L. Ron Hubbard - Mission Earth 03 by The Enemy Within

Author:The Enemy Within [Within, The Enemy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-02-15T22:52:14.708000+00:00

Chapter 2

Using the communicator system to the hangar, I sent for the technician who had installed the new emergency-alarm system. He soon came in through the hangar tunnel.

He was a cocky, self-confident type, a little runt named Flip, product of Wiggo, one of the Voltar planets. Nobody had ever persuaded him to comb his hair Earth style: it stood up in two spirals, like twin antennae.

"Alarm system don't work?" he said.

I sat him down. I handed him the hypnohelmet and the box it came in. "There is a grave emergency," I said. "These just came in on the Blixo. They work on everybody."

He looked the hypnohelmet over. Count on a technician. They never look on the outside of anything. He instantly began to look inside and open up the guts. Then he paused. "If they work, what am I doing fixing it?"

"You don't understand," I said patiently. "I've got sixteen of these. I want them fixed so that they only work when I want them to work. I want them fixed so that on some people, they appear to be working when they are not working at all."

He probed around in it. "Well, that's easy. The light on the front that shows the operator it is working isn't part of the main circuit. It can go on independently. So we just put a switch on it and it goes on but the main circuit doesn't."

"It's more complicated than that," I said. "I want the operator to turn the helmet on and think that it is working but on some people it works and some it doesn't. Now, I thought if you could put some kind of a secret switch inside the helmet that only the one it is put on can turn off, it would solve the problem."

"Oh, you mean the guy inside the helmet should be able to turn it off while the operator thinks it is still on. Right?"

"Right. Now, I was thinking that very few people can wiggle their ears. I can wiggle my ears. It is a talent I have. So if the operator put a helmet on me and I wiggled my ears—let's say three times—the helmet would be off when the operator thought it was still on."

"I can't wiggle my ears," said Flip.

"Precisely," I said. "So the helmet would work on you but, as I can wiggle my ears, it would not work on me."

"Can't be done," he said. "Not with the state of the art. There are no ear-wiggling switches."

"Not even a tip of an ear?" I pleaded.

He saw I was pretty desperate. He thought. Then he looked at the little manual I had been reading. "Huh," he snorted disparagingly, "a scaled-down operator's manual. Worthless." He reached down to the bottom of the carton and he brought out a huge, thick manual, enough to break a man's arm: Design, Theory, Maintenance and Repair Manual for Technicians.

In a moment he was absorbed in huge, spread-out schematics. "Aha!" said Flip. "A multimanifold, bypass-input, shunt circuit!" He put a finger on it impressively.

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