The Best of Argosy #7 - Minions of Mercury Read online

  “Down there,” his guide went on, “are the pipelines which furnish the plants with water. Dissolved in the water are all the minerals needed to replace those that the plants take from the ground. Great invention. Vargo’s work.”

  Omega noticed a slight spasm of pain cross the man’s face as he talked. Curious, he probed with his versatile vision, into the man’s body. He was disgusted to see a malignant, cancerous growth at work in the abdomen. Delicately he removed the growth, destroying it utterly, and healed the tissues which it had damaged.

  “You’d better quit this job and get another,” he advised, sounding like a personnel manager.

  The man’s face registered something akin to horror. “No, no!” he protested. “This is my life’s work. I love it! It makes me mad that they won’t let me stay here all the time. But two hours is the limit. And I guess they’re right,” he said, regretfully. “It seems that if a man stays here much longer, the leakage of the ray causes funny things to happen inside him.”

  Omega nodded. “There was an extremely funny thing inside of you, a minute ago. How long have you been doing this?”

  “Four years.”

  There were some other things that Omega was curious about and he decided that questioning was too slow. The man stiffened when Omega looked deeply into his eyes. But Omega found practically the same thing that he had seen in the other two. This man was also under the influence of hypnosis. He firmly believed that he enjoyed the monotonous job of directing the growth ray. Yet there was no record in his brain of the identity of the one who had impressed this belief.

  Omega did, however, discover one other fact. Each boy and girl of the city was given a fair education, and upon graduation was sent to a governmental unit which decided, ostensibly, what aptitudes were present and what line of work should be followed. Appropriately, this was called the Vocation Board. Training for the chosen profession followed. It was at this point, most likely, that the hypnotic suggestion had been planted.

  In one way, Omega reflected, the practice was beneficial. It certainly made for satisfied and happy workers. But on the other hand it was tough on the lads who were given jobs like this one. Nor did it fall under the scope of Rugged Individualism, or the Democratic Principle.

  OMEGA frowned, mentally of course, as the thought came that Mark wouldn’t like it. And after all this was Mark’s world, whether he wanted it or not. Omega had made him a present of it with fixtures and good will included, and it was up to Omega to see that it stayed the way Mark liked to have it. He decided to look a little further, before setting the machinery in motion which would bring this state of affairs to Mark’s attention.

  He restored the man’s consciousness and bade him a cheerful goodbye. The growth ray operator didn’t know it, but he now had another four years or so to enjoy his occupation. But then, he probably hadn’t realized that his life expectancy had been numbered in days before Omega had run across him.

  Omega penetrated deeper into the city, pausing from time to time, in an effort to satisfy his curiosity. The further he penetrated, the more puzzled he became.

  There were a great many things which showed signs of being the result of unnatural progress. Others were normal developments of the millennium since he had observed the city. Multi-storied buildings could be expected, inasmuch as the city had not spread outward. Upward growth was normal, for a knowledge of engineering would develop during the same centuries which doubled and trebled the population.

  In the matter of mechanical development, the city was in almost the same stage as it had been before the great war which destroyed it.

  Omega became annoyed, as the day grew older, at his inability to ferret out the facts he sought. But so complete is the loss of memory incurred when a posthypnotic suggestion commands that the subject forget, that even Omega’s great mind couldn’t bring the forgotten facts to the fore. Knowledge of the hypnotist’s identity had been erased so thoroughly that it might as well have never existed.

  With his annoyance came a certain amount of alarm.

  Several times he had noticed a trace of something sinister in the course of his mental probing. Most of these happy people, though quite carefree and friendly, had a fixation that it was their destiny to some day spread out and conquer the surrounding cities of the country — and eventually the entire world!

  There was no malice in the thought. There was no picture in their minds of the horrible bloodshed and privation such a course would bring. There seemed to be only the altruistic desire to give the rest of the world the benefit of their own economic and social progress.

  Omega, for the sake of his own curiosity, set out to find the headquarters of the Vocation Board. There, he knew, would be the answer to the whole puzzle.

  As he searched, his mind dwelt upon another matter entirely. Mark, of course, would have to straighten things out in Detroit. On the other hand, there were certain matters a little closer to Mark’s own home which needed straightening out also. Mark’s two kids weren’t getting any younger, and the race must be perpetuated... Maybe these two jobs could be dove-tailed.

  Chapter 3: The Case of the Chinese Whale

  THE North Atlantic, usually a pretty tempestuous stretch of water, was on its good behavior. Mark stood, legs braced, at the wheel of his ship and wondered why he should be having so much trouble on such a fine day.

  There was a steady breeze from the stern and absolutely no reason why the boat shouldn’t sail itself. But it wasn’t doing that, not by a long sight. On the contrary, it was pitching and yawing as wildly as if it had encountered a typhoon.

  Mark didn’t know what to make of it. And it wasn’t the only thing he had to bother him. Most important was trying to decide why he had ever left home at all. Things had been going along quite satisfactorily, and there was no valid reason why he should have left his happy home. He suddenly realized, spinning the wheel viciously to offset a nasty tendency his ship seemed to have acquired to head in the general direction of the north pole, that although he had invented several reasons why he should make a trip across the Atlantic Ocean, none of them amounted to a hill of beans.

