Keith Laumer - End As a Hero.pdf - Keith Laumer - widez2

End as a Hero

In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire. The dream went on

and on; and then I was awake-and the fire was still there, fiercely burning

at me.

I moved to get away from the flames, and the real pain hit me. I tried to

go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no

go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.

I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an

unpadded acceleration couch-the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in

seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them.

I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than

should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm.

Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with

deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper

layers had burst.

There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my

right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended

pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl

to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a

couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the

thing, and then I was fading out again . . .

* * *

I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but

reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand

and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left

arm-well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by

a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling

me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a

sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet

hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining.

As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the

Gool-if I survived.

I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition

of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could

see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.

I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition-with a

broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull-I shouldn't have

been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar's CCC

to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an

emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken

femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a

cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was there-and it was time to get a

call through to TSA headquarters.

I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of

Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was

almost five minutes before the "acknowledge" came through from the

Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into

view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.

"Granthan!" he burst out. "Where are the others? What happened out

there?" I turned him down to a mutter.

"Hold on," I said. "I'll tell you. Recorders going?" I didn't wait for an

answer-not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:

"Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh-I think. I got out. I lost a

little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people

the drinks are on me."

I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen,

his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a

swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his

reaction to my report. I dozed off-and awoke with a start. Kayle was

talking.

"-your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the

disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?"

"How the hell do I know?" I yelled-or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning

on:

" . . . you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have

some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for

them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself

that you blacked out during the attack-and came to on the lifeboat, with no

recollection of how you got there.

"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without

warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility

of-what's that term you use?-hypercortical invasion. You know better than

most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.

"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk."

"What do I do now?" I stormed. "Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you

think of something? I need a doctor!"

Presently Kayle replied. "Yes," he said. "You'll have to enter a parking orbit.

Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to . . .

ah . . . restudy the situation." He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was

thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I

couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right

thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend-right up until the warheads

struck-that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death.

I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was

alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging

flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I

had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with

my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool

orders.

I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist,

who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I

was having weren't brilliant, but they were mine, all mine.

But how could I be sure of that?

Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful

as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their

tampering-not at a conscious level.

But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting

like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I

wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the

mind-and I had been prepared for just such an attack.

Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one

resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious-and see again

what had happened.

I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on

the trigger word that would key an autohypnotic sequence.

Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a

first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface

into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of

sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly

hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored

for attention. And deeper . . .

* * *

The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me.

Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction

scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence

of an alien intrusion.

And found it.

As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of

static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing

Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.

I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.

"It is a contact, Effulgent One!"

"Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold . . ."

"It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough!"

A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the

voices-yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate.

I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the

purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding

stimuli-then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I

watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to

crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment

toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt

ghostly flames whipping at me-and then the hatch was open and I pulled

myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the

locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the

disintegrating dreadnought-and the world-ending impact as I fell.

At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed

out again-fighting the invader.

"Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!"

"Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the

last filament of your life-force!"

Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are

instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed

the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my

subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to

leave me unaware of its tampering-at a conscious level.

Watching the Gool mind, I learned.

The insinuating probe-a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had

theorized-was no more than a pattern in emptiness . . .

But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been

done to me.

Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and

manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal,

the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.

Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to

pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable

void-and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening

dark shape.

There was a soundless shriek. "Effulgence! It reached out-touched me!"

* * *

Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the

outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous

immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia-a ton of

liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.

I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not

pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing

patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind . . .

I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a

fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling

an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each

monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable

position.

I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked

each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the

passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller

creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me,

were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport

the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds

where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium,

calcium, iron and all the metals-riches beyond belief in endless profusion.

No longer would the Gool tribe cluster-those who remained of a once-great

race-at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy-and

beyond.

But not if I could help it.

The Gool had evolved a plan-but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.

In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the

fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to

wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to

Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.

Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the

other mindfields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist.

Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an

unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal.

A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and

white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared

along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an

alien mind.

I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within

pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.

I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning

exploded in my mind.

From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its

lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind.

Matter across space.

* * *

"You've got to listen to me, Kayle," I shouted. "I know you think I'm a Gool

robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight.

Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is

too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I

can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area

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