Lankar of Callisto
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Callisto #6
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Lankar of Callisto». Краткое содержание книги:
...in the mysterious and treacherous domain of the insidious Mind Wizards. Searching for him is a fearless armada of his loyal friends, and a stranger who knows him better than anyone on Callisto. The stranger, Lankar, is none other than Lin Carter, accidentally transported through the Gate Between the Worlds to the land of the Thanatorians. Aware of Jandar's plight, Lankar joins the search beyond the world's edge and suddenly finds himself battling for his own existence against the most nightmarish creatures on the planet - the gruesome flesh robots of Kuur and the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto themselves...
“You paint a grisly picture,” I said. “But surely, even with an infinite supply of organ transplants, you can’t keep a body going forever. What about the arteries? You can’t replace the entire arterial system, surely …”
“I told you they revere intellect alone,” he said. “They live for the life of the mind: pure mind alone, that’s their ideal. The senses, the emotions, these mean nothing to them. When they have the whole planet thoroughly pacified and running like a machine, then they’ll all end up like Number One. His name is: Quorll. He is nothing but a brain, a huge, swollen brain floating in a crystal sphere full of nutrient foam, with wires leading to the sensory nerve centers, attached to artificial eyes and ears and voice box. Just one huge, naked, living brain. I told you that Three, the old mummy in the life-support chair, is about a thousand years old. Well, Quorll is something else: they’ve kept him alive for twenty-three thousand years now, and they say there’s no reason he can’t exist forever in that glass ball … .”
He cleared his throat as if something had left an ugly taste in his mouth. “What a vision of the future, eh? The Kuurians’ idea of Callisto is a mechanical paradise, staffed by living zombies controlled by telepathy, and the whole thing geared to perpetuating for eternity sixteen naked brains, floating in slime, living a life of pure thought … forever.”
I shuddered. It was loathsome, like one of the grimmer pages out of Lovecraft, or the section in Stapledon’s The StarMaker about “the Great Brains.” …
“You―you said they were eager when they learned about Earth?”
“Yes; they’ve about given up on Callisto; Earth holds greater promise. You see, with its very much smaller population, and given the fact that the human race will go sour and thin out here, once we’re all zombies, they figure they can only keep Callisto going for a million years or so. But Earth has thousands of times the natural resources and the population. Earth they could keep going until the death of the Sun. And they’re already working on that problem, too! They got tremendously excited when they learned from study of my memories that the Earth-terminus of the dimensional portal lies in a part of the world inhabited by yellow men such as themselves, and the most heavily populated portion of the Earth, at that, and a part politically dominated by an ironstrong one-man dictatorship―Red China, of course. My God, sir, think of it! Once they got into the jungles of Cambodia they could merge invisibly with the people, lose themselves entirely … and once in China, of course, all they’d have to do is get within mental range of one man, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and it’s all over. One quarter of the world’s population would be their absolute slaves, and they’d be in charge of an immense modern army, navy, and air fleet, already armed with the hydrogen bomb.”
The vision was chilling. Horrible. But it was so lucid, so obvious, so easy! It was difficult to see how the Mind Wizards could possibly be stopped―especially since those few who knew the ultimate horror of their plans for mastery, were locked up here in these cells, completely helpless. Any time they wished they could come through the door and finish us off, and Callisto might not for years know the doom being spun for it by insidious, coldly evil, age-old minds. Earth might never know… until it was too late!
And then Jandar broke off suddenly, touching my shoulder for silence. Was that a footstep in the stone corridor outside our cell? The footstep of a living man, or the flaccid mechanical shuffle of a zombie, a flesh robot, his will destroyed, his brain dominated by the most fiendishly cunning band of devils that ever menaced a world?
“They know the effects of the vapor have worn off by now,” he said heavily. “They are coming to interrogate you―to dig into your brain for details that will corroborate the information they’ve learned from me!”
I was horribly afraid again, but this time not for myself, but for all the helpless millions behind me there on a tired and worn but still green world nearer the sun, men and women who had not the slightest chance of guessing the hideous, the unspeakable doom that hung over them … .
“Jandar, quick! I’m not particularly brave when it comes to pain, but tell me―is there anything I can do to resist the questioning?”
He shook his head dully.
“It’s nothing like that, Mr. Carter. There’s no torture or mistreatment, I told you. It’s not a question-and-answer session at all. They inject you with a mild soporific that weakens your willpower and sends your conscious mind drifting off somewhere in a daze, and then they simply read your mind by that insidious telepathy, of which they are the masters. It’s impossible to resist yielding up to their mental probe the information they desire―you won’t even be aware of the fact that you’re doing it. You’ll just doze and daydream for a time, and when you wake up you’ll find they’ve learned hundreds of facts from your memory-paths… : ‘
He broke off as a key clicked, startlingly loud, in the lock.
“Ssshh! It’s too late for talking now―they’re here.”
“There’s no chance of fighting them, I suppose? Making a break for freedom, somehow? I know we’ve got no weapons, but they look as weak and puny as children―”
“There’s no hope for that,” he said heavily. “Damn it, man, don’t you think I would have tried it months ago, if there were? They’ll send in the flesh robots first, and believe me, you haven’t seen the worst of those babies yet! They’ve a few special ones they’ve either bred genetically or tinkered together with surgery―there’s one lumbering horror thirteen feet high, weighs half a ton, and has six arms. Christ, he makes Frankenstein’s monster look like Porky Pig! Ssshh―they’re coming in!”
Hinges squealed; the door swung inwards suddenly, flooding the darkness of the cell with light from the illuminated corridor beyond―light that seemed dazzling to eyes by now adjusted to the darkness.
I blinked painfully, squinting in the glare―then gasped at the incredible figure standing in the open door
Chapter 18
RED SWORDS IN KUUR
It had a massive chest and burly shoulders, six, fat waddling legs and a blunt, homely visage, all gogling eyes and grinning, froglike mouth filled with blunt, powerful tusks. And once again its purple jowls and muzzle were smeared with fresh crimson!
Bozo hurled himself across the cell, whining with eager joy at seeing me again, and nearly knocking me flat with the enthusiasm of his greeting. Behind him, still in the doorway, stood the boy Taran, his face flushed and happy; behind him, holding a heavy, long-handled war axe dyed crimson, stood Ergon. The boy-sized sword that Taran carried ready in one small, capable fist was also red with gore. And from further down the corridor I heard a tumult: shouts and screams and thundering war cries.
Ergon’s gloomy visage lit up when he saw Jandar standing at my side. And Taran laughed happily.
“Hi, Lankar-jan!” he chirped (or the Thanatorian equivalent of the greeting). “I knew Bozo would find you first of all, so I let him go and we just followed.”