JOHN HOLDER'S WEAPON

"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.

The loudspeaker went silent. Holder hastily turned his attention back to the lab table, where an experiment was in progress. His head was a whirl. It seemed to him that the whole center of his cranium was a ball of light. He knew beyond a doubt that this correlated with his ability to disintegrate Nocher. The next problem would be to test the process, in secret, and discover its limits, if any. Did it have any limits? A body, flesh, bone, blood, had gone—like that. He went from the table to his desk. With a knowledge that the TV camera was watching every move he made, he pretended to be busy studying a sheaf of reports on the experiment in progress. From the back of his desk, a photograph with three smiling faces looked at him—Marie and Johnny and Teresa. His wife and their two kids. They were here too, in his apartment, hostages for his good behavior and for his efficient performance.

The three faces in the photograph were the biggest reason why he hated Nocher, and all of Nocher's kind and all that Nocher had stood for.

They had been vacationing in the Swiss Alps two years before when all four had been kidnapped. It had been as simple as that. An American scientist and his family had vanished from Switzerland. Presumably they had been taken behind the Iron Curtain but no one in America knew this for certain. Nor would anyone in the western world have been able to do anything about it if they had known the facts. Holder assumed that a search had been made for him. Possibly a protest had been lodged with the Russian government. If so, like so many other protests, it had come to nothing. Power was all that was respected in this part of the world.

He grinned to himself. Since power was all they respected, he would show them some!

He looked up. An armed guard, one of the hated security police, had entered the room.

"The commandant orders your presence," the guard said.

"Tell the commandant to go to—" Holder caught his tongue in the nick of time. He forced a polite smile to his face. "I will be glad to call on the commandant."

"At once," the guard said.

"Certainly," Holder said, rising. With a farewell glance at the framed photograph on his desk, the scientist left the lab. Why was he breathing so heavily?

The commandant was a big man with a bald head and arm muscles that made bulges in the sleeves of his uniform. An ex-spy, to a man the scientists here in this installation hated him. He sat behind a plain oak desk and played with a Turkish dagger that he used as a paper knife. Rumor had it that in the days when he had acted as an executioner, he had used this knife to slit the throats of his victims. He did not bother to be polite to a mere scientist. They were dogs to be used for the benefit of the state.

"You were the last one to see Nocher," the commandant said.

"The last one to see him?" Holder questioned. "I do not understand. Is he dead?"

"I will ask the questions, you will answer them," the commandant stated. "What happened to Nocher?" He was so sure of his power that he did not bother to play his usual game of cat and mouse.

"I do not know that anything happened to him." Holder answered quickly. "He was in my lab, talking, then he went away."

"How did he go away?"

The scientist shrugged. "I didn't really notice. We chatted for a few moments, then I turned my attention again to my work. When I looked up, he was gone. I get the impression from your questions that something is wrong. May I ask—"

"You may not. I will do the asking. What did you do to Nocher?"

"Nothing," Holder promptly answered.

"I saw you do it." The commandant pointed to the television screen on his desk.

"You saw me do what?" Holder said. Anger was rising in him. Again he had the impression that the inside of his head was filling with light.

"I saw you destroy him, with the new discovery you have made!" A wolfish grin appeared on the Commandant's face and he looked like a Red who has just found a way to achieve his heart's desire of swallowing the world.

Holder saw what was happening. The commandant harbored a secret desire to be a ruler. Another Mussolini, another Stalin! If the commandant could win possession of the discovery he thought Holder had made, he might become another Genghis Khan, to scourge the world with flame and death.

"You're utterly crazy!" Holder shouted.

"You have discovered a disintegrating ray and I want it." The commandant continued as if he had not heard a word the scientist had said. "I'm also going to get it." He flicked a button and motioned Holder to look at the TV screen. Revealed there were Marie and Johnny and Teresa. The kids were playing their eternal game of hide and seek and were waiting for him to return home to play it with them. At the sight, Holder felt his heart turn over inside him.

"You wouldn't harm them," he whispered. "You wouldn't dare."

The commandant now looked like a Red who had just swallowed the whole solar system. "Wouldn't I?" he answered. The wolf grin on his face had spread from ear to ear.

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

The last he saw of the commandant as the latter went away was the wolfish grin. There was a startled expression on the grin as the man vanished like something had happened that was not on schedule.

Holder walked quietly out of the room and down the corridor. Behind him, he heard an alarm bell go off. The pound of heavy boots answering the alarm bell followed. He moved faster. A shout to halt followed. He dodged around a corner in the corridor and began to run.

He knew now that he would be followed to the ends of the earth. For him, and those dear to him, there was no hiding place. His conversation with the commandant had been monitored. Now that the commandant was gone, the next in command automatically stepped into his shoes. He knew what he was going to do, what he had to do. Perhaps—the vague hope was in his mind—if he could disintegrate bodies, he could also re-integrate them. He did not know if he could do this and there was no time to find out. There was only time to act, and hope.

