The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

Doctors Grosbeck and Timofeyev could see Vomact’s face go white with the impact of the pain machine, but Vomact kept his voice under control and said evenly and loudly to the patient, “ Who - are - you ?”

The patient said flatly, “Elizabeth.”

The answer was foolish but the tone was rational.

Vomact pulled his head out from under the net, shouting again at the patient, “ Who - are - you ?”

The naked man replied, speaking very clearly:

“Chwinkle, chwinkle, little chweehle

I am feeling very feeble!”

Vomact frowned and murmured to the robot, “More pain. Turn it up to pain ultimate.”

The body threshed under the net, trying to resume its swim on the concrete.

A loud wild braying cry came from the victim under the net. It sounded like a screamed distortion of the name Elizabeth, echoing out from endless remoteness.

It did not make sense.

Vomact screamed back, “ Who - are - you ?”

With unexpected clarity and resonance, the voice came back to the three doctors from the twisting body under the net of pain:

“I’m the shipped man, the ripped man, the gypped man, the dipped man, the hipped man, the tripped man, the tipped man, the slipped man, the flipped man, the nipped man, the ripped man, the clipped man-aah!” His voice choked off with a cry and he went back to swimming on the floor, despite the intensity of the pain net immediately above him.

The doctor lifted his hand. The pain net stopped buzzing and lifted high into the air.

He felt the patient’s pulse. It was quick. He lifted an eyelid. The reactions were much closer to normal.

“Stand back,” he said to the others.

“Pain on both of us,” he said to the robot.

The net came down on the two of them.

“ Who are you ?” shrieked Vomact, right into the patient’s ear, holding the man halfway off the floor and not quite knowing whether the body which tore steel walls might not, somehow, tear both of them apart as they stood.

The man babbled back at him: “I’m the most man, the post man, the host man, the ghost man, the coast man, the boast man, the dosed man, the grossed man, the toast man, the roast man, no! no! no!”

He struggled in Vomact’s arms. Grosbeck and Timofeyev stepped forward to rescue their chief when the patient added, very calmly and clearly:

“Your procedure is all right, doctor, whoever you are. More fever, please. More pain, please. Some of that dope to fight the pain. You’re pulling me back. I know I am on Earth. Elizabeth is near. For the love of God, get me Elizabeth! But don’t rush me. I need days and days to get well.”

The rationality was so startling that Grosbeck, without waiting for orders from Vomact, as chief doctor, ordered the pain net lifted.

The patient began babbling again: “I’m the three man, the he man, the tree man, the me man, the three man, the three man…” His voice faded and he slumped unconscious.

Vomact walked out of the vault. He was a little unsteady.

His colleagues took him by the elbows.

He smiled wanly at them: “I wish it were lawful… I could use some of that condamine myself. No wonder the pain nets wake the patients up and even make dead people do twitches! Get me some liquor. My heart is old.”

Grosbeck sat him down while Timofeyev ran down the corridor in search of medicinal liquor.

Vomact murmured, “How are we going to find his Elizabeth? There must be millions of them. And he’s from Earth Four too.”

“Sir and doctor, you have worked wonders,” said Grosbeck. “To go under the net. To take those chances. To bring him to speech. I will never see anything like it again. It’s enough for any one lifetime, to have seen this day.”

“But what do we do next?” asked Vomact wearily, almost in confusion.

That particular question needed no answer.

The Lord Crudelta had reached Earth.

His pilot landed the craft and fainted at the controls with sheer exhaustion.

Of the escort cats, who had ridden alongside the space craft in the miniature spaceships, three were dead, one was comatose and the fifth was spitting and raving.

When the port authorities tried to slow the Lord Crudelta down to ascertain his authority, he invoked Top Emergency, took over the command of troops in the name of the Instrumentality, arrested everyone in sight but the troop commander, and requisitioned the troop commander to take him to the hospital. The computers at the port had told him that one Rambo, “sans origine,” had arrived mysteriously on the grass of a designated hospital.

Outside the hospital, the Lord Crudelta invoked Top Emergency again, placed all armed men under his own command, ordered a recording monitor to cover all his actions if he should later be channeled into a court-martial, and arrested everyone in sight.

The tramp of heavily armed men, marching in combat order, overtook Timofeyev as he hurried back to Vomact with a drink. The men were jogging along on the double. All of them had live helmets and their wirepoints were buzzing.

Nurses ran forward to drive the intruders out, ran backward when the sting of the stun-rays brushed cruelly over them. The whole hospital was in an uproar.

The Lord Crudelta later admitted that he had made a serious mistake.

The Two Minutes’ War broke out immediately.

You have to understand the pattern of the Instrumentality to see how it happened. The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a plenum of the low, the middle and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and to keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong - ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed.

With three Lords, the situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to citizen status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.

This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan: “Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!”

The Lord Crudelta had seized the troops - not his troops, but the light regular troops of Manhome Government - because he feared that the greatest danger in the history of man might come from the person whom he himself had sent through space 3.

He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his command - an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the incomparable communications net, both open and secret, reinforced by thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged from the Ancient Wars.

Overriding, overridden!

These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before recorded time began. Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of weapons, most often by cutting in on other peoples’ mechanical and social controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as they had taken them.