DOUBLE TROUBLE-5
576 Words
“DON’T YOU SEE,” THE lady continued. “Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images.”
The Larynx manager nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “But why don’t the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?”
“Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains,” Grannie replied.
Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.
Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.
“Sorry,” the operator said. “I’ve used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again.”
Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.
“That explains something at any rate,” the old prospector said. “But how about that Red spot fever?”
On Jimmy Baker’s desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady.
Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks.
Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds.
Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping.
The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn’s eye. He began to walk toward that window.
“Look here,” he said.
Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work.
All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter’s great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men.
I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator:
“Turn it on!”
The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.
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