Feet pounded behind him along the corridor. On the roof of the building, a siren began to wail. All security forces were being called out.

He slipped from the building, dodged around a concrete statue, and ran as fast as his legs could carry him toward the living quarters provided here. This was a three-story concrete structure. As he slid into the entrance of this building, whistles were shrilling behind him and armored car motors were beginning to roar. The air was still vibrating with the shrill screaming of the alarm siren. A guard had sighted him and was in hot chase behind.

With the feet of the guard clumping behind him, John Holder ran down the third floor hall toward his apartment. A shot rang out behind him and the bullet chipped plaster from the wall at the end of the corridor. A hoarse shout to halt sounded. He snatched open the door and was inside. His wife, her face a question mark, came toward him. Panting, he leaned against the wall. With one hand, he shot the latch on the door.

"I thought I heard a shot," Marie said.

He nodded.

Her face lost all its color. "Then—it's come?" Each had secretly wondered what would happen when the inevitable hour came when Holder's work was no longer satisfactory. They could not be returned to Switzerland. They knew too much. Would it be Siberia? Or a quick death? What would happen to the children?

Again Holder nodded.

"Daddy! Daddy's home!" This was six year old Johnny shouting the good news to Teresa. The boy came running to throw himself toward his father. Holder stooped and picked him up.

"You're going to play games with us tonight?" Johnny demanded. "You're going to play hide and seek?"

"Your father is very tired right now dear." Marie said quickly. "Later he will play with you."

"Sure," Holder said. "Sure. Later." He made no effort to release the boy. Four year old Teresa, carrying her teddy bear, was also making a bee-line for him. She did not intend to be left out of the fun. Holder caught her up in his free arm.

Hob-nailed boots pounded to a halt outside the door. A heavy knock sounded. Marie turned toward the door. Holder shook his head. Down the corridor a command rasped out. Abruptly the knocking ceased. "Let 'em break it down." Holder said. "That will give me enough time." He ignored the questions on his wife's face.

"Somebody want in, daddy?" Johnny inquired. "Who is it?"

"The big bad bear," Holder answered. "But don't worry. He won't get you. I won't let him." To Marie, he said, "Look out the window and tell me what you see."

"An armored car has just pulled up in front," she said. "They have set up machine guns on each corner of the b-block."

"Thorough devils," Holder commented.

"What's a devil, daddy?" Johnny asked.

"It's just a word," Holder answered.

Marie moved across the room to him. "John," she said. Then again, "John—"

"Don't be alarmed, darling," Holder said. "It's only death."

"It's only—" She sat down so quickly that he thought her legs had given way beneath her.

"That's only a word too," Holder said quickly.

"It—it—" Her lips twisted and a choking movement started in her throat. "How can you say it's only a word when it's the most real fact in our existence right now?"

"Is death a fact, or is it another human delusion?" the scientist asked.

"John!" Her eyes were fixed on him with terrible intensity.

"I'm not nuts," he said. "The men outside setting up the machine guns are the ones who are crazy, not me." Deep inside he was quite sure he meant what he had said.

"What are they going to do with the guns, daddy?" Johnny asked.

"Guns, daddy," Teresa echoed.

"They're going to use them to make loud noises," Holder answered. "If I try to run, they will point them at me and make loud noises and I will fall down."

"And go boom?" Teresa asked. She thought this was amusing.

Johnny suddenly sensed the seriousness of the situation. "I don't want you to fall down, daddy," he said.

"That's the kind of world we live in," Holder answered. "Sooner or later, everybody has to fall down. There's a law—"

"John!" Marie spoke.

"Which do you want?" Holder answered. "If I fall down, I'll never get up. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in this kind of a world, where you will become the plaything of barracks soldiers. Do you want—"

"John!"

"Do you want the kids to be raised as wards of the state, where they will be conditioned into accepting the idea that this world is right?" Holder gestured toward the windows.

Marie's face revealed mute agony. "N-no. But—isn't there some other way?"

"Sure," the scientist said. He set the kids on the floor.

Marie's face gleamed with sudden hope like a rainbow seen at the world's end.

A knock sounded on the door.

The rainbow vanished from her face. She looked toward the door.

"Get the hell out of my sight!" Holder said to her.

She went as Nocher and the commandant had gone. Except that she went smiling. Her smile seemed to linger in the air, like a bright gleam from some far-off heaven, after she had gone.

"Where mommy go?" Teresa inquired.

"Yeah where'd she go?" Johnny added. "She was sitting right there just a minute ago—"

"We will break down the door if you don't open up," a voice said outside.

"Just a minute," Holder yelled. He looked at his son. Why was it so difficult to concentrate now? "Johnny," he said. His voice was a hoarse gasp.

