul’s laser rifle and threw it over a nearby slope; the big Neeg-part leader was laughing now, with the gloating snarl of a victor, and he continued laughing, but more quietly, to himself, as he strode toward the entrance of the cave.

  Joan returned her attention to the ant colony on the ground before her. And frowned.

  Something had further upset the ants. They had begun to wander aimlessly, instead of going about their business in their usual orderly fashion.

  She heard a moan and glanced questioningly up again.

  Paul Rivers had dragged himself to his feet, shaking his head vigorously in an effort to clear it. He peered into the cave, saw Percy X at the entrance and, although still by no means recovered from the judo chop, started toward Percy X at a clumsy, weaving run. Percy X looked back, saw Paul coming, and sprang through the entrance into the dark interior of the cavern. A moment later Paul, too, had disappeared into the cave; Joan heard the sound of scuffling and then a strangled, half-human cry, followed by silence.

  Hearing nothing more after an interval she bent down to examine the ants more closely. Suddenly a bird fell nearby, still fluttering; then another and another.

  With a trace of amusement Joan thought, It’s raining birds.

  A thought came to Marshal Koli from one of the leaders of the clock faction, a thought tinged with annoyance. “Mekkis just tuned in.”

  Koli shrugged. What difference, he thought, does that make?

  He stretched out his tongue toward the firing button, noticing with real alarm a peculiar effect of light and a sensation of déjà vu, as if he had done this same thing many times before.

  It’s just the excitement, he decided.

  Then, it seemed to him, the button started to move away from him. His tongue grew longer and longer, reaching for it, but still it moved away. Now his tongue had become longer than his body and was yet growing; the button, however, remained no closer than before. With a madness born out of panic Koli guessed—correctly—that the button was moving away from him not in space but in time.

  What’s going on here? he demanded of the Great Common, and, as if to answer his question, he suddenly found himself in the mind of the turncoat Mekkis.

  Mekkis thought, All right, you great and glorious Common. I, Rudolph Balkani, am killing you, and you know that I am killing you and you will go on knowing it for a long time. Into the sensory withdrawal tank, all of you worms!

  Trying to remember who he himself was, Koli found that his name had escaped him. He knew only that it was neither Mekkis nor Balkani; he was someone who had intended to push a button, Ah, I know, he thought, I am Percy X! And he found himself reaching with a dark-skinned finger for a pushbutton on a small but somehow infinitely potent machine in a cave within Terran mountains.

  And then the light bent and bent and bent, making a tube of greenish gray, a tunnel down which the one huge dark-skinned finger slowly moved, year after year.

  If you decide to use the thing, he thought, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

  Then he felt the needle enter his Percy-Koli-Balkani arm.

  The dark finger at last reached the button, while a cloud of eyes watched in mute horror and all the stars in space screamed in pain-ecstasy. The dark finger pushed the button, while armies of pyrotechnic phantasms flickered in and out of being like a movie rushing through a projector at breakneck speed: whole scenes appeared superimposed over one another. And music sounded, too, also playing itself out at a frantic pace, so high-pitched that only an animal should have been able to hear it…yet he could hear it anyhow.

  And then the finger broke, and the bent light, unable to take any more stress, broke also, and as the sound abruptly faded out and the light dimmed away to nothingness his last thought sounded in the emptiness. Who am I?

  Becoming darkness, he could not answer his own question, because darkness does not speak. Nor think. Nor feel. It only sees.

  XVI

  GUS SWENESGARD stood before the cracked bureau mirror in his room, the finest in the hotel, and toasted himself in expensive pre-war Cutty Sark Scotch. To the future world ruler, he said to himself, and drained the tall cracked glass. An unnatural lighting effect began to manifest itself, a sort of tunnel vision combined with a graying of the light; Gus, however, ignored it, supposing it to be only a consequence of the liquor.

  This stuff, he reflected with slurred approval, has really got the old puzoom!

  Then the lights winked out.

  I’d better call one of the maintenance Toms, he thought with annoyance.

  But when he tried to speak, nothing happened. It was as if, he realized, he had no vocal cords, or even any tongue or lips. He tried to move his hands up to touch his face—only to find that his hand, also, was missing.

  And, he discovered, so were his feet and legs and body.

  He listened, and heard not the slightest sound in the darkness. Not even the beating of his own heart. Good God, he thought. I’m dead!

