Controller (ss) by Eric Frank Russell

Author:Eric Frank Russell [Russell, Eric Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Short Story
Publisher: Astounding Science Fiction
Published: 1943-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Forty brown-skinned infantrymen squatted on the floor around the sides of the Cave of Lightnings. None of them were bound. All had full equipment and loaded arms. They watched Jackson with eyes that were intelligent but totally disinterested. They did not speak unless spoken to.

With the lithe Malo to help him, Jackson shoved Konura into the cabinet. The victim’s English was fluent, his accents cultured, but he was making far more use of the fluency than the culture. There was no fear in his face, no pleadings in his speech which consisted entirely of threats of a type which revealed his knowledge of anatomy.

He promised that Jackson would be choked to death with his own bowels. He said that the warmongering President of the United States would dispose of his own liver in a certain unmentionable manner. He declared that a fake-Oriental movie star would clean the latrine of the Son of Heaven. Without pausing for breath, he made prophecies concerning white women and children, his language being even viler than his imagination.

“Let me!” pleaded Malo. He did not understand one word of the disgusting tirade but was shrewd enough to sense its purport. He temped Jackson with a view of his hamlike fist.

“Not now,” said Jackson, sickened and tired. “We cannot spoil him at this stage. After—I promise you!”

Malo registered extreme pleasure. He licked his knuckles, eyed the honorable nose with warlike hunger. Konura noticed none of this. He continued to orate in a voice verging upon the hysterical, his newest subject being the ancestry and future of the forty swinish traitors by the wall. The forty swinish traitors infuriated him further by listening with blank indifference.

“Squeaking pig not like mirror-men,” chuckled Mala

“Humph!”

Jackson tugged over the master switch. For perhaps the hundredth time the apparatus leaped to hotter, more brilliant life. Transformers hummed like hives of angry bees; cathode emission doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and continued to go up from there. Inductances started to emulate toasters, and a faint mist crept up to the nozzles of the cooling sprays.

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