  That yarn he had told Nona, for instance.

  “What do you want to go there for?” she had demanded. “There’s nothing in America.”

  “You just don’t know anything about it,” he had told her. “The country as a whole, I mean. Sure, you know your home town and a bit of the surrounding territory, But America’s a big place.”

  “But the Vikings,” Nona had reminded him. “They’re supposed to have seen a lot of it. They didn’t think much of it.”

  “I’ve investigated that,” he’d told her. “None of them ever got in more than a few miles, so that doesn’t mean much. And they never really found anything even about the people they raided. They just grabbed and bashed worthy citizens in the head and ran. And those squareheads aren’t competent observers.”

  “I thought you liked them.”

  “I do. But does that mean that I think they qualify as sociological experts!”

  “How about your work?” she had asked, sharply.

  That had almost stumped him. But he’d risen beautifully to the occasion. “I’ve gone far enough for the present. These people are still semi-barbarians, you know. And it wouldn’t be safe to push them too fast. Social and economic progress should keep pace with mechanical advancement. I’ve already inaugurated too many twentieth-century ideas.

  “The candlemakers guild has been on my neck ever since I built that generator with the waterpower turbine, and electrified the city. I tried to get them to change their vocation and take up the manufacture of electric lamps, but they tell me they can’t make them out of whale blubber, of which they have a monopoly. Things like that are getting me down.”

  THE discussion had gone on like that for quite a while, until Nona had finally seen that, even with logic and reason to back her up, she was on the losing side. Mark was practically perfect — but he was after all, A M
an. She’d stretched herself in front of a full-length mirror and then scowled ferociously.

  “Never try to cramp their style, my mother always said,” she observed tartly. “They’ll come back, sooner or later, and when they do, he’ll love you twice as much!”

  “I hope your mother had better command of her pronouns,” he snapped. Then he softened. “Don’t get the notion that I want a vacation from you. I could manage that without crossing any oceans. Some of these Svenska girls are very cute, I’ve been told. And don’t make faces. I’ve got a real reason for this trip. Scandinavia, you know, is a very small portion of the world. And Omega intends that our descendants eventually take over the entire globe. So it is my plan to establish myself in a section of the western hemisphere. Dominate it, if necessary, and advance the civilization of that portion to a point where our immediate descendants can settle and multiply in comparative safety.

  “It’s my job to provide several progressive communities, just as we’ve done here with the Vikings. We can’t disappoint Omega, you know.”

  “That old goon,” Nona grumbled. Then she’d smiled, and they’d kissed, and after an appropriate interval, everything had been all right again.

  Some of the things he’d told Nona, even though they were spur-of-the-moment inventions, were good ideas at that. For one thing he had been pushing the Norsemen too fast. Occasionally he had gummed up the machinery of local economics. Progress had to be made slowly.

  The business of the healers had proven that. But fortunately he had seen it in time. He hadn’t gone ahead and explained about germs and told them to forget all about evil spirits. The healers — venerable sages all — would have placed him in the booby-bin, even if they had to build one especially for the occasion.

  But while he had had to handle them with kid gloves, he’d made considerable progress there, even so. He had proven that there was more than one kind of sickness, and that different types must be treated in different ways.

  He’d showed them that the evil spirits which caused scurvy couldn’t be handled in the same manner as the demons who took refuge in wounds and animal bites. Whereas one group of spirits had to be propitiated by feeding the victim certain greens the other must be dealt with firmly, even brutally at times. That sort of teaching had been well received and quite a few prospective corpses had recovered to go forth in their ships and make corpses of others.

  Another good idea, Mark recalled as he fought with the wheel, had been the one about his project to provide another place for his descendants to live and thrive.

  Twelve years ago, when Omega had awakened him from the nap which had taken him six thousand years and had supplied his blood with a radioactive element that rendered him immune from fatigue and all but invulnerable to ordinary injuries, he had told Mark that he’d only done so with the idea of starting a new race on the earth. He had taken Nona, a normal girl, and changed her physical chemistry so that she was capable of perpetuating the new race. He had chosen her because her innate characteristics were of the same high type as Mark’s.

  Their children would inherit none of the greed and lust for power which had caused most of the wars that invariably had stunted man’s growth, for the simple reason that neither of them possessed any tendencies in that direction.

  Physical and mental strength, coupled with an almost immortal longevity, would be their tools. But, and Mark knew that this was his job, a start must be made in several spots on the earth’s surface at the same time.

  FURTHER cogitation was interrupted by the increasing necessity of keeping every sense alert to prevent his tiny craft from overturning completely. And now his tenancy of this particular part of the ocean was being disputed by a group of ferocious and apparently simple-minded whales. In spite of the fact that they could have picked any of several thousand square miles in which to swim, they perversely kept bobbing up right in the path of Mark’s craft. Making faces at him.

