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The Mightiest Man

Fahy, Patrick

Published: 1961

Type(s): Short Fiction, Science Fiction

Source: http://gutenberg.org

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They caught up with him in Belgrade.

The aliens had gone by then, only a few shining metal huts in the

Siberian tundra giving mute evidence that they had been anything other

than a nightmare.

It had seemed exactly like that. A nightmare in which all of Earth

stood helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered

and flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening

had not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That if

it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been capable

of dealing with the terrible menace. It had been real. And they had been

no more capable of resisting the giant intelligences than a child of killing

the ogre in his favorite fairy story.

It was an ironic parallel, because that was what finally saved Earth for

its own people. A fairy story.

The old fable of the lion and the mouse. When the lion had exhausted

his atomic armor and proud science against the invincible and immortal

invaders of Earth—for they could not be killed by any means—the

mouse attacked and vanquished them.

The mouse, the lowest form of life: the fungoids, the air of Earth

swarming with millions of their spores, attacked the monstrous bodies,

grew and entwined within the gray convolutions that were their brain

centers. And as the tiny thread-roots probed and tightened, the aliens

screamed soundlessly. The intelligences toppled and fell, and at last that

few among them who retained sanity gathered their lunatic brethren and

fled as they had come.

If he had known the effect the fungoids would have on them, he

would have told them that too. He had told them everything else, when

he had been snatched from a busy city street, a random specimen of hu-

manity to be probed and investigated.

They had chosen well. For the payment they offered him he was will-

ing to barter the whole human race. As far as it lay in his power he did

just that.

He was not an educated man, though he was intelligent. It was child's

play to them to strip his mind bare; but they had to know the intangibles

too, the determined will of humanity to survive, the probabilities of the

pattern of human behavior in a situation which humanity had never be-

fore faced. He told them all he could, gladly and willingly. He would

have descended to any treachery for the vast glittering reward they

tempted him with.

It wasn't easy for the Yugoslavs to guard him and, anyway, their

hearts weren't in the task. His treachery, the ultimate treason, the betray-

al of the whole human race, was commonly known.

Inevitably the mob got him and killed three policemen in the process.

When they had sated their anger a little and the traitor had lost most of

his clothes and the thumb of his right hand, they dragged him to the

junction where the Danube meets the Sava and held him under the gray

waters with long poles, as if he was some poisonous reptile.

He lay supinely on the bed of the river and smiled evilly while a hun-

dred thousand people writhed in neural agony.

Twenty-four hours later the neural plague had spread to Zagreb and

into Albania as far as Tirana. When it crossed to Leghorn in Italy the

Balkans held twenty million lunatics and the Danube was an artificial

lake a hundred miles wide.

They had used a "clean" bomb. So they were able to bring a loudspeak-

er van to its edge and boom at him to come out. He allowed them to do

that for some inscrutable reason; perhaps to demonstrate that his powers

were selective. Then it seemed he got tired of the farce, and cruel fingers

twined themselves into the nerve centers of the President of Italy and the

Prime Minister of the government of United Europe. He made them

dance a horribly twisted pas de deux on the banks of the Danube for his

perverted amusement.

Then he released them, and released the millions of gibbering, twitch-

ing idiots that inhabited Southern Europe, and he came out of the river

bed in which he had lain for forty-eight hours.

He walked alone through the deserted streets of Belgrade until he

came to the United Nations building. There he told a very brave lieuten-

ant that he was willing to stand trial any place in the world they wished.

For three days nobody came to arrest him. He sat alone with the lieu-

tenant in the peopleless city of Belgrade and waited for his captors. They

came then, timidly reassured by his non-violence. While he talked to

them pleasantly the citizens of London and Paris suddenly began to

dance jerky and grotesque jigs on the pavements of their cities. In the

same moment the Chief Justice of the Court of the Nations, at a cocktail

party in Washington, writhed in the exquisite pain of total muscle

cramp, his august features twisted into a mask of abject fear.

The trial itself was a legal farce. The prisoner promptly pleaded guilty

to the charge of betraying mankind to an alien race, but he didn't allow

them to question him. When one lawyer persisted in face of his pleasant

refusals, he died suddenly in a cramped ball of screaming agony.

The gray-faced Chief Justice inquired whether he wished to be sen-

tenced and he answered yes, but not to death. They couldn't kill him, he

explained. That was part of the reward the aliens had given him. The

other part was that he could kill or immobilize anybody in the world—or

everybody—from any distance. He sat back and smiled at the stricken

courtroom. Then he lost his composure and his mouth twitched. He

laughed uproariously and slapped his knees in ecstasy.

It was plain that he was fond of a joke.

An anonymous lawyer stood up and waited patiently for his merri-

ment to subside.

If this was true, he asked, why had not the aliens used this power?

Why had they not simply killed off the inhabitants and taken over the

vacant planet? The traitor gazed kindly at him; and a court stenographer

who had cautiously picked up a pencil returned agonizingly to her foetal

position and, that way, died.

The traitor looked at his fingers and shrugged. The thumb that had

been snapped off in the mob's frenzy was more than half grown again.

"They needed slaves," he said simply.

"And at the end, while some of them were still sane?"

The traitor raised his eyebrows, giving him his full courteous atten-

tion. The lawyer sat down abruptly, his question unfinished. The

creature who had betrayed his own race smiled at him and permitted

him to live.

He even completed his question for him, and answered it. "Why did

they not kill then? They had something else on their minds—fungoids!"

He laughed uproariously at his macabre joke. "And in their minds too!"

The lawyer's blue eyes gazed at him steadily and he stopped laughing.

In the bated hush of the courtroom he said softly, "What a pity I'm not an

alien too. You could have the fungoids destroy me!"

He laughed again helplessly, the tears running down his cheeks.

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