The Mightiest Man - Patrick Fahy

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The mightiest man by Patrick Farhy, 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

(00:20):
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. Wakening 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

(00:42):
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

(01:04):
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

(01:27):
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

(01:48):
had been snatched from a busy city street, a random
specimen of humanity to be probed and investigated. They had
chosen well for the payment they offered him. He was
willing 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.

(02:10):
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
before 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

(02:34):
the Yugoslavs to guard him, and anyway, their hearts weren't
in the task. His treachery, the ultimate treason, the betrayal
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

(02:55):
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 one hundred thousand people
writhed in neural agony. Twenty four hours later, the neural

(03:16):
plague had spread to Zagreb and into Albania as far
as Tarana. When it crossed Leghorn in Italy, the Balkans
heeled twenty million lunatics, and the Danube was an artificial
lake one hundred miles wide. They had used a clean bomb,
so they were able to bring a loud speaker van
to its edge and boom at him to come out.

(03:36):
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 parda dure on
the banks of the Danube for his perverted amusement. Then

(03:59):
he really them and released the millions of gibbering, twitching
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 lieutenant that he was willing
to stand trial any place in the world they wished.

(04:21):
For three days, nobody came to arrest him. He sat
alone with the lieutenant 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.

(04:42):
In the same moment, the Chief Justice of the Court
of the Nations, as 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,

(05:05):
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. A gray
faced Chief Justice inquired whether he wished to be sentenced,
and he answered yes, but not to death. They couldn't
kill him, he explained, that was part of the reward

(05:25):
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 court room. Then he lost his composure and
his mouth twitched. He laughed uproariously slapped his knees in ecstasy.
It was plain that he was fond of a joke.

(05:48):
An anonymous lawyer stood up and waited patiently for his
merriment 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

(06:09):
agonizingly to her fetal 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 attention.

(06:34):
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

(06:54):
broariously at his macarb joke, and in their minds too.
The lawyer, his blue eyes gazed at him steadily, and
he stopped laughing. In the baited hush of the courtroom,
he said, softly, what a pity. I am not an
alien too. You could have the fungoids destroy me. He

(07:15):
laughed again, helplessly, the tears running down his cheeks. The
Chief Justice adjourned the court then, and the prisoner sauntered
to his comfortable quarters in front of his frightened guards.
That night, in his own living room, the Chief Justice
danced and agonized fandango in front of his horror stricken wife,
and the anonymous lawyer sat in his apartment staring at

(07:36):
the blank wall. He was glad the aliens had not
made the traitor telepathic too. He had found the chink
in his armor. The neural paralysis, the murders by remote
control were acts of a conscious will. He had himself
admitted that if his mind was destroyed, his powers would
be destroyed with it. The aliens had not sought revenge

(07:59):
because their minds were totally occupied with saving themselves. The
stricken ones had simply lost the power. The knowledge was
useless to him. There was no way they could attack
his mind without his knowing it. Possibly they could steal
away his consciousness by drugging or bludgeoning, but it would
be racial's suicide to attempt it. In the split moment
of realization, he would kill every human being on earth.

(08:22):
There would be nobody left to operate on his brain
to make him a mindless, powerless idiot for the rest
of time. For any period of time, he corrected himself,
his brain would heal again. He was useless to think
about it. There was nothing they could use against his invincibility.
The only hope was to attack him unawares, and if
that hope was a fraction less than a certainty, it

(08:45):
could only mean final and absolute catastrophe. The lawyer looked
at his watch. It was four in the morning. He
went into the kitchenette and then shrugged himself into his coat.
He walked through the silent streets, past the city hospital
where the Chief Justice lay in agony while the motor
impulses from his nerve centers wrenched and twisted his body.

(09:09):
He entered the foyer of the luxury hotel where the
race betrayer was held prisoner, and took the elevator to
the sixth floor. Two sleepy guards jerked erect outside the
unlocked door. He put his finger to his lips, enjoining
them to silence. Then he entered the room and stood
for a moment over the man who was invincible and immortal,

(09:29):
and human, human, and subject to the involuntary unconsciousness which
nature demands from all men. He slept, the eyelids fluttered.
The lawyer took the steel meetskeua from his pocket. He
thrust it through a half oamed eye and rotated it methodically,
reducing the soft brain to formless mush. After that, the

(09:52):
trial proceeded normally. The prisoner stared vacantly in front of him,
and all his movements had to be directed, but he
was alive, and his thumb was full grown again. He
was the lawyer that noticed this and pointed out the implications.
The thumb had grown to full size in less than
six weeks. They must regard that as their maximum period

(10:13):
of immunity. They ruminated over it for another four days.
The question was a tricky one, for malignant immortality was
beyond human solution. It was not just a matter of
dealing out punishment. The problem now was the protection of
the race from sudden annihilation. An insolvable problem, but one

(10:33):
that must be solved. They could only do their best.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a special feature.
It was decided he should be guillotined once a month
as long as he lived. The End of the Mightiest
Man by Patrick Firey