Megalomania Read online

  Croyd-

  Chairman of Sol Galaxy, he is an immortal and a time traveler, a master of telepathy and teleportation.

  Dino Trigg—

  Charismatic First Minister of Sol Galaxy and beloved protege of Croyd, Dino has developed a powerful system of psychophysical forces with which he can project his will upon others.

  MEGALOMANIA

  is the remarkable story of these two godlike beings—and of the struggle that ensues when Trigg, failing to oust Croyd from the Chairmanship of Sol Galaxy, launches a cosmic vendetta against him…

  Novels by Ian Wallace

  HELLER’S LEAP

  THE LUCIFER COMET

  THE RAPE OF THE SUN

  A VOYAGE TO DARI

  THE WORLD ASUNDER

  Z-STING

  MEGALOMANIA

  Copyright © 1989 by John Wallace Pritchard

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Bryn Barnard.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 781.

  First Printing, May 1989

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  ONE MORE FOR MY LIB

  who is not in this book nor, this time, anywhere else

  Radiant with love for all people she meets;

  loved in return by all people who know her.

  Good God above! when it snows, rains, or sleets,

  let balmy breezes be all that you blow her!

  Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,

  With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power

  Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

  With hideous ruin and combustion, down

  To bottomless perdition…

  *

  Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,

  Accurst, and in a cursed hour, he hies.

  —John Milton,

  Paradise Lost

  The Action

  Author’s Forenote

  CAPER ONE REBELLION IN HEAVEN

  1. The Rebellion

  2. Enter the Devil

  3. The Shape of Dino’s Vendetta

  CAPER TWO HIGH-VELOCITY MUSIC

  4. The Bird-People of Hollow Hudibras

  5. Party on Outer Hudibras

  6. Foreplay

  7. Seduction

  8. Repose at Zaubergerschloss

  9. Meanwhile, Elsewhen

  CAPER THREE GALAXIES IN DEEP SPACETIME

  10. Two Billion Years Ago—NOW!

  11. “Certain Planned patterns of Ultra-High-Velocity Stimuli”

  12. Darkside’s Flip-Flop

  13. Great Communication

  CAPER FOUR CLIMAX FOR THE JET-MASTER

  14. Detonation

  15. Surprises in Bed

  16. Adversary vs. Adversary

  CAPER ULTIMA REALITY-FACING

  17. Aboard Schnarliwarli

  18. Consequence of Backwards Music

  19. Showdown

  20. The Judging of Dino

  Author’s Forenote

  MEGALOMANIA constitutes another episode in Croyd’s epic operations to defeat forces of evil in and near Sol Galaxy (the locus of the planet Erth which is not our Earth but is so much like it that the reader can feel at home there).

  The protagonist—the villain—is Dino Trigg, a galactically high-ranking protege of Croyd, who rebels against his fathering friend and, frustrated in his drive for power, resorts to a revenge that is nothing short of cosmic. And he can do it.

  The mindsoul of Dino is obviously abnormal. However, he is not technically insane; he is thoroughly in touch with reality, as at one point he makes clear to Captain Kedrin.

  Galactic jets are real. The specific jets which are cited in the story, other than the herein-created jet out of the Magellanic Clouds, exist, and they exhibit the ferocious lengths and energy-levels herein cited.

  If here and there a reader seems to perceive allusions to the ejection from paradise of the Archangel Lucifer and to the Old Faust story, that is the reader’s honored privilege.

  —Ian Wallace Western North Carolina, 1988

  CAPER ONE

  REBELLION IN

  HEAVEN

  1. The Rebellion

  Parked in Nereid’s orbit around Neptune, taffyhaired Kolly Kedrin took advantage of her captaincy by occupying the best chair on the President’s Bridge in order to use its incomparable holotelly during election or reelection of a Galactic chairman (the incumbent being Croyd). She’d be alone in there; her first and second officers had shore leave, and the rest of her crew including her command android had their own information-input facilities.

