A. Smith: Royal Road

“Yes, your grace. These instruments are nearly self-locating.”

Despite himself—despite the fact that the ultra-fine and ultra-fast jet spray went through the skin without an actual sensation—Duke Harald felt his muscles tighten. He grew a little dizzy. Just lack of sleep and overmuch imagination, he decided; and made himself relax and smile. Taking the empty hypospray, he wrapped it loosely in a handkerchief, placed the Untidy bundle on the floor, and crushed it underfoot with grinding heels. Bending and picking up the wadded mass of cloth and broken glass and twisted metal, he tossed it in the wall incinerator chute.

“And now,” Duke Harald said, and matched the words with action, “I’ll just stretch out on this bed and wait. Thirty minutes, more or less; then things are supposed to happen.”

The half hour dragged along. Borrow, apparently on orders from Count Godfrey, waited in an easy-chair, quiet and scarcely moving. Duke Harald felt vaguely glad of his presence.

At last the necessary time had passed. Confidently, Duke Harald reached out with his mind and groped for contact with the secretary. Nothing! Not a whisper yet; only blank mental silence.

He let five minutes more go by and tried again, this time more strongly. Still nothing.

Was there, he wondered, something he had failed to learn? Some trick of the mind, some knack like—he let his thoughts drift back to boyhood in search of an apt comparison—those hours he had spent without success, trying to—

“Can you wiggle your ears, Borrow?” he asked suddenly, completing the thought aloud. Then he noticed Borrow looking at him strangely, and the apprehensive, puzzled glance touched off a more erratic impulse. Shouting with laughter—while a corner of his mind looked on in helpless wonder—he tore a pillow from beneath his head, poised it carefully; and let it fly!

Borrow leaped to his feet and fled the scene of action.

Duke Harald bellowed jesting comments after him; and fell back on the bed, choking and gasping with mirth, wiping tears from his eyes.

Tears!

But they were more appropriate than laughter, now that he came to think of it; now that the esper drug had failed. For this was surely not telepathy. Far from it—this was more like sottish drunkenness. A swift depression seized Duke Harald, and he wept in truth, rolling on the bed, burying his face in the remaining pillow.

Exhausted, he lay still at last in a dull stupor. Vaguely he became aware that others had entered the room. He recognized the voice of Master Elwyn.

“…And I tell you that the drug does work. That it has worked! But in this matter, words are—”

Words, words, words! These are but wild and whirling words my lord. Laughter began again to bubble in Duke Harald’s throat.

“But—I do not understand—he said the drug was harmless!” That was Count Godfrey. The faint, protesting voice came thinly from the distance.

“Physically harmless. That is true. The drug produces total sensitivity to thought—to any thought. And what is closer to a man than his own mind? Even his own unconsciousness, with its long forgotten memories, its tangled and forbidden wishes? Expose an untrained consciousness to that, in its entirety, and—”

And then the drug took firmer hold. Within Duke Harald’s mind there grew a feeling of relentless pressure, of conflict, of barriers giving way before an almost overwhelming onslaught. He shouted loudly with exultant laughter—and, almost in that very instant, felt himself begin to weep with all the hopeless desperation of the damned.

A noiseless roaring filled his world. The most intolerable sound that he had ever heard or dreamed of, was here increased a thousandfold; raised to a tooth-grating pitch of shrill unbearable unpleasantness. And with it—adding to it, if addition could be possible—was the bleak assurance that the horrid thing would still go on; would never cease. Never, never, never—

Never, unless he stopped it.

That single thought became the final weapon of the entity that had been, and would be once again Duke Harald. And with that final weapon he began to fight. How, or in what fashion he could never after tell. For all of that most singularly awful episode was barred to him in later days.

But fight he did. His two months’ training, scanty though it was, may well have helped. And it is possible—nay, probable—that Master Elwyn violated his Prime Rule of Privacy and reached in a helping mind. But in the end it was perhaps a certain bedrock strength, bred in the bone and inmost core of generation after generation of a warlike race that had never known surrender; this it was what served and saved him.

And so Duke Harald fought. For long without real hope, with nothing to sustain him but that ultimate refusal to admit defeat. And gradually, and slowly he began to win. Began, in some vague manner to remake old barriers and to build new ones; began to stem the howling mental tumult.

Quiet at last! The final shield was fitted into place. His thoughts moved slowly now, but only with the slowness of exhaustion. He sank parsecs-deep in slumber.

Coffee aroma, drifting through the open door, awakened him at last. His first thought was that he was hungry. Eagerly he sat up; and discovered, first that someone had removed his clothing while he slept; and, more important, that a full twelve hours had elapsed.

Swiftly he dressed. And as he did so, Duke Harald let his mind scan over what had happened. He had taken the esper drug; that much was clear. But afterwards? His memory showed a curious blank—empty of content, yet filled with a shapeless sense of horror from which his thoughts drew back. To his surprise, he found that he was shaking. He had to sit upon the bed while he regained control; and perspiration started from his body.

Well! he thought. He had taken the esper drug. But—had it worked? Uncertainly, he tried to contact other thoughts. Just for a moment he seemed to catch a vagrant whisper from outside. But he was not sure. It could have been imagination.

Driven as much by puzzled apprehension as by hunger, he trailed the scent of coffee to the lower floor. And there he found Count Godfrey, Master Elwyn, and the answer to his riddle.

“Why is it,” Master Elwyn asked, sipping coffee while Duke Harald ate, “that humans are not ordinarily vested with the esper skill?”

Duke Harald only stared at him. The question seemed to be rhetorical.

“Because,” said Master Elwyn, “of the many aberrating processes which comprise the loosely-named unconscious mind. These processes are unconscious because they are dangerous; because they threaten the integrity of reason. We all acquire barriers against them, strong defenses.

“Unfortunately, our mental screens are not selective. They act most strongly against outside thoughts. In the natural state, telepathy is very near insanity. Indeed, it has been known for centuries that some psychotics—paranoid schizophrenics in particular—are weirdly sensitive to the mental states of others. And so the mind’s protection keeps it shut within the skull.”

“And the drug?”

“Inhibits the defenses. There you have the basic reason for the training. We try to draw the fangs of the unconscious; try to stabilize the conscious. Only the integrated mind can tolerate the esper skill.”

“If that’s the reason, why the secrecy?” Count Godfrey sounded skeptical.

“How many would believe they were not strong enough? Indeed, those who are least fitted would be most convinced of their superiority. Fools rush in where saner men might hesitate. Would you have us release an instrument of mass psychosis?”

“But the rumors?” asked Duke Harald. “The so-called myths? What of them?”

“To Terrans, they are only that—myths. We of the Institute originated most of them, in a calculated program of security. No one believes them in the slightest.”