The X-69 couldn't stand another one like that. The Enlissa ship had computed better than they had thought.
"aJprojectors!" Roysland shouted. "Prepare to track and fire!"
The only way to save the ship now was to shoot down every torpedo before it hit.
"All guns tracking, sir," said one of the observers.
"Set and ready!" Roysland said. "Fire automatically!" He punched a button.
TheaJprojectors moved in their mounts, each one seeking out a different missile. They would go on seeking until the—
Then the first one fired, and Roysland's mind went blank, as did everyone else's aboard the X-69.
For a long time, Roysland Dwyn watched a play. He was a disinterested spectator, who had not one iota of interest in what was going on. He was much, much,muchtoo busy with his own thoughts to be interested with such trivia as his bodily reactions and his exterior environment.
In the first place, he had solved the problem. And such a fascinating problem! The broad ramifications of the whole concept were appalling in their immensity and scope!
Some people came into the control room after a long while and asked him some questions. He answered them politely, but without paying any attention whatsoever to what they were saying.
After all, what could possibly be so utterly absorbing as my own problems? Who could be more important than I?
The people asked him to walk to somewhere, and he did; but he didn't have the slightest notion where he was going, nor why, nor how. And he really didn't care. They put him in a bed and fed him soup and stuck needles in his arm and several other utterly meaningless things, but it made no difference.
Introspection. Know thyself. And then get going around and around and around on the ever deepening spiral-helix that goes lower and lower as it closes in on itself. Self-analysis. What are my motivations? Why do I want to know what my motivations are? Why am I analyzing myself? Why do I want to know why I am analyzing myself?
What do I know about the motivations for desiring to know about the reasons for analyzing myself? Why do I feel that the motivations—
After a long period of being left alone, he was in a place that was different from where he had been before, but it wasn't any different than the place where—
A sudden blazing shock crossed Roysland's mind. With the awful brilliant clarity of a man seeing suddenly into a darkened room when the lights have been lit unexpectedly, Roysland snapped agonizingly back to awareness.
Only for a fraction of a second did he realize what had happened. Then his mind blacked out under the shock.
When he came out of it again, a nurse was standing by his bedside. She smiled at him when he opened his eyes, and said: "How do you feel, sir?"
He thought for a moment, taking inventory of exactly how he did feel. Then he smiled. "I feel fine. What happened?"
The girl touched a relay plate. "The psychometrist will be in right away, sir. He'll explain things to you." She gave him another flash of white teeth and stepped out of the room.
Less than a minute later, the door opened, and the psychometrist came in. It was Bilford.
"Well, well," Roysland said. "I get special treatment; the chief cheese is in to see me."
Bilford grinned, ran a hand through his hair and nodded. His thin face seemed to almost sparkle from within. "Yup. You're important. I knew you'd want to see someone as soon as you came to."
Roysland propped himself up in bed. "How right you are. The boys have solved the Secret of the Mysterious Weapon, I see. Have they actually made a usable weapon out of it?"
Bilford lifted his eyebrows. "What makes you think they've figured it out?"
Roysland's massive face broke into a grin. "Simple. I'm back among the living again. If I'm right—and I think I am—you undid this feedback in the prefrontal lobes with an effect similar to the one that caused it. Q.E.D.: You know what caused it."
Bilford nodded. "Good reasoning. And accurate. I guess your brain isn't as burned out as it might be. I guess you can see visitors now."
"Who?" Roysland asked.
Bilford stood up and headed for the door. "Four Special Weapons staff members and a Fleet Commander. They've been waiting to see you for three days, and I told them you'd be out from under this morning." Then he stopped at the door and looked bland. "Of course, if you don'twantto see them—"
"Get them in here!" bellowed Roysland.
All Bilford had to do was open the door. Five men came into the room as though the hall were full of poison gas. After a minute or so of inquiring after Roysland's health and expressing their sympathy for his plight, they settled down to business.
