John Holder's Weapon

Holder hated his Communist captors so much he wished them out of existence. Impossible, of course--and yet they vanished before his eyes....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy October 1957 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"Get the hell out of my sight, Nocher!" Holder shouted.

The scientist had held his temper ever since he had been taken captive. This had set up such a condition of strain within him that even in his dreams, he had seen himself destroying Reds. He had blown them up with hydrogen bombs, he had destroyed them with death rays, he had disintegrated them with weapons that no other mind had ever imagined. Most of all, he had hated the poking, prying political commissars, who had breathed down his neck in every experiment he had ever attempted, or had watched from the TV camera installed in every laboratory of the vast installation, to make certain that any discovery that was made went to the right place.

But even Holder's most fantastic dreams were nothing in comparison to what actually happened.

Nocher was a big man, standing six foot two inches tall. There was Cossack blood in him, which gave him a vast feeling of superiority for all men not of his race. This was particularly true of the captive scientists being held prisoner in this secret Ural stronghold. In spite of the fact that every one of them had a better brain than he had, the political commissar looked down upon them as being creatures of an inferior race.

As Holder shouted at the Commissar, Nocher lost his expression of superiority. His face turned a dim shade of blue, then a thin shade of white.

Then, clothes and all, he vanished.

Nocher went like smoke before the wind, roiling and turning. When he vanished, he left a vague outline of a human body behind him which looked like a hole in space, like a ghost outlined against a gray sky. Then this vanished too. Of Nocher's bulk, not even a wisp was left.

John Holder was aware of thundering elation somewhere deep down inside of him. There was horror too, but the elation was greater. He stared at the empty spot where the commissar had been standing a moment before.

Sounds came from his lips but he had no conscious knowledge that he was uttering them. They were noises that had existed long before language had come into being. Their meaning was pure horror. As they came from his lips, Holder felt every muscle in his stomach begin to tighten into a knot.

There was absolutely no question in his mind that he was responsible for Nocher's disappearance. Out of his dreams, out of his hate for the commissars and all they represented, this ability had been created. A million to one chance had come true! This ability was something he did inside himself. It needed no outside equipment to function, no generators to feed energy to it, no crystals to control its frequency. It was its own generator and its own frequency control! And it was all in his own mind! It was new, it was totally different from anything any scientist had ever envisioned before.

In this moment, staring at the spot where Nocher had been, John Holder felt as if the concrete floor on which he was standing had no more real substance to it than empty space. All that existed was mind, energy, and the dance of the atoms. He also knew that everything he had thought he had known about science was drivel, the mouthings of an idiot. The string of degrees after his name, which had so impressed the Red and had led to his capture by a nation hungry for scientists and willing to go to any lengths to get them, became meaningless, fodder for the amazement of fools.

The only important reality in the Universe was mind. Everything else was subservient to this reality. Mind was flooding through him now as glowing shafts of light.

"Nocher?" the loudspeaker in the ceiling rasped.

The sound jarred John Holder back to his surroundings. He turned startled eyes upward. From the ceiling, the bland eye of the television camera regarded him in silent accusation. He swore beneath his breath. How much had they seen?

The television system, which spied in every nook and corner of the huge installation, had been Nocher's idea, his way of making absolutely certain that he knew everything that was going on among the captive scientists working here.

The security police had felt that the TV system was a fine idea. There was no way of predicting what a scientist might discover, or when he would find it out. Perhaps it would be a new weapon that would enable them to conquer the world. This was what scientists were for. This was the reason the whole vast institute existed here in secret.

"Nocher?" the loudspeaker inquired again.

"He went--that way." Holder said quickly, pointing toward an open door.