Hypno Lock

In among the hard brilliance of the glittering stars, winking over the desolate acres of Karoo Bush, Collyer saw the flame. He stopped his car and stepped out into the chill wind burbling across the desert and stared at it. The coruscating lance of light winked red and orange and green and blends of the three. He frowned, one hand on the door of the car, head craned to the heavens, as he studied it. He shivered with cold and with a sudden fear that pierced him. Across miles of space and through the wind came a whisper of sound.

The flame moved. It descended, and Collyer knew it was not a star. The whisper grew louder and became a muted rumble and the fiery lance changed to a brilliant white tinged with green.

Dimly against the mass of the Milky Way Collyer thought he saw something surmounting the fire. But it was yet too high. The rumble became a thunder and the light more brilliant. It cast his shadow on the dusty road.

Excitement encompassed Collyer. With a quick movement he stooped, switched off the car's ignition and the headlights. In the darkness and wind he saw the great rocket sink slowly earthwards on its fiery jet. The thunder of noise rose to a bellowing crescendo and the flame too bright to look at. Collyer stumbled around his car, hands capped over his ears. And suddenly the terrible noise stopped.

A mile away, he saw a dying red glow on the earth and straddling it the rocket. Struts from its metallic sides propped it up. Its vast bulk towered toward the sky to be silhouetted against the hills of the horizon. As the glow died away, Collyer's first impulse was to run. His heart beat rapidly within him. The cold was forgotten. He took a grip on himself and stared hard, forcing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Nothing moved. The earth was silent but for the desert wind. For an hour Collyer watched the thing in the veld. But it might have been a monument, or a spire of stone for nothing moved or hinted of life.

Then Collyer made his decision. With a swift movement he snatched from his car a pistol. A popgun of a pistol, but it gave him confidence. Within 35 minutes he stood at the base of the rocket. The earth beneath its bulk was blackened and charred and a great hole had been scorched into it to be straddled by the props supporting the ship. The ground beneath his feet was still warm and wisps of vapour came from the hole.

He stared. The monstrous rocket was at least 800 feet long. A fierce constriction gripped Collyer's heart as he heard a click. He looked swiftly upwards. A square of light had appeared in the side of the ship fifty feet above him. He clenched his pistol and turned to run, anywhere, as long as it took him away from this thing that was beyond his comprehension.

Collyer was frightened, badly frightened. In the world of his brain where a fraction of a second measured minutes, he cursed himself for being a fool. Escape. He had to escape. He had taken but one step when he was transfigured in the brilliant beams of a spotlight from the doorway.

That brought him to a stop. Like a hare in, the light of a hunter's lamp, Collyer stopped and stared hysterically into the darkness about the limits of the light. He was trapped. Terror swept over him in waves and he turned to the light and saw nothing but the harsh brilliance of the reflector.

It was a croak, But Collyer spoke. "Who are you?" he cried, shading his eyes against the light and raising the puny pistol. He had not seen the figure descend from the doorway but now it appeared between him and the light. A silhouette, like that of a man in one of those space suites kids wore. But it wasn't a man. Collyer knew it wasn't a man. He sobbed. "Who are you? Go away. Leave me. I've got a gun." The silhouette stopped moving. Collyer panted, his blood racing. Ice encompassed him.

Then it happened. A voice spoke in his mind. Clearly. Collier reeled. "Stand where you are" said the voice. "Do not move away from me."

His mind was chaos, unformed thoughts raced through his consciousness. There was turmoil, and colour and pain. The voice in his head had come from the creature before him. Violent waves of flame burst inside his head. The long-unused word "telepathy" formed on the mirror of his mind and was gone on the washing pain. Collyer fell to his knees, clasping his head, moaning, swaying.

The voice came to him again. This time it was urgent yet querulous. "What planet is this? Quickly, tell me. What planet is this?"

Collyer sobbed as the pain seared through his head. Consciousness was dim within him. He tried hard. He thought and he spoke it out aloud. "Earth," he said, "Earth, leave me alone, leave me."

The black figure came a stop nearer. Something grasped Collyer's shoulder and something hard and metallic prodded into his neck. "Speak", hissed the voice in his head. "There is another name? Is there?"

"No" sobbed Collyer, "no, leave me, you are killing me." The pain and the colour smashed through his skull. It was becoming worse. His brain was being burned within his skull. But a word formed there. "Terra", he thought, "Terra". He felt the probing of the other's mind in his suddenly withdraw. The figure before him stepped back quickly. There smashed across his reeling mind the terrorised thought of the creature, back to those who waited in the rocket. And the thought was from one who knew he was close to the brink of death. "It's a Terran."

