A. Smith: Royal Road

So the pattern had repeated itself; the same tale told, with the same disclaimer of its truth! But Melton was speaking again.

“To be blunt,” he was saying with an air of finality, “there really does not seem to be any easy way—any royal road to telepathy.”

Nevertheless Duke Harald’s sense of urgency remained. There was still the problem of the aliens. And, a part of that problem, and yet peculiarly distinct, was his own private plan, now working so slowly towards fruition. As premier duke of Arkady, he had been able to persuade the Council to send him on this quest. But he was not naive enough to think that grudging consent meant an end to opposition. For he had rivals in the Council—Duke Charles, for one. And if those rivals came to realize how near completion were his plans—attainment of the esper skill was all that he now needed—then the noble weather vanes would change their minds, vote for his recall, and bring in a Terran adept. The more fools they, to risk another Altair!

The feeling of impatience was still with him as the hour drew on for another grueling session with his robot therapist. Of all the training at the Institute, these daily sessions seemed least relevant. And yet the adept-masters were without exception firm in their insistence on this aspect of the lengthy course. With slow reluctance Duke Harald made his way to the Hall of Therapy, and to the quiet windowless room where the robot waited.

The machine that faced him as he sank into the relaxing embrace of the special chair was, he knew, but an extension of the great computer banks buried bedrock deep in vaults beneath the Central Library. Yet he tended to endow it with an austere personality of its own.

Pressing his hands lightly to the glowing sensiplate that registered his personal pattern, he relaxed deeply and allowed the silent mechanisms to carry out their wonted ministrations. Deft mechanical hands swabbed his skin with pungent ether, massaged it with astringent conducting jellies, strapped on, taped on and otherwise affixed the spongy plastoid cubes that detected the electric potentials from the muscles underneath. A cunningly shaped helmet settled down about his ears, to hold against his skull the multiple probes of an electroencephalograph. A flat and hollow band coiled snakelike about one arm and was inflated; a pressure gauge nestled snugly against his diaphragm—recorders of blood pressure and breathing.

At early sessions these fittings had bothered the Arkadian; had kept him tense with vague discomfort. But apprehension had passed away with use. He now “wore” his instruments easily, like a suit of clothes.

As ever, the session started with semantic training. Similar but non-identical pairs of images appeared and flowed across the robot’s “face,” while a clear and smoothly modulated voice repeated, over and over, the ancient formula: “This is not this, this is not—”

More and more alike became the pictures; faster and faster they moved; until at length they blended in a vaguely shimmering band of light. The band steadied, brightened, and narrowed abruptly into the restlessly weaving pattern of the hypnagogic light. Duke Harald concentrated—he could not have done otherwise—as the pattern surged in complex synchrony with the slow rhythm of his breathing and the staccato beat of his heart. And as he concentrated, memory pictures came, to fuse with and displace the changing tapestry of light. To sharpen, as his eyelids flickered shut, into the full brilliance of the eidetic recall.

He was jouncing along a shadowed forest road in Arkady. The wheel of a scout car shook between his hands; the springs groaned audibly; and, in the right-hand bucket-seat his ser-geant-squire—who should by rights have driven—groaned beneath his breath. For Duke Harald, impatient of the slowness of ground transport, was noted as a demon-driver, and the ride was rough! Yet rough and slow as it was, anachronistic as it seemed, on a forest planet surface travel had its role and had been cultivated. For alien eyes watched out of space; alien raiders swooped hawklike from the lofty skies; and the mazelike forest paths gave secrecy.

But it was slow. Duke Harald pushed the car a trifle harder. His squire almost—not quite, but almost!—muttered protest. And then ducked involuntarily, as a red-winged pheasant flushed noisily from the roadside brush and rocketed low above them, the whir of its wings and its raucous cry quite clear above the hum of the electric motors.

Ahead the trees were starting to thin out, yielding place to narrow open fields cross-hatched with vineyards. The road sloped gently down to a broad and curving river, where a colorful huddle of little dwellings lay cupped in the bend between trees and water.

They broke from the forest. Both men, from long habit, raised their eyes to the thin cloud cover that the early sun had not yet burned away. Lifted their eyes—and on the instant became desperately busy!

Duke Harald crashed his right foot to the floor. The motor hum became an angry snarl; the cleated tires scrabbled at the dusty surface of the road. The car lurched forward into speed.

The sergeant-squire forgot his worries. One finger stabbed at a button on the dash, and an automatic sender began to shout its “Red Alert” along a microbeam. A gyro-mounted blaster rose smoothly from his housing. And the squire, bracing himself against the hard sway of the car, collapsed the half-screen in front of him and started to hurl bolt upon bolt of blue-white flame into the misty sky above the village.

Three slim, black, delta-winged spacecraft whirled there in a light circle. A fourth, slipping and fish-tailing, rode its flaming under-jets down to the village green. Smoke trails of tracer and of guided missiles wove a lacy net of death across the sky; eyes accustomed to the cool morning light, of the dim forest trails were dazzled by the sudden hot brilliance of energy beams; ears which had heard nothing louder than a bird’s startled cry were assaulted by a shrieking, chattering din. And already, on the outskirts of the village, a gayly painted house had crumpled into crazy shards.

“Raiders!” groaned Duke Harald. “And the local baron is away! They’ll have only hand weapons in the village.”

Not that those were to be despised. Weight for weight they were more potent than anything the aliens had to offer, depending as they did on bombs and rockets and other packaged high explosive. But still, hand blasters against spacecraft!

“One away!” yelled the squire suddenly, without looking up from his compensating gunsight. The beams of the handguns, reinforced now by heavier fire from the scout car’s weapon, had met in fortuitous but deadly focus. And at that point of meeting there blossomed an expanding ball of flame—above it a black shape, driving a hasty and erratic course for outer space.

“He’ll not be back!” said Duke Harald, blasting the scout car down the last slope and into the final turn in a screaming power skid.

And then, ahead—too near by several score of feet—a free-ball bomb sheered the corner from the closest red-roofed house, skipped to the road before its fuse let go, and exploded in a cloud of flame and dust and flying debris. The sergeant-squire screamed once, wordlessly. Moving with deceptive slowness, a jagged rocky missile crushed his gun and made a bloody ruin of his face. He sagged limply in his safety harness. Duke Harald cursed, pumped his brakes and fought to keep his vehicle under control. Too late! Lurching, whipsawing, the car plunged broadside into the swirling cloud of dust. It bounced once, and then a second time on broken paving stone—and flipped over on its back.

(At this point, Duke Harald almost backed away from the memory. And the eidetic images began to fade. Sternly he fought them back again.)