JOHN HOLDER'S WEAPON

                       By Robert Moore Williams

              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.

       *       *       *       *       *

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.