M. Harrison - THE CENTAURI DEVICE

Suddenly, and close: 'There's a whole nest of the buggers in here! Look alive, lads! — Let's have their trousers down! Where's that napalm!'

Truck shuddered. Bitter smoke had begun to drift down the empty corridor, nuzzling the corpses at his feet. He knew that voice, that awful gusto: he stood once more at the fulcrum, with the Galaxy shaking itself to pieces in a mad struggle for balance around him. 'Come on, Tiny.' He gazed warily round the abbattoir. The dead police stared back, their polarized contact lenses grim and gray and unblinking. 'I've got to find that bloody thing before they find me.'

General Caw's voice faded in the teeth of an Arab counterattack. Truck and Tiny, hermetic and apart, waded off hopelessly, deeper into the labyrinth, their shoulders hunched, the bunkers vibrant around them with the careless enthusiasm of the dance — Opener, Arab, Israeli, celebrating the abandoned figures and extravagant rituals of violence.

Tiny Skeffern dawdled once too often, and they missed each other in the dark. Truck ran wildly up and down the transit lanes bawling 'Tiny! Tiny! ' not caring who heard. Only echoes answered him. He stumbled about firing off one of his Chambers guns at shadows until the click-clack of the empty mechanism brought him to his senses. Groaning, he leaned on a wall, put his forehead to the cold damp rock. Another dependent astray in the absolute broil of Circumstance.

Thereafter, he wandered with the gradient like a thin jackal, avoiding the larger concentrations of military and trying to surprise smaller ones by leaping out at junctions with bared teeth and oaths. He came to an area of seemingly endless geological disturbance, picking his way through a great choke of rubble and collapsed ceilings to the fault-line lip, where he watched the water spill over and down into the planetary chasm, not quite sure what he was seeing.

By that time, the Device itself was exercising control over the bunker maze; Grishkin, who'd mapped the system for IWG less than a year previously, was roaming it in a mad daze; Arab and Israeli alike were hopelessly confused. Truck was being cut out and guided toward an initiation he'd feared all along. He blundered along the fault-line, not thinking about much.

Twenty minutes walking brought him to the central redoubt, Grishkin's markers and lights, and an anteroom where luminous fungi cloaked the pipes and cables, and the wind hissed up out of Centauri like a voice.

From the anteroom the bunker doors, jammed open for about a quarter of their travel, made a tall rectangle of light, peculiar and leaping, as if some sort of fire was burning inside.

Byes narrowed, he advanced.

He preferred light to darkness. If that seems trite, then remember that it was a decision made long before he stepped over the threshold of that bunker, and he meant it literally. Though he loved the streets after nightfall — the cold blind littered alleys of the docklands — he found his true environment out among the weird spectral particle displays of the dyne fields, and he had indulged himself under the kaleidomats of a hundred different Spacer's Raves on as many planets until his brain jumped and resonated to the beat of their strobes and their unpredictable shift of wavelength. None of that, however, prepared him for the Centauri Device.

It hit him, the moment he walked in, with a hammer of light and sound designed to crack his head open like a walnut, and the complex antenna of his central nervous system became abruptly a receptor for everything from a 30 c.p.s. epileptic flicker to the ultrasonics of nonspecific anxiety. It was like walking into a brick wall — lights, noise, radiation. Wild bursts of sound set fire to the contents of his skull; white light raped his eyes; pulsed infrared attacked his epidermal nerve endings -

The inhibitory neuron blocks of the CNS depolarized. Synapse points and potassium-sodium exchanges across the axon membranes flared up wildly, went into frantic activity then locked up solid; gate levels disordered, swooped, dropped to zero. Masses of irrelevant information stormed the sensory-motor cortex, smashing up through the thalamus and hypothalamus, howled triumphantly round the reverberatory pathways of the association cortex; nerve ignition reached a frenzy as something bypassed the damping effect of sodium ion supply deficiency and total constant excitation was achieved; all three cortices blew out like candles in the wind -

Somesthesis became nothing but a memory. Truck was deaf, dumb, and blind, without feeling, without volition. His nervous system had been captured and enslaved -

In the sub-millisecond period following this onslaught, while membrane potentials were bedding back down into the millivolt range (after measuring in actual volts and attaining terminal impulse propagation speeds of more than four hundred miles an hour), the Device got to work on his biology -

In the limited sense, Captain John Truck was no longer there, conscious or otherwise: he could sense nothing; he could not order his limbs, nor was he aware of any limbs to order or any essential 'Truck' to order them — he existed solely as a metaphysic and a problem of philosophy. In that, he was lucky. Pain scorched up every nerve in his body, got in among the cells and began to unwind the dextro-rotatory helix — he didn't feel it; fingernails scraped samples from the marrow of his bones, broached the canal of his backbone, and dabbled in his cerebrospinal fluid — he didn't know; unbelievable methods of genetic exploration were loose in his skull and gnawing like the larvae of some parasitic wasp — he couldn't tell.

He couldn't tell. The Device, having research into his mere chemical credentials well in hand, had turned to psychometry — of a sort. Off in some debatable realm where thoughts drag themselves around without benefit of a single brain cell between them, Truck was looking at pictures. Pictures -?

— Everything he most desired: the secret of a new propulsion fitted to the Ella Speed (which was now somehow longer and slimmer, chased and inlaid, with a white fire flaring at its stern) — immense brass wheels, concentric and eccentric, which might enable him to shoot through into unmapped Galaxies; a girl he had never seen, Ruth Berenici's scar transfiguring her face; the studio of Swinburne Sinclair-Pater, a poem in porcelain; a drug; Fix the bos'n alive and well and baring his filed teeth, his stomach all neatly sewed up; finally, and very briefly, a scene at the Spacer's Rave -

Tiny Skeffern, immobile under the lights, a quirky smile on his lips — and a new music to replace the old, boiling from the H-line cabinets in a tidal wave fit to inundate the Galaxy -

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From that first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more , more ; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.

His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest: but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other.