"Yes, dad."

"Get the hell out of my sight."

The boy went easily and rapidly. Johnny did not seem to mind. It was as if to him there was nothing bad about this experience. And possibly nothing new.

Holder wiped sweat from his face. Was he sure? Did he really know what he was doing? Was he certain? There had been no time for testing.

Teresa, staring around the room, was searching for her idol. "Johnny!" she called. When there was no answer, she looked up at her father and announced, "Johnny is hiding." This was the beginning of a game.

Holder forced a smile to his face. "Do you want to go find him?"

She clapped her hands in joy. "Sure. Find Johnny."

Why was this tic in his right cheek and this sudden tremor in his hands? Did this child with the bright blue eyes mean so much to him that he could not send her after her mother and brother, that he could not protect her from the men on the other side of the door? Why this sudden sweat all over his body?

"Get—" His voice faltered into silence. A knot as big as his fist was in his throat.

"Find Johnny, daddy," Teresa urged.

Bang! The butt of a rifle crashed against the door, giving Holder the strength that he needed. "Get the hell out of my sight," he said.

She went even easier than Johnny had gone as if the younger they were, the easier this process was. She went laughing and giggling. She was going to find Johnny. This was a game of hide and seek, which she had always enjoyed.

Holder tried to swallow the knot in his throat. He moved to the mirror, stood regarding himself in it. Why was his heart pounding so heavily. He, of all men on earth, knew and could prove, that the human body was only a mental construction, that the very atoms in it were held together by the force of a patterned idea, and by nothing else. The pattern on which the body was constructed, the blue-print for the bones, flesh, and organs, this was an idea, and nothing more. The flesh and bones, the blood and sinew, that gave reality to the idea, were in reality only the bricks and mortar, the lumber and metal, that gave reality to an architect's blue-print of a house. When the house burned down, or was otherwise destroyed, the idea still remained. It, and it alone, had life. It, and it alone, had immortality.

Why was sweat spurting from every pore in his body?

Crash! Behind him, the door fell inward.

"Get the hell out of my sight!" he said staring at his reflection in the mirror.

Nothing happened. The mirror clearly revealed the puzzled frown on his face and the look of bewilderment in his eyes. It also revealed three men approaching from behind.

Holder knew he had failed. He had thought that all he would need to do would be to look at himself in a mirror—and go with the others. Something had gone wrong.

"I was only sending them ahead of me," he whispered. "I meant to go too." The agony inside him was as deep as space. He made no effort to resist the men when they grabbed him.

They took him directly to the deepest underground cell in the headquarters building. He had heard whispered rumors of this place from the other scientists here but he had never really believed it existed. They chained him to the wall so that his feet did not touch the floor. He looked at the chains, and wondered if they would go away when he told them to.

A little man with the face of a rat entered the cell and the others withdrew. Rat-face was the interrogator. Obviously Rat-face had had vast experience with political prisoners. He knew all the questions to ask and all the torture methods. Holder dimly wondered what tales the walls of this tiny, barren cell could tell if they had the ability to speak.

"Where is Nocher?"

"In hell, I hope."

"Ah!"

"I did it," Holder said. "I confess everything. I destroyed Nocher. I eliminated the commandant. All I ask is that you shoot me, at once."

The rat face revealed mixed pleasure and chagrin. Prisoners were supposed to confess. But not so quickly. Rat-face felt cheated. He enjoyed torturing the helpless.

"What about your wife? Did you destroy her too?"

"Yes."

"And your children?"

"Yes."

Rat-face counted on nicotine-stained fingers. "That makes you five times a killer."

"Yes. Shoot me," Holder begged. The agony inside him was growing deeper. Visions of Teresa going away danced before his eyes. What had he actually done to her?

"What did you do with the bodies?"

"I—"

"You have admitted you killed them. You must have hid the bodies some place."

Rat-face had not been properly briefed by the new commandant. He thought he was dealing with murder! Holder glanced up at the ceiling. The TV camera and the microphone were there. Probably the new commandant was watching this scene from some safe place.

"Where did you hide the bodies?" Rat-face continued.

"Try and find them!" The laughter that followed was wild and Holder knew it. This fact didn't matter. The political commissars thought all scientists were crazy anyhow. Except when they made atom bombs. To a political commissar, atom bombs made sense. They could be dropped on the heads of people who didn't agree with them.

"How did you do it?" Rat-face demanded. His little beady eyes bored into Holder as he asked this question.

"Like this," Holder answered. "Get the hell out of my sight."

His laughter continued for minutes, at the funny expression on the little political commissar's face as Rat-face had gone away. No one else came into the cell. Holder concentrated his attention on his chains. He repeated the magic formula. The chains remained as firm as ever. He stared at them in growing fear. Here was one thing that did not obey his command to vanish.