  He strained to make out something, anything, even if it consisted of nothing more than a figment of
his own mind. The only item, however, which he could conjure up appeared to be a faint afterimage of that which he had been watching at the moment the darkness came: his own reflection in the cracked old hotel mirror.

  Now, experiencing himself as—not a person—but a disembodied ghost, he stared at his pseudo-reflection and felt sudden and enormous aversion. All that flesh, that sweating, ugly, bloated flesh! He sprang back from it, watched with relief as it grew smaller and dimmer in the distance.

  A detached feeling of freedom came over him, as if he could now, having shed his solid body, fly through space and even time without hindrance.

  So this is what it’s like, he said to himself, to be an angel.

  There has been a terrible mistake, Mekkis thought in the blackness.

  This in no way resembled what he had anticipated on the basis of Dr. Balkani’s Oblivion Therapy. He had expected horrors, hallucinations, a variety of grotesque and fantastic images or perhaps light phenomena composed of whirling discs of pure color. All that he had read in the papers, books and monographs of Balkani, plus all that he had heard about the illusion projectors used by the Neeg-parts—

  But nothing, Mekkis thought. “Nothing” is not right.

  Even more painful than the experience itself was the thought that Balkani had been wrong, fundamentally wrong.

  What deluded game have I been playing with myself? he wondered. I’m not Balkani. I’m not even a worm called Mekkis. I am a part, not a whole; I am just one of many organs in the great body called the Common, but I am a cancerous organ, and now I’ve succeeded in killing the entity of which I am a part.

  Without the aid of creeches no Ganymedian of the ruling class could survive more than a few days. And in this darkness neither he nor anyone else could summon a single creech.

  This is death, Mekkis thought: death for all of us. But it’s not as I imagined it would be. I thought I would be able to savor the agonies of my enemies in the Common; I believed it would be a grand and spectacular doom, like the final chords of something made of music. But it is not.

  It is nothing, absolutely nothing. And I am utterly alone in it.

  Somewhere in the desolation of the Ganymedian administrator’s mind a voice seemed to be saying, “Your death…will be much worse.” The Oracle. And it spoke the truth.

  I’ve failed, Paul Rivers thought, lying buried in the darkness. I had a grip on his throat but he was too strong for me and we were too close to the machine. Somehow he managed to reach it and turn it on. And now he’s stopped the clock at last.

  However, Paul did not panic; he did not give up quite yet. He relaxed his mind and tried to think as clearly as possible. And, because of the absolute lack of interference and distraction, this proved easy to do.

  It would seem, he decided, that my autonomic nervous system is maintaining my body satisfactorily, since my mind is still functioning too well to be under the influence of any difficulty emanating from my somatic body. In that case, my body, like my mind, is also perfectly functional—though I have no way of knowing if it can obey the commands of my brain.

  Experimentally, he ordered his hand to move in the direction of the machine, as he remembered it, but instantly ran into a canceling factor; he did not know any longer which way was up and which was down, let alone in which direction he could find the machine. Without sensory feedback he could not act.

  And yet, he thought, if I thrash at random, the odds are good that I might accidentally come in contact with the machine, hit it and possibly break it. It’s a reasonably delicate construct, as I recall from my brief glimpse of it.

  For a considerable time Paul Rivers sent out signals to his body, commanding that it gyrate, then to kick, then flail its arms. Nothing, as far as he could determine, happened; he could not even sense ground under his feet—gravity, that fundamental ubiquity, seemed to have become suspended.

  He noticed, then, a slight feeling of dizziness.

  It might be an indication of exertion, he thought with a flash of hope—and redoubled his efforts. Still nothing happened.

  The longer that device stays on, he realized, the more damage it will do; the effect must be radiating concentrically and God knows where it will weaken and hence terminate. I’ve got to think of something.

  A stray thought drifted into his mind. According to Balkani’s theories, Joan Hiashi, because she had been detached from the shared reality by Oblivion Therapy, must be immune to the impulse of the machine. That means, he realized, that Joan could turn it off.

  He instructed his voice to shout and his lips to form words. “Joan! Turn off the machine!” Again and again he sent out the orders to his body, having no idea whether or not he was actually inducing a palpable sound. He kept it up for what subjectively seemed at least an hour…but still the blackness continued.

