Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

When he could see again, Alper was half a dozen feet away, levering himself painfully towards his cane, breathing hard and watching Sawyer with bright, still eyes under the heavy lids.

“All right,” Alper said. “You’re quite a boy, Sawyer. I’ll get the cane myself. Sit up. You’re all right. I haven’t damaged you permanently—yet. Get up and take a chair, my boy. You and I have some talking to do. And first of all, to be on the safe side, there’s a matter of evidence that I intend to destroy.” He glanced around the room. “That metal waste-basket should do nicely to burn a film. So—give me that film, Sawyer.”

Sawyer said painfully, “Come and get it, you—”

Alper smiled.

A few final wisps of smoke rose from the waste-basket and faded. Sawyer, breathing a little hard, leaned back in his chair and stared at the old man. Curiously, now that the thunder had passed he felt no ill effects. He seemed perfectly normal. But his brain cringed at the thought of what Alper had just done to him—could do to him again, apparently at will. What was Alper saying now?

“You had better understand first exactly what has happened to you. Afterward you’ll realize that you are going to do precisely as I say from now on, or you will die. I’m willing to go a long way with you, because you’re a good man. You’re better than I expected. I admire you. I respect you. But I’ll kill you if I have to. Is that clear?”

“No,” Sawyer said, lifting a tentative hand toward his head. “Do you really expect to get away with this?”

“I do,” Alper said. “Go ahead, try to remove that transceiver. You can’t without killing yourself. There are tantalum probes making contact with your brain itself, through the bregma—the opening at the vault that closes as a man ages. Luckily, you’re still young enough to have a vestige of the fontanel still open. Luckily for me.”

Sawyer lowered his investigatory hand. He still felt thatif he could kill alper he could stop the thunder, or at least die trying. But information might show him a better way, and Alper seemed quite willing to talk.

“Maybe I couldn’t remove this thing,” Sawyer said, “but I could get it removed.”

“Possibly,” Alper said. “There’s a contact compression that will eventually form a semi-permanent ceramic-to-bone bonding, of course. But at present the tantalum probes as a nerve-contact serve the purpose. It’s an amazing little device, isn’t it?”

“Fascinating,” Sawyer said grimly. “Who did you steal it from?”

Alper chuckled.

“I’m not a bad technician myself,” he said. “Though I admit the original design wasn’t my idea. I did make some improvements. I saw possibilities the inventor didn’t. A miniature electrostrictive device like this—a transducer, let us say, which converts sound pressure to electric signals and back again—oh, I could see the possibilities very easily. It was simply a matter of applying the properties of light to the principles of sound. Sound, like light, can reflect, and can be amplified… Yes, my young friend—down through the bregma, into the cavities of your skull, reaches that transceiver to pick up sounds your senses are too dull to catch, and amplify them and reflect them back directly into the temporal lobe, the auditory area. And other brain-centers are involved too, as the wave-motions pass through motor and somesthetic areas. Implicit in your skull is the sound of the trumpets that shattered the walls of Jericho!”

He began to laugh. “You know what high frequency ultrasonics can do, don’t you? Shatter glass. Burn wood. Shake a human mind apart, Mr. Sawyer! And you might also consider the wave-motions of the brain—the alpha and kappa waves—which I believe the transceiver can receive and amplify.

“The beauty of it is, you can’t get away from it. It’s in you, inherent in your blood and breath and thoughts. If you could stop it—you die. But no one else can hear it. It’s subjective. And so is madness, my boy. This is a very special and literal version of madness. So I think, in the end, you’ll do as I ask.”

He watched Sawyer not without sympathy, smiling as he saw the younger man’s hands close in a tight, primitive clench.

“One other thing,” he said quickly. “No doubt you would like to kill me. Don’t. It would save nothing. You see, your body-field has a damping effect on the transceiver’s operation, which I can alter by the—ah—volume control of this.” He half drew from his pocket a small, flat metal case and thrust it back out of sight immediately. “If you tried to remove the transceiver, the farther it’s moved from your body-field, the less the damping effect, and that would soon kill you. My body-field provides a supplementary damper, but it takes the combined effects of both fields to keep the acoustic level of the transceiver below your threshold of safety. So if you took this control device from me—or if I died—you would die in either case. We would meet in Hell in no time. Out of breath, startled, I expect, but mutual murderers, and not the devil himself could convict either of us of the other’s death, they would happen so nearly at the same time.”

The bloodhound smile was genial.

“It’s a multi-purpose device, too. It also is clever enough to act as a microphone—and here is the receiver.” He patted his pocket. “It isn’t keyed to pick up the internalized sounds you find so uncomfortable; I made sure of that. But it does report to me, quite accurately, spoken conversations. So when you go down into the mine with Klai Ford soon and get the rest of the film she’s planted down there, I’ll be able to keep track of exactly what’s happening. I don’t expect there’ll be anything on the film this time. Klai was miraculously lucky.” He nodded at the waste-basket with its charred ashes.

“So,” he said, with an air of finality, “you’ll give me any further evidence you happen to run across. Meanwhile, you’ll report by radio to headquarters that this—this affair seems to be a false alarm. As for Klai, the safest thing she could do is leave Fortuna. If we can prove she has hallucinations—delusions of persecution—a year’s rest at some private sanitarium might be the best way to eliminate the risk of Nethe’s killing her. And Nethe will, if Klai persists in sticking her head in the lion’s mouth. Quite impersonally. Without malice. Nethe’s disinterest in ordinary human problems is—awkward, sometimes.”

“Who is she?” Sawyer asked.

Alper paused, frowned a little, and shook his head slowly, as though he were as puzzled as Sawyer.

“No questions,” he said. “Action, now. I have the whip hand, and I intend to use it. If you got away from me, you might find a way to remove the transceiver from your head—what man has made, man can unmake, I suppose. But I warn you, Sawyer, that if you get out of my sight without permission, I can and will kill you. You can never get out of my hearing, with your—your built-in microphone. Now my energy’s low. I used up too much of it, and I’ve got to get more. That means closing the mine, as Nethe wishes. I’ve got to keep my part of the bargain before she’ll keep hers. So—”

His cool gaze studied Sawyer calculatingly.

“You’re a young man,” he said. “You want to live, don’t you? Well, I repeat my previous offer. I expect you to say no. But my offer of a job for life, working for me, holds good at any time you care to accept it. What have you to say now, young man?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I was sent up here to do a job,” Sawyer said quietly. “Maybe I’ve failed. I’ve had failures before. Every man has.”

“Not every man,” Alper said, with a sudden flash of curious pride.