  Each and every one of them carried a gross tonnage which would have made a collision fatal. And final. With no concept of the laws of traffic or courtesy, they refused to stay put long enough for him to steer his way through them. They would make sudden dashes across his bow, apparently trying to see how close they could come without actually capsizing him. No doubt it was great sport for the whales, but Mark couldn’t see any humor in it.

  “Go away, you stupid fools. Get out of here,” Mark bellowed.

  Tremendous waves, caused by their passage, kept him fighting vainly for control of the boat. His craft bobbed like a cork in a hurricane. The beasts seemed to have no sense of propriety. No sense at all, in fact. They spun madly and kept returning for another try. There were still as many in front of him as there had been when he first sighted them.

  “And you,” he called to the one who seemed to be leading the cotillion, “stop making those insane faces. Don’t leer at me —” He broke off, for he was almost sure that a whale never leers. Though, of course, he might be mistaken. His experience with whales was quite limited.

  The feeling, however, persisted. Whales just did not behave like this. They were too darned big to be so playful. Dignity, he presumed, should be present in direct ratio to the volume. Pixies, for instance, had practically no dignity at all, while elephants were crawling with it. A whale, therefore...

  The thought congealed considerably when one of the beasts, a very large one, placed itself directly in the path of the boat, and opened its mouth. Mark heaved mightily on the wheel and managed to steer past it. His whole craft could have passed within that mighty maw. Mark immediately revised his cynical ideas about Jonah.

  He noticed that as he passed the monster, it snapped its mouth shut and looked decidedly chagrined. And Mark was absolutely certain that whales weren’t capable of that emotion. An embarrassed whale. The idea was appalling. And silly. That whale was either polluted or —

  Sighing unhappily, Mark relinquished his hold on the spokes of the wheel. He staggered to the rail and waited for developments. They weren’t long in coming. With derisive flirts of their tails, the entire school of overgrown aquatic animals sounded, disappearing in unison.

  With their going, the sea calmed abruptly and the boat settled down. Mark waited, halfway between resignation and anger and a kind of nervous dread. Resignation, because he hadn’t really expected that things would be peaceful as long as they had; anger because of the silly trick that had been played on him, dread because he was sure that Omega was in the vicinity. Only Omega could have caused the peculiar activities he had just observed.

  He looked out over the sea, expecting the disembodied intelligence to make his appearance in the guise of a crackpot sea monster of some sort, but nothing like that occurred.

  HE WAS on the point of concluding that perhaps the whales had been genuine after all, when he heard a voice from the direction of the wheel.

  “Ain’t you-all gwine ter say hello?”

  Mark wheeled. And saw, not a lovable old darky with a refreshing mint julep in either hand, but a distinctly sinister Oriental who probably could have scared the pants off Fu Manchu.

  “H’y’all, honey chile?” inquired the mandarin.

  Marked groaned. “That’s terrible. That corny accent. No Southerner ever says you-all to just one person. I know because I went around with a girl from Alabama,” — he blinked — “six thousand years ago... What do you want?”

  “I want to show you something. Detroit.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Mark replied glumly. “Oho — it was you that made me think of this goofy trip, was it?”

  “I had nothing to do with it, son. I just happened to observe something that ought to be corrected.”

  Mark nodded. “It’s always that way,” he said. “Well, what is it? What’s the matter with Detroit?”

  “Don’t know exactly,” confessed the Oriental. “But it’s something that needs looking into. Detroit has suddenly become civilized!”

  Mark raised an eyebrow, but held his peace.

&
nbsp; “Yep. Truly civilized,” continued Omega, “They’ve got to the point where they can’t wait any longer. They’ve just got to give the world the benefit of their culture. Even if they have to shoot everybody who doesn’t agree with them, in the process. And that’s the final proof of a human civilization. The Romans did it, if you remember. So did the Persians and the Greeks.

  “I wasn’t there,” denied Mark. “Besides, they were a bit primitive.”

  “They were human,” Omega said. “And I was there. Identical species of animal, I assure you. And incidentally, you Americans had the same altruistic tendencies, you know. You weren’t satisfied till you had civilized the Indians, though you had to feed half of them firewater and murder the other half.”

  “Let’s talk about Detroit,” said Mark. “Didn’t I hear you say something about shooting? They’ve developed guns, eh?”

  “Yeah, and a lot of other things. But I’d rather not tell you about it. You can see for yourself. This planet is your job, not mine. I’m just a spectator — I hope.”

  “You’re an instigator,” accused Mark. “But has it occurred to you that there are something like four thousand miles between here and Detroit? By the time I get there the war will be over.”

  “It hasn’t started yet,” Omega informed him. “And you’re practically there now!”

  Mark felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach as the boat suddenly dropped out from beneath his feet! The mandarin and he, elbows locked, rose in the air to a height of several hundred feet and then sped forward at an alarming rate, directly away from the rising sun. Mark strove mightily to keep an expressionless face, but this experience was a little too trying for convincing calm. His eyes were streaming tears from the rush of air, but through the blur he could see the satisfied expression on the face of the Oriental.