"I figured there was something screwy in that story you gave me," Allerdyce said. "Going to hunt for animals, indeed!"
Bilford grinned. "I didn't think he was, either. It was brilliant to have those recorders in the Enlissa officer's cell. And the other stuff came through perfectly."
Roysland shook his head. "You misunderstand me. I most certainly did intend to get animal specimens. I figured the answer was involved with the aliens themselves, but I didn't know what the gimmick was.
"Now I know that it was the interaction of theaJ's backwash and the enemy's beam that caused the mindjammer effect. The enemy's weapon was intended as a death ray, but for some reason, it doesn't work on humans."
"That's right," said Taddibol. "The enemy projector was designed to disintegrate the molecule of a particular enzyme that is necessary to Enlissa life. It does the job beautifully, too. When the beam hits an Enlissa, the enzyme disintegrates, oxidation can no longer take place in the tissues, and presto! the Enlissa dies. But our own system is so different that the beam doesn't even effect us."
"The answer's been right in front of our eyes for a long time," Kiffer said. "The backwash from theaJ's has too long a wave length to be effective, and the Enlissa's death ray is too short. But the complex harmonic of the two is just right. It creates a momentary field that causes the loop-feedback to start in the prefrontal lobes. From what we can gather, the effect is one of intense, overpowering curiosity—inwardly directed."
"Statistically," Allerdyce cut in, "it accounts for the peculiar behavior of the enemy ships, too. If we assume that a little over twenty-five per cent of their ships are equipped with what they think is a death ray, you'll get the right figures. About the same number of our ships are equipped withaJprojectors.
"When a death-ray ship comes in on anaJship, theaJguns cut it down and the crew is mindjammed. But if a death-ray ship comes in on one of our conventionally armed ships, they're blasted out of the sky because they figure that everyone aboard the ship is dead and they don't bother to fire any torpedoes. Our own torpedoes come as a pretty rude surprise. So the enemy has lost one hundred per cent of their death-ray equipped vessels in every engagement!"
Roysland nodded. "We couldn't see it because we weren't looking for it. I suspected at first that it had something to do with theaJ's; the statistics suggested that. But when every test showed that it couldn't possibly be our own projectors, and when this Enlissa projector came along, I made the mistake of dropping the previous line of approach. Keep that in mind, boys; you can forget oldtheories, but you can't forget olddata.
"By the way, commander, did you figure out how we happened to get the Enlissa ship?"
"Sure," said Allerdyce. "When they came in so close, they were caught by the field that was generated. The thing has an effective englobement volume with a radius of about six hundred miles. We don't know what the effect is near the outside, of course, but we're working on it."
"You know," Roysland said, "mankind has known for centuries the old dictum that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' but we sometimes forget how it works in practice. We still tend to look from cause to effect and from effect to cause.
"But in this case, there were two 'causes' of the mindjammer field, and three 'effects' from the two 'causes.' And that's simplifying a great deal. We still haven't dug into what else we can get from subetheric harmonics phenomena."
Roysland looked at Bilford. "How did you do this quick-cure stunt?"
Bilford shrugged. "Simple. I fiddled around until I got a subetheric harmonic that corresponded to the frequencies of the microwaves I was using. Works fine."
Kiffer chimed in again with: "With the stuff we got from your instruments on the X-69 I think we can build the weapon we've been so afraid of."
"Won't the Enlissa be able to analyze it?" Bilford asked, interestedly. "After all,wefigured it out."
"Not the same thing," said Kiffer. "They don't haveaJprojectors yet. They can't accidentally generate the field."
"Besides," Commander Allerdyce said grimly, "we won't leave them any evidence. If the weapon works, we'll beam 'em down, board 'em, and end up with prisoners and a perfectly good ship. The Enlissa will never know what happened to them."
Roysland was about to say something when the door flew open and a heavy body propelled its way inside.