  History was about to be made, and Kolly by God would select and control her own angles for it. Occupying all of the cycloramically curved bulkhead bridge-wall, the screen responded holistically to any holographic telecast such as this one—which in effect meant that a watcher could prowl the scene at will, alternately in front of the action or behind it or in it.

  Because the year was 2513, the directing board of Galactic, Ltd., tops among all governmental corporations, was meeting to determine by vote whether Board Chairman and Chief Executive Croyd should, during another half-decade, continue to govern Sol Galaxy whose most prosperous planet was Erth. Normally, Chairman Croyd would preside over board meetings; but at this quintennial election, with Croyd standing for reelection, it was the President of the Interplanetary Union who occupied the chair, the Union being the employer of Galactic.

  President Tannen was a benign but decisive and endlessly knowledgeable, semi-corpulent white-haired Sinite out of Erth’s Gaza Strip. His age was crowding eighty. He had been elected Interplanetary President, repeatedly, by majorities of all the affiliated planetary governments in Sol Galaxy: the democratic or authoritarian republics of fifty-four planets in fifty-two planetary systems. Tannen hired and could fire a governmental corporation to rule the galaxy; he kept hiring Galactic, Ltd., which had ruled since 2475, under Croyd’s top leadership since 2496. Tannen could not fire Croyd without firing the whole corporation.

  These arrangements made Croyd the most powerful person in the galaxy. And because Croyd was Croyd, Tannen was delighted to have it so. During his long life, never had Tannen known a man who so remarkably blended into his leadership wisdom, psychophysical agility, personal charm, and interpersonal caring.

  Action in the board room: people entering. Kolly straightened with interest; whereafter she settled back, with a container of popcorn and a soft beverage on her chair arm near the remote controls, to watch the proceedings studiously and yet with stirrings of excitement. Had not Dino Trigg promised her astonishment?

  The austerely functional board room was ovoid. Seated people were arranged along both side walls, one parenthesis open-facing the other. Between them, a broad space of floor was empty; but by crouching and peering upward, Kolly could see a large device hanging above and presumably lowerable.

  Chairman Croyd was seated behind a small desk at the center of one parenthesis of small desks facing the board. He was flanked by the ten ministers who were his top officers in Galactic.

  Trigg sat at Croyd’s immediate right, being first among these ministers. Roily was intently aware of Croyd’s involuntarily magnetic appearance—his auburn hair verging on flame, his eyes as blue as the octopus-haunted Blue Grotto, his ineffable effluvium of inward substance. His evident age was a wiry-muscular loose-athletic thirty-six—after (her backgrounding apprehended) nearly forty years of being thirty-six inside and out. (Roily didn’t know about his prior centuries.)

  But in view of how intimately she had begun to know him, Roily was shiveringly aware of Dino Trigg’s charisma. He was smilingly relaxed at the moment, but poised for electrical deployment. (For seated-next-to-him Croyd, there was nothing new about that smilingly ele
ctrical charm; Croyd, however—being in bodily proximity—sensed a great deal that was abnormally more, and Croyd prickled with apprehension.)

  Croyd and his battery of ministers were gazing somewhat upward at a toward-them-open, daised counter-parenthesis: a broad semicircular highly-polished ebonoid table behind whose convex edge were nine swiveling easy chairs, eight of which were occupied (Croyd having vacated his own center chair for this quintennial occasion). High above each of the chairs hovered a lowerable crystal cube which, at meetings where some board member could not be physically present because of extra-planetary business (boondoggling or honest), would descend to display the image of that member: the image would be able to hear, speak, and vote. All, however, were physically on hand today: the cubes were dark.

  Behind and above the board-arc sat President Tannen; behind and above Tannen was positioned SECYCOM which did not count as human.