Collyer's head seemed to split asunder from the hammer blows inside his skull. He fell onto his face in the sand, and blackness enveloped him. A swooping roaring blackness, soothing quiet and warm like his mother's breast.

He floated in another world, remote, in time and space. There formed before him pictures. Pictures of proud men. Men like himself and other people. But different. And the difference was in the terrible intelligence that gleamed in their eyes. And their world was green and pleasant like earth. Great cities of soaring spires, of metal and plastic dotted it. Fleets of roaring rockets poured across it skies out into space where the galaxy trembled in fear, for the Terrans were coming. And the Terrans conquered the galaxy. Few others could match their intelligence, culture, technology - or their grim aggressiveness. Terra's empire stretched across the galaxy and in thousands of planets, Terran rulers and their soldiers sat in the halls of government.

For centuries the galaxy groaned beneath the yoke of Terra with its insatiable demands for wealth, power and glory. The empire ran to the pattern of all empires.

Revolt reared its head in the dark corners, far from the world of the conquerors. And, with the years, the nibbling forces of the barbarians encroached upon the empire, decadent and decaying.

Then the day arrived when Terran space cruisers, shattered and burned scattered across space, driven like deer before the hunters by the ships of the rebels.

Around the planet of the Empire builders grouped the fleet, demanding surrender. It was agreed. The Terrans would surrender only if their leaders and those who chose to follow them were allowed to live.

The ships of the fleet conferred. The invasion of Terra would cost far too much. The leaders agreed. Terran power would be smashed but the leaders and their followers would be banished.

At a meeting place on the planet the Terran leaders, once rulers of a mighty empire, met their conquerors to discuss the terms. They were betrayed. For they and the thousands who followed them were overpowered and subjected to the machines of the rebels. The machines which probed their minds, dulled their senses, leaving only one tenth of their mentality usable, the remainder chained with a hypno-lock, alive, but forever cut off from consciousness.

But the pictures Collyer saw revealed also another fact. That once the Terrans were again communicated with in the telepathic manner so common in the galaxy, the hypno-lock would shatter and again would the intellect of the prisoners resume its former proportions.

Collyer saw these pictures and more. He saw the great fleet of space ships leave Terra and head from the centre of the universe far out into the empty wastes of space, out to where the scars were thin and widely scattered until in a place where no ship had been before, a place where no one was ever likely to venture again, the captain of the fleet found a planet. The third planet out from a yellow sun, where conditions were similar to those on Terra. There he marooned his prisoners without food or tools and with but a portion of their intellects functioning. There, on the fringe of the great inter-galactic void, the fleet left the Terrans, to fend for themselves, to eke out whatever existence they could.

Collyer's mind blazed as now powers swept over him. His mind expanded and he knew things which no man before him on Earth had known. And he saw how the Terrans had conquered their environment. Had carved their place out on the Earth. Had developed from primitive peoples, tamed the ox, discovered the wheels built the pyramid, and the ship, the steam engine, the aeroplane and the atomic bomb.

He stood up. So quick had been his thoughts that he still caught the trace of the thought the figure, "It's a Terran."

The hypno-lock fell away from Collyer's mind. It became something far removed from the mind of man. Something great and awful filled with the knowledge of a people who had sacked a universe and he knew then how one of the Terran leaders, realising what treachery might wait them, had, in his enormous intellect induced auto hypnosis, that despite whatever happened to him, his sub-conscious would impart the history of his people, their technology and culture to his descendants with the order to them to transmit the same knowledge to the sub-conscious of those who followed them.

Collyer was weak with the shock of his awakening. He was, as yet the only Terran on Earth. The creature before him was a Mantian. He scanned its brain. It was far inferior to his. IQ about 900. His was over 1,500. Collyer darted out the thought. Strong, crushing, brutal. The figure before him crumpled and fell, its mind seething madness. In the ship figures fell as that all-enveloping wave of thought toppled their minds over the edge of madness.

Collyer knew what he had to do next. To remove the hypno-lock from his fellow men. And then build the ships and the weapons. He stared deeply into the incandescence of the Milky Way as if he could see that far-off Planet, Terra. A wolfish smile cut across his face.

His eyes glittered in the starlight. And the wind whipped away his whisper.

"We are coming back."

  One of my father's short stories, found among his papers after his untimely death in 1990.