Keith Laumer: Test to Destruction

He strained against his chains. “I can’t tell you,” he croaked. “Don’t you understand, nothing is worth this horror! Nothing…”

Nothing he could have done would have saved her. She crouched on the raft, doomed. But he could join her—

But not this time. This time chains of steel kept him from her. He hurled himself against them, and tears blinded his eyes…

Smoke blinded his eyes. He looked down, saw the faces upturned below. Surely, easy death was preferable to living immolation. But he covered his face with his arms and started down…

Never betray your trust! The woman’s voice rang clear as a trumpet across the narrow dungeon.

Daddy! the child screamed.

We can die only once! the woman called.

The raft plunged downward into boiling chaos…

“Speak, damn you!” The Inquisitor’s voice had taken on a new note. “I want the names, the places! Who are your accomplices? What are your plans? When will the rising begin? What signal are they waiting for? Where… ? When… ?”

Mallory opened his eyes. Blinding white light, a twisted face that loomed before him, goggling.

“Excellency! He’s awake! He’s broken through…”

“Pour full power into him! Force, man! Force him to speak!”

“I—I’m afraid, Excellency! We’re tampering with the mightiest instrument in the universe: a human brain! Who knows what we may be creating—”

Koslo struck the man aside, threw the control lever full against the stop.

… The darkness burst into a coruscating brilliance that became the outlines of a room. A transparent man whom he recognized as Koslo stood before him. He watched as the dictator turned to him, his face contorted.

“Now talk, damn you!”

His voice had a curious, ghostly quality, as though it represented only one level of reality.

“Yes,” Mallory said distinctly. “I’ll talk.”

“And if you lie—” Koslo jerked an ugly automatic pistol from the pocket of his plain tunic. “I’ll put a bullet in your brain myself!”

“My chief associates in the plot,” Mallory began, “are…” As he spoke, he gently disengaged himself—that was the word that came to his mind—from the scene around him. He was aware at one level of his voice speaking on, reeling off the facts for which the other man hungered so nakedly. And he reached out, channeling the power pouring into him from the chair… spanning across vast distances compressed now to a dimensionless plane. Delicately, he quested farther, entered a curious, flickering net of living energies. He pressed, found points of weakness, poured in more power—

A circular room leaped into eerie visibility. Ranged around it were lights that winked and glowed. From ranked thousands of cells, white wormforms poked blunt, eyeless heads…

HE IS HERE! The Egon shrieked the warning, and hurled a bolt of pure mind-force along the channel of contact and met a counter-bolt of energy that seared through him, blackened and charred the intricate organic circuitry of his cerebrum, left a smoking pocket in the rank of cells. For a moment, Mallory rested, sensing the shock and bewilderment sweeping through the leaderless Ree mind-segments. He felt the automatic death-urge that gripped them as the realization reached them that the guiding over-power of the Egon was gone. As he watched, a unit crumpled inward and expired. And another—

“Stop!” Mallory commanded. “I assume control of the mind-complex! Let the segments link in with me!”

Obediently, the will-less fragments of the Ree mind obeyed.

“Change course,” Mallory ordered. He gave the necessary instructions, then withdrew along the channel of contact.

“So… the great Mallory broke.” Koslo rocked on his heels before the captive body of his enemy. He laughed. “You were slow to start, but once begun you sang like a turtledove. I’ll give you my orders now, and by dawn your futile revolt will be a heap of charred corpses stacked in the plaza as an example to others!” He raised the gun.

“I’m not through yet,” Mallory said. “The plot runs deeper than you think, Koslo.”

The dictator ran a hand over his gray face. His eyes showed the terrible strain of the last hours.

“Talk, then,” he growled. “Talk fast!”

As he spoke on, Mallory again shifted his primary awareness, settled into resonance with the subjugated Ree intelligence. Through the ship’s sensors, he saw the white planet swelling ahead. He slowed the vessel, brought it in on a long parabolic course which skimmed the stratosphere. Seventy miles above the Atlantic, he entered a high haze layer, slowed again as he sensed the heating of the hull.

Below the clouds, he sent the ship hurtling across the coast. He dropped to treetop level, scanned the scene through sensitive hull-plates—

For a long moment he studied the landscape below. Then suddenly he understood…

“Why do you smile, Mallory?” Koslo’s voice was harsh; the gun pointed at the other’s head. “Tell me the joke that makes a man laugh in the condemned seat reserved for traitors.”

“You’ll know in just a moment…” He broke off as a crashing sound came from beyond the room. The floor shook and trembled, rocking Koslo on his feet. A dull boom echoed. The door burst wide.

“Excellency! The capital is under attack!” The man fell forward, exposing a great wound on his back. Koslo whirled on Mallory—

With a thunderous crash, one side of the room bulged and fell inward. Through the broached wall, a glittering torpedo-shape appeared, a polished intricacy of burnished metal floating lightly on pencils of blue-white light. The gun in the hand of the dictator came up, crashed deafeningly in the enclosed space. From the prow of the invader, pink light winked. Koslo spun, fell heavily on his face.

The twenty-eight-inch Ree dreadnought came to rest before Mallory. A beam speared out, burned through the chair control panel. The shackles fell away.

I/we await your/our next command . The Ree mind spoke soundlessly in the awesome silence.

Three months had passed since the referendum which had swept John Mallory into office as Premier of the First Planetary Republic. He stood in a room of his spacious apartment in the Executive Palace, frowning at the slender black-haired woman as she spoke earnestly to him.

“John—I’m afraid of that—that infernal machine, eternally hovering, waiting for your orders.”

“But why, Monica? That infernal machine, as you call it, was the thing that made a free election possible—and even now it’s all that holds Koslo’s old organization in check.”

“John—” Her hand gripped his arm. “With that—thing—always at your beck and call, you can control anyone, anything on Earth! No opposition can stand before you!”

She looked directly at him. “It isn’t right for anyone to have such power, John. Not even you. No human being should be put to such a test!”

His face tightened. “Have I misused it?”

“Not yet. That’s why…”

“You imply that I will?”

“You’re a man, with the failings of a man.”

“I propose only what’s good for the people of Earth,” he said sharply. “Would you have me voluntarily throw away the one weapon that can protect our hard-won freedom?”

“But, John—who are you to be the sole arbiter of what’s good for the people of Earth?”

“I’m Chairman of the Republic—”

“You’re still human. Stop—while you’re still human!”

He studied her face. “You resent my success, don’t you? What would you have me do? Resign?”

“I want you to send the machine away—back to wherever it came from.”