  Tannen had appointed Croyd as Temporary Chairman in 2496, a year when Croyd’s predecessor had been disabled by a mind-attack from the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Croyd had defeated the attack. Reelected, he continued to call himself Temporary Chairman on the reasonable ground that there was no such thing as a five-year permanency. In 2507, he had resigned, accepting a transient embassy to milliparsecs-distant Djinn Galaxy. In 2509, his successor as chairman had come up dead. At Tannen’s i-radio urging, Croyd had returned, again as chairman, to quell a couple of planetary threats.

  Now, in 2513, Croyd felt uncomfortable here, having been privately advised by Tannen that Dino in secret had been hard-lobbying for his own election.

  Croyd had brought Dino cherishingly along and, returning to power, had elevated Dino from Minister of Sciences and Arts to First Minister. Dino had always been an exuberant blend of intellectuality and gallantry, driving his life as he drove his space-scouter: perceptively and with accurate precalculation of risks. He had always practiced devoted loyalty to Croyd, his foster father.

  In Dino’s warmly grateful presence, Croyd had several times intimated to Tannen and to board members that apparently Trigg would be the best of all possible chairmen by the time of Croyd’s anticipated final retirement in 2518. But now Dino was about to demonstrate that a five-year wait would be, for him, a bit much.

  Tannen contemplated Trigg. Kolly contemplated both men. Incumbent Croyd was choosing not to glance at his magnificently naughty protégé; Croyd was watching his own hands folded on his desk, and the fingers of those hands were quiescent. Silently, in his own way, Dino was praying—which is to say, he was upstirring the mystical depths of himself.

  Tannen spoke now, easily although he was feeling unease. “Hearing no objection, I will proceed to the prime business. Chairman Croyd, are you standing for reelection?” Croyd stood, assented, sat. “Prior to discussion by this board, do you wish to enter any remarks?” Croyd replied, holding his middle-baritone voice in restraint: “Not prior to discussion, sir.”

  Tannen queried: “Does anyone wish to arise as a competing candidate for the chair?”

  Dino Trigg stood: hair and trim beard golden blond, eyes a surprising dark brown, handsome-flexible-potent. His generally unexpected selfpresentation startled and even shocked his fellow ministers and some board members.

  Inquired unrufflable Tannen: “First Minister Trigg, you are challenging Chairman Croyd for the chair of this board?”

  “I am, sir.” Dino engaged the eyes of Tannen directly.

  Unsurprised but hurt, Croyd studied the faces of his eight board members, but he could descry nothing as to their voting intentions. (With respect to six of the members, Dino knew.)

  Equably Tannen told the challenger: “Sir, we have known you during some years as a remarkably fine administrator. We are also aware of your researches and achievements in astrophysics, in spatiotemporal analysis, and in psychosociology. Unless a member of this board objects, these remarks about your record will be stipulated—which will save you the embarrassment of hornblowing and allow you to go immediately into the meat of your challenge.” Tannen looked about him. “Hearing no objection, I so stipulate.” SECYCOM emitted one confirming beep.

  Tannen proceeded: “Now, sir, please give us any reasons why we should prefer you to Croyd as chairman.”

  Deep within him, Dino could virtually hear the lyric tenor of his friendly resident demon: Right here, Dino, restraint, restraint.

  Dino began: “Mister President, 1 do feel that I should begin by adding a word or two about my experiential qualifications for the chair. Be it recalled that there have been long periods of time when Chairman Croyd, my revered friend and mentor, has absented himself from his post, making it necessary for his deputy to act in his stead. Temporal analysis shows that during Croyd’s fifteen years in the chair, not counting the 2507-9 hiatus, his deputies, including myself during the past three years, have governed this galaxy more than sixty percent of the time; in my own case, it has been sixty-three percent. I have reminded you of these circumstances only to make it clear that I can handle the job. However, more affirmatively—” The inward tenor: Great, Dino! unfair, unfair, great! But now—let it roll! And this time, Croyd actually mind-heard the mind-voice; he hadn’t meant to mind-spy, which he gready disliked doing, but his hintermind had inadvertently probed, and his mental eyebrows arched high.

