Asylum, page 7
“Quick!” she said breathlessly. “Yield, yield!”
Leigh scarcely heard; for that other mind that had been lingering in his brain, surged forward in its incredible way. He heard himself say:
“I’ll trust your promise because I can’t resist such an appeal. You can kiss‘your head off. I guess I can stand it—”
There was a blue flash, an agonizing burning sensation that spread in a flash to every nerve of his body.
The anguish became a series of tiny pains, like email needles piercing a thousand bits of bis flesh. Tingling, writhing a little, amazed that he was still alive, Leigh opened his eyes.
He felt a wave of purely personal surprise.
The woman lay slumped, lips half twisted off of his, body collapsed hard across his chest. And the mind, that blazing mind was there, watching—as the tall figure of the Dreegh man sauntered into the room, stiffened, and then darted forward.
He jerked her limp form into his arms. There was the same kind of blue flash as their lips met, from the man to the woman. She stirred finally, moaning. He shook her brutally.
“You wretched fool!” he raged. “How did you let a thing like that happen? You would have been dead in another minute, if I hadn’t come along.”
“I—don’t—know.” Her voice was thin and old. She sank down to the floor at his feet, and slumped there like a tired old woman. Her blond hair straggled, and looked curiously faded. “I don’t know, Jeel. I tried to get his life force, and he got mine instead. He—”
She stopped. Her blue eyes widened. She staggered to her feet. “Jeel, he must be a spy. No human being could do a thing like that to me.
“Jeel”—there was sudden terror in her voice— “Jeel, get out of this room. Don’t you realize? He’s got my energy in him. He’s lying there now, and whatever has control of him has my energy to work with—”
“All right, all right.” He patted her fingers. “I assure you he’s only a human being. And he’s got your energy. You made a mistake, and the flow went the wrong way. But it would take much more than that for anyone to use a human body successfully against us. So—”
“You don’t understand!”
Her voice shook. “Jeel, I’ve been cheating. I don’t know what got into me, but I couldn’t get enough life force. Every time I was able, during the four times we stayed on Earth, I sneaked out.
”I caught men on the street. I don’t know exactly how many because I dissolved their bodies after I was through with them. But there were dozens. And he’s got all the energy I collected, enough for scores of years, enough for—don’t you see?—enough for them.”
MMy dear!” The Dreegh shook her violently, as a doctor would an hysterical woman. “For a million years, the great ones of Galactic have ignored us and—”
He paused. A black frown twisted his long face. He whirled like the tiger man he was, snatching at his gun—as Leigh stood up.
The man Leigh was no longer surprised at— anything. At the way the hard cords fell rotted from his wrists and legs. At the way the Dreegh froze rigid after one look into his eyes. For the first shock of the tremendous, the almost cataclysmic truth was already in him.
’’There is only one difference,” said Leigh in a voice so vibrant that the top of his head shivered from the unaccustomed violence of sound. “This time there are two hundred and twenty-seven Dreegh ships gathered in one concentrated area. The rest—and our records show only a dozen others—we can safely leave to our police patrols.”
The Great Galactic, who had been William Leigh, smiled darkly and walked toward his captives. “It has been a most interesting experiment in deliberate splitting of personality. Three years ago, our time manipulators showed this opportunity of destroying the Dreeghs, who hitherto had escaped by reason of the vastness of our galaxy.
“And so I came to Earth, and here built up the character of William Leigh, reporter, complete with family and past history. It was necessary to withdraw into a special compartment of the brain some nine-tenths of my mind, and to drain completely an equal percentage of life energy.
“That was the difficulty. How to replace that energy in sufficient degree at the proper time, without playing the role of vampire. I constructed a number of energy caches, but naturally at no time had we been able to see all the future. We could not see the details of what was to transpire aboard this ship, or in my hotel room that night you came, or under Constantine’s restaurant.
“Besides, if I had possessed full energy as I approached this ship, your spy ray would have registered it; and you would instantly have destroyed my small automobile-spaceship.
“My first necessity, accordingly, was to come to the meteorite, and obtain an initial control over my own body through the medium of what my
Earth personallity called the blackness room.
“That Earth personality offered unexpected difficulties. In three years it had gathered momentum as a personality, and that impetus made it necessary to repeat a scene with Patricia Ungarn, and to appear directly as another conscious mind, it order to convince Leigh that he must yield. The rest of course was a matter‘of gaining additional life energy after boarding your ship, which”—he bowed slightly at the muscularly congealed body of the woman—“which she supplied me.
“I have explained all this because of the fact that a mind will accept complete control only if full understanding of—defeat—is present. I must finally inform you, therefore, that you are to remain alive for the next few days, during which time you will assist me in making personal contact with your friends.”