"If I had only had time to test!" he muttered. He tried to pull himself free from the chains. They had been designed and built to prevent exactly this. He exhausted himself with no result then left off his efforts when he realized he was hearing the sound of running water.

His feet were wet.

He looked down and saw that the bottom of his cell was covered by water. "A pipe broke somewhere," he thought. Looking up toward the TV camera on the ceiling, he yelled, "Hey! You had better repair that pipe before you drown one of your prisoners."

There was no question in his mind as to what lay ahead for him. He would be questioned for days, for weeks, if necessary, until they had gotten his secret from him. The new commandant, and the powers above him, would use up any number of political commissars to achieve their goal. Political commissars were cheap. Secrets such as the one John Holder possessed were very important.

The water was up to his ankles. He saw, then, the purpose of this cell. It had been constructed so that water could be turned into it. The helpless wretch who had been left chained to the wall here could either confess or he could drown. The cell was actually a death trap.

Now he understood why no one else had taken the place of Rat-face!

In dazed horror, he watched the water rise to his knees. The sound was now that of a roaring torrent. He knew that his unseen watchers had opened the valve still wider.

The water rose to his chest, constricted a cold band there, then surged upward to his throat.

"Help!" he screamed involuntarily.

Instantly he heard the valve close. The sound of the torrent stopped.

"Do you talk now?" the speaker on the ceiling asked.

"I—" In this moment of terrible threat, he knew he would talk, not to save his life, but because he could not help himself, because he could not keep from talking. He knew, also, that there was nothing he could put into words which would reveal what he knew to be true. "I—I can't."

Again the valve was opened, again the water came into the narrow cell. It reached Holder's chin. He knew now that they fully intended to drown him if he didn't reveal what he knew. From the viewpoint of the watchers, it was better that he should die than that they should take a chance on letting him escape to tell what he knew to someone else!

"I can't tell you," he screamed. "It won't go into words. It's something I do inside my mind."

"Talk!" the loudspeaker answered.

"But I'm telling you that I can't—" His voice took on the sound of a gargle as water poured into his mouth. He spat it out and tried to scream. The water, rising higher, poured into his mouth. He twisted his head upward, shoving against the chains that held him to the wall. The water reached his nose and flowed downward into his lungs.

Within a minute, at most, the level of the water would be hastily lowered. After he was revived he would be given a chance to tell what he knew. If he still proved obstinate, the process would be repeated. But Holder did not know this.

Some prisoners had withstood repeated duckings only to be drowned in the end. Most told everything they knew after the first treatment.

Inside him, John Holder knew that the human body was only a mental construction. Only the strength of an idea held flesh and bones and blood together. He also knew there was no way on earth for him to reveal this secret to another person, in words. Perhaps long and careful study of the nature and the kinds of energies involved would enable him to give a mathematical description of what he knew he could do inside of him. The Reds would never wait for such a study to be made. They were looking for something as simple and as dramatic as E is equal to MC squared, the basic equation that had served for the mathematical springboard for the atom bomb.

As the water poured into his nose and down into his lungs, he made one last furious effort. The process had worked on other people. How could he make it work on him? An answer popped into his mind. All he had to do was to think of himself as another person.

He did this. Light exploded through his brain and flooded through his whole body.

When the water level was lowered, the bewildered Reds found empty chains dangling from the walls of the cell. The body they had placed in the chains was no longer there.

Three days later, the driver of an American jeep, on border patrol at night with a squad of men, was astonished to find four bodies suddenly appear within his headlights. To him, they seemed to come out of nowhere. Brakes screaming, the driver jerked the jeep to a halt. The sergeant in charge of the squad hastily dismounted.

"I am John Holder and this is my wife and our two children," the man in the glare of the headlights said.

"Holder?" the sergeant said. "Say, we've got a search order out for you. You vanished behind the iron curtain."

"We have come back through it," Holder answered. "Take us to your commanding officer, at once."

They were put into the jeep. "Johnny, go hide again," the smallest child kept saying. "So we can find him in that place where the light is. Johnny go hide—"

"Shhh, Teresa," her father answered, indulgently. "No more game until we get back to America." He thought longingly of that land across the sea that to them was home. "Besides it is too hard to find you on the other side, and re-integrate a body for you—"

"John," the woman spoke reprovingly. "Why explain it to them? You know they can't understand what you're talking about."

Holder grinned and was silent. Sometimes he wondered if he understood it all himself. All he knew was that a body could be disintegrated, by pure mental force.

The jeep shifted into high gear. At the end of this journey, a plane would be waiting. This would take them to America.... Home.... There a whole new world of exploration waited for him. The very best research teams the country possessed would be at his disposal, the keenest brains, the sharpest minds. Hugging the kids to him, he smiled quietly to himself.