It was General Director Eckisster, and he was very obviously seething mad. He glanced around the room and his eyes lit on Bilford.
"May I ask, sir," he thundered, "why I have been kept from seeing Roysland Dwyn for two weeks? And why these men are allowed to see him now?" He didn't wait for an answer, but turned toward Roysland. "As for you, sir, I am filing a reprimand—officially. You had no business using the X-69 as military vessel during time of war without my permission. You might have been killed, and I need you!"
Roysland started to answer, but Commander Allerdyce was one jump ahead of him. He smiled serenely at Eckisster and said: "My dear director, don't you think such an action would be just a bit confusing? Captain Dobrin recommended that Roysland Dwyn be given the Golden Cluster for bravery in action above and beyond the call of duty. I added my recommendation and sent it on to the Regent's office. The Regent himself has given his approval. Surely, a reprimand now would be a bit unseemly."
Eckisster glowered. "My dear commander," he said, "it so happens that Roysland Dwyn is the mainstay of my directorate. It also happens to be a fact that I have a perfect right to threaten to do any damned thing I want to. It keeps him mad at me, so he works like a beaver to show me up. I threaten, cajole, intimidate, scream, and ask silly questions. It works. If you won't tell me how to run my directorate, I won't tell you how to run your spacefleet. At least not very often. Fair enough?"
Again, he did not pause for an answer, but looked back at Roysland. "And you, you get out of that bed as soon as this twitch doctor lets you. You have a gun to build. A mindjammer. Get busy. I'll expect you in my office later. Good-by." He turned and stamped out.
Allerdyce stared at the closed door for a moment, then turned and grinned. "I guess I got told."
"You did," said Bilford, "and you're going to get told again. All of you. Clear out. The patient has had enough excitement for today. Scram."
It took the five men several more minutes to leave, but Bilford was finally alone with Roysland.
"Did you know that about Eckisster?" Bilford asked. "That he needles people with a purpose in mind?"
"Sure," said Roysland. "I've known it for years. I don't say that it works the way he thinks it does, but at least it keeps the job exciting. I think everybody needs a little needling now and then."
Bilford nodded. "I know you agree with him. You're a bigger needler than he is, any day."
"Me?" Roysland looked surprised.
"Yes, you. Eckisster's needling is effective in a limited way, but yours is not only effective, but efficient. You ask the kind of questions that make people think instead of the kind that make people mad. Where Eckisster jabs in all directions and people jump, you use your needle with the deftness and precision of a physician using a hypodermic. Eckisster doesn't know what he wants and he doesn't know how to get it. And he wants somebody else to do it for him, whatever it is. On the other hand, you know what you want and how to get it without making everybody hate you, and you'll do the job yourself, if necessary.
"You gave your staff men, Commander Allerdyce, even me, credit for finding out what the mindjammer effect was. But the credit belongs to you. If it weren't for your incessant needling, your ability to arouse interest in seemingly dull facts, your sometimes radical theories, and your propensity for asking searching questions, I doubt if we'd have our answer yet.
"The core of this problem wasn't just the fact that several phenomena combined to give the mindjammer; that was a purely physical effect. The big problem was to get human beings to take their individual fields of thought, work with them in relation to other fields of thought, and come up with useful information that could be fitted together to explain the whole.
"Eckisster's type of needling might make a manworkharder, it might even make himthinkharder—but it won't make him think in a different way or look at data from a new angle. Even when your theories are wrong, you use them in such a way that they uncover the data which proves them wrong. And then you're perfectly willing to drop them and work out a new hypothesis and get people to try to destroy or confirm it." He stood up and smoothed a palm over his gray hair.
"And now, if you'll excuse me," he said, "I have some more things to work on. I have a hunch that these subelectronic polar harmonics can do a lot more to the human brain than just knock it silly. When you feel better, I'll tell you all about it." He turned and walked out the door.
Roysland lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling. Me, a needler? he thought, ME?
THE END