  Again he paused to think. The key, if one existed, lay in Balkani’s theories somewhere. But where? I wish, he said to himself, I had studied Oblivion Therapy and Centerpoint Theory more intensively, instead of merely skimming them as I did.

  Centerpoint Theory.

  That might be it.

  According to Balkani’s Centerpoint hypothesis, a shortcut existed through which contact would be possible between any particle of matter and any other particle, no matter how distant. It was through this Centerpoint that the aural vibrations passed in long range telepathy. Hence, on the basis of this theory, Balkani had managed to train quite a number of people—such as Percy X—to penetrate minds at a considerable distance. But actually the theory implied that anyone, under the proper conditions, might be capable of creating telepathic contact. After all, everyone held a relationship to the Centerpoint.

  That means, Paul realized, that I might function as a telepath, at least theoretically. Assuming Balkani was correct.

  Again his thoughts turned to Joan Hiashi. He could not be, of course, certain that she had remained unaffected by the machine, but, if she was unaffected, that meant that, at this moment, she might be the sole person in the system worth contacting. To contact anyone else would simply be to share his blindness, to merge it with theirs.

  How had Balkani claimed that individuality was established? By selective awareness. I am Paul Rivers, he realized, because I am unaware of the sensations being experienced by someone else, say by Joan Hiashi. Ordinarily my own direct sensations would drown out anything I might pick up from her. But now, when I have no sensations, even faint impressions that she may be undergoing will be infinitely stronger than my own.

  He began by imagining himself to be a woman.

  I am small, delicate, vulnerable, he told himself. I perceive reality in the yin mode, rather than the yang. I am sensitive, flowing, graceful.

  It was not hard, he discovered, to hallucinate all these sensations with perfect conviction, since no real sensory impressions existed to counter them.

  And now, he decided, that I am a woman, I must individualize, become a specific woman. And I know which major character trait it is that delineates Joan. It is detachment. She is the most detached woman on the planet. So I, to become her, must also be detached…but I must not become so detached that I, like her, am indifferent to the fate of mankind.

  How easily my personality splits, he discovered. He had always thought that only a schizophrenic could achieve it, but actually it appeared to be the most simple act in the world—at least in this world that surrounded him now.

  On the other hand, he thought with grim amusement, perhaps I am a schizophrenic and just never knew it.

  Then, abruptly, he felt something. A very faint, yet somehow vital sensation; he could tell instantly that its source did not lie in his own imagination. Cold. And pressure. He was seated on something. Something hard. The sensations came too intense to be forced mental constructs; he was a woman. And, opening his eyes, he knew that the woman was Joan.

  There, in the dirt before him, wandered ants, completely disorganized, some on their backs kicking their feet helplessly in the air, some sc
rambling blindly, aimlessly about. The sky had darkened considerably, which meant that some time, probably hours, had already passed. Joan sat listening to the ebb and fall of a great throng of animal screams and moans and wails that echoed and reechoed from the surrounding woods, and Paul, through her ears, heard their travail, too. He felt her pleasure at the sound, her enjoyment of it as music, her indifference to the suffering that it represented. In his revulsion to this obliqueness he almost drew back from contact with her, almost broke the delicate link between their two minds.

  It is not my job, he realized, to judge her. And with this understanding he found himself once again fully aware of all that she sensed. And thought. That, to him, constituted the strangest part; her thoughts could have been those of a creature which had evolved on another world entirely: they seemed so alien. Yet there was something familiar about them.

  There’s been a part of me like that, he reflected. A part of me that only wants to watch, never to act.

  All right, Joan, he thought. Watch this. He sent a mental command to the girl’s right hand, telling it to rise. It fluttered a little but remained where it was.

  Let it happen, Joan, he thought strongly, with all his will in fact.

  She let it happen; slowly her hand rose to hang before her face, while she gazed at it in wonder and delight, thinking that it had moved all by itself. No resistance existed in her; whatever he willed her body to do, that it did, while she simply enjoyed the sensation of being possessed by a spirit which was not herself.

  He told her body to get up. It got up. He told her body to walk toward the cave; it walked toward the cave.

  How strange it feels, Paul thought, to experience reality through another person’s body and percept-system. I need to make constant allowances for her smaller size and lighter weight, as well as for the special feminine swing that comes from her differently jointed pelvis. He now entered the cave—and stopped, trying to penetrate the deep blackness ahead. As his pupils dilated he saw something that shocked him more than anything else he had seen during these last days. He saw himself.