Destroyer of Worlds by E. C. Tubb Read Free Book Online Page B

blown and taken the entire ship with it. If we hadn’t tested it as we did — Commander, you could have saved us all!’
    A possibility, but the danger was now over. Maddox wondered what had made him abort the original test and push the screen so hard for so long. Instinct, perhaps, the cultivated inner sense which defied all logic and so often provided the right answer.
    ‘Have the engineers check the system,’ he ordered. ‘All defective parts to be replaced. Summon Professor Manton to check and test the installation when the work has been completed.’ Maddox glanced at the chronometer. ‘And tell them to hurry — we have only twelve hours left before impact.’
    *
    Claire Allard was asleep and, in her sleep, a man came to her in a dream. He was short, stocky with a neatly trimmed beard and a domed, balding skull. He wore a ceremonial dress coat with a scarlet flower in his lapel and, crossing his torso from his right shoulder to the left hip, a wide ribbon blazed in gold and emerald. She had seen him three times before.
    The last had been on the stage of the theatre.
    The time before had been when he had given her the highest accolade of her profession short of the Nobel Prize.
    The first had been when, as a young student, she had been privileged to attend one of his lectures.
    Years ago now, a time when both he and she had been much younger, but always she remembered him as he had been when handing her the award, neatly if fussily dressed in his old-fashioned dress coat, his inevitable flower and the sash which was the decoration he had won from the President of Zaire as a part-reward for saving ten million souls from the ravages of plague.
    Professor Victor Rousseau.
    To her, once, the living symbol of ultimate authority.
    And, in the dream, he came to stand before her, moving through wisps of swirling fog, his face blurred a little, his voice distant but as firm and impatient as she remembered.
    ‘In ancient times men thought of a person as consisting of three parts: the brain, the body and the soul. Later, when we, in our arrogance, assumed that only ourselves had been graced with receiving true knowledge, an adjustment was made. The brain became the mind, the body remained and the concept of the soul was medically disposed of. Now a person consisted only of two parts; the body and the mind and it was natural to place them each in their neatly labelled compartments. If the mind was affected, then the subject was insane. As insanity has no connection with reality as we have determined, what it should be then all statements and utterances of the poor, demented creature could be safely ignored. If the body fell ill, then it could be repaired as a mechanic would mend a broken machine. In those enlightened days it was common for eminent surgeons to complain bitterly that, while their operations had been successful, the ungrateful patient had insisted on dying.’
    A calculated pause; time in which to take a sip of water, to adjust his flower, to move a little to ease incipient cramp, to allow the sycophantic laughter to fade into a respectful silence.
    In her dream Claire saw it all as she had seen it before. Turning she looked at an endless expanse of barren desert, sere beneath a lambent sun, the grit strewn with a stark litter of bone; fleshless skulls watching her with cavernous sockets, teeth bared in the parody of a smile.
    On the podium the archaic figure continued as before.
    ‘…is a tedious thing. It is hard to accept the fact that we may have been wrong and it is easy to look for simple answers to involved questions. A sane man becomes deranged — how convenient to say that a demon has possessed him. A man’s body is not as it should be — obviously the humours are not working in true harmony. Words!’ The dry voice held the crack of a whip. ‘Rubbish! What is a demon? What are humours? Define! Define before you can hope to understand!’
    The figure blurred, wavered, mist rising to stream in