  Dino: “Mr. President, have I the board’s leave to present some pertinent visuals?”

  Having looked back and forth at the board members and forward at Croyd to detect negation signals which, however, were not forthcoming, Tannen assented to the visuals. Dino spoke directly to SECYCOM, issuing instructions which caused that robot to lower the overhead object—which turned out, of course, to be a crystal holosphere four meters in diameter, swinging gently a meter above the floor and nearly filling the inside of the desk/ table parentheses—causing board members and ministers to lean far back in their adjustable chairs in order for their eyes to focus comfortably on sphere-heart. SECYCOM had darkened the room, filling it with pale blue twilight.

  After a suitable pause for dramatic impact, they heard the first minister’s quiet, command-easy voice: “Roll Exhibit A.” If internally he was going nuclear-critical, nevertheless he stayed all quiet command-corn in his externality.)

  The results of his order were enchanting, even though they were familiar stuff to most of the watchers, including Kolly. The holosphere melted into black space filled with varihued stars, with a particularly bright star near center. The watchers zoomed in on that star-seeming: it became a nebula, then took discernible form as an elliptical galaxy which approached them until it filled the tube.

  “Deep-tint the tube and keep rolling,” Dino commanded; and the nebula dimmed and began to recede; at the same time, the galaxy appeared to rotate out of its plane until it was edge-on, presumably (if this was not animation) because of a repositioning of the camera-ships. “Hold the roll,” he directed; and then he turned to the board:

  “Mister President and honorable board members, let me caution you: even with the holotube in deep tint, the brightnesses that you are about to see may exceed the limit of your visual tolerance; this may be true even if your lens implants adapt to light. I do urge that, at least for the moment, you squint to exclude some of the light.” He swiveled 180 degrees: “Fellow Galactic ministers, the same applies to you, of course; and” (he looked upward) “it applies even to our telewatchers everywhere in the galaxy, unless they now darken their tubes almost to minimum brightness.”

  In the board room, his audience stiffened, and some donned dark glasses. Aboard her ship, Kolly shrugged and watched; her doubly indirect tube-image ought to be sufficiently dimmed in transmission.

  Returning his attention to SECYCOM, Dino told it: “Resume rolling.”

  Several cries of distress were heard when a multicolored flame-serpent flared into light-life that hissed out beyond the tube curvature to convert the room’s dimness into stroboscopic hyperdaylight; so might the post-medieval twentieth-century physicists and reporters have s
taggered screaming back, flinging forearms across eyes, when the first of all nuclear fireballs on Erth blindingly ignited itself.

  Moments later, grace to one or another sort of eye guard, the jet-spumes resolved themselves into describable form and color even for momentarily blinded and soul-affrighted Kolly who promptly, after all, darkened her picture and looked elsewhere until the after images paled and died. When she returned to the screen, the full images of two mirror-symmetrical plumes in fiery varicolor had achieved ultradynamic definition.

  As an interglactic spacer, of course Kolly knew what the plume-flares were, even while Dino was explaining them to his board. (Croyd, she noticed, was resting his forehead on his folded hands and was frowning down.) She and they were viewing the violent dual ejaculations of an elliptical galaxy astronomically known as 3C-449 and also, by spacers and by irreverent astronomers, as Hapi the Bull because of these twin fire jets which fancifully resembled bull horns (not the vocal but rather the prickery sort): curving gently upward from galactic center, then sharply downward, then terminally upward, each horn being tipped by a hotspot inferno. You couldn’t see these fire-horns at all with raw human vision even at normal radio-telescope frequencies; but nowadays every deep-space ship such as Kolly’s Sterbenräuber was equipped with transcolor visiscreens which opened up the higher wavelength ranges. Ironically, Sterbenräuber’s transcolor equipment was unnecessary now, because in Kolly’s tube-picture Dino had already evoked transcolor in the demonic holograph that he was exhibiting on Nereid to his board members.