He made a gesture of dismissal: “Return to your normal existence. I have still to co-ordinate my two personalities completely, and that does not require your presence.”
The Dreeghs went out blank-eyed, almost briskly; and the two minds in one body were— alone I
For Leigh, the Leigh of Earth, the first desperate shock was past. The room was curiously dim, as if he was staring out through eyes that were no longer—his!
He thought, with a horrible effort at self-control: “I’ve got to fight. Some thing is trying to possess my body. All the rest is lie.”
A soothing, mind-pulsation stole into the shadowed chamber where his—self—was cornered:
“No lie, but wondrous truth. You have not seen what the Dreeghs saw and felt, for you are inside this body, and know not that it has come marvelously alive, unlike anything that your petty dreams on Earth could begin to conceive. You must accept your high destiny, else the sight of your own body will be a terrible thing to you. Be calm, be braver than you’ve ever been, and pain will turn to joy.”
Calm came not. His mind quivered in its dark corner, abnormally conscious of strange and unnatural pressures that pushed in at it like winds out of unearthly night. For a moment of terrible fear, it funked that pressing night, then forced back to sanity, and had another thought of its own, a grimly cunning thought:
The devilish interloper was arguing. Could that mean—his mind rocked with hope—that co-ordination was impossible without his yielding to clever persuasion.
Never would he yield.
“Think,” whispered the alien mind, “think of being one valuable facet of a mind with an I. Q. twelve hundred, think of yourself as having played a role; and now you are returning to normalcy, a normalcy of unlimited power. You have been an actor completely absorbed in your role, but the play is over; you are alone in your dressing room removing the grease paint; your mood of the play is fading, fading, fading—”
“Go to hell!” said William Leigh, loudly. “I’m William Leigh, I. Q. one hundred and twelve, satisfied to be just what I am. I don’t give a damn whether you built me up from the component elements of your brain, or whether I was born normally. I can just see what you’re trying to do with that hypnotic suggestion stuff, but it isn’t working. I’m here, I’m myself, and I stay myself. Go find yourself another body, if you’re so smart.”
Silence settled where his voice had been; and the emptiness, the utter lack of sound brought a sharp twinge of fear greater than that which he had had before he 6poke.
He was so intent on that inner struggle that he was not aware of outer movement until—
With a start he grew aware that he was staring out of a port window. Night spread there, the living night of space.
A trick, he thought in an agony of fear; a trick somehow designed to add to the corroding power of hypnotism.
A trick! He tried to jerk back—and, terrifyingly, couldn’t. His body wouldn’t move. Instantly, then, he tried to speak, to crash through that enveloping blanket of unholy silence. But no sound came.
Not a muscle, not a finger stirred; not a single nerve so much as trembled.
He was alone.
Cut off in his little corner of brain.
Lost.
Yes, lost, came a strangely pitying sibilation of thought, lost to a cheap, sordid existence, lost to a life whose end is visible from the hour of birth, lost to a civilization that has already had to be saved from itself a thousand times. Even you, I think, can see that all this is lost to you forever— Leigh thought starkly: The thing was trying by a repetition of ideas, by showing evidence of defeat, to lay the foundations of further defeat. It was the oldest trick of simple hypnotism for simple people. And he couldn’t let it work—
You have, urged the mind inexorably, accepted the fact that you were playing a role; and now you have recognized our oneness, and are giving up the role. The proof of this recognition on your part is that you have yielded control of—our —body.
—Our body, our body, OUR body—
The words re-echoed like some Gargantuan sound through his brain, then merged swiftly into that calm, other-mind pulsation:
—concentration. All intellect derives from the capacity to concentrate; and, progressively, the body itself shows life, reflects and focuses that gathering, vaulting power.
—One more step remains: You must see— Amazingly, then, he was staring into a mirror. Where it had come from, he had no memory. It was there in front of him, where, an instant before, had been a black porthole—and there was an image in the mirror, shapeless at first to his blurred vision.
Deliberately—he felt the enormous deliberateness—the vision was cleared for him. He saw— and then he didn’t.
His brain wouldn’t look. It twisted in a mad desperation, like a body buried alive, and briefly, horrendously conscious of its fate. Insanely, it fought away from the blazing thing in the mirror. So awful was the effort, so titanic the fear, that it began to gibber mentally, its consciousness to whirl dizzily, like a wheel spinning faster, faster— The wheel shattered into ten thousand aching fragments. Darkness came, blacker than Galactic night. And there was—
Oneness!
THE END.
A. E. van Vogt, Asylum
