Empire Dreams Read Free Page B

star-pilots exchange greeting signals, and Orange Two rolls effortlessly away into a billion billion cubic light-years of space. Ahead, the Zygon flagship is sowing fighters like demon seed and now its heavy-duty laser turrets are swinging to bear on you. Photon blasts fill the air like thistledown on a summer’s day.
    “Hold on to your seat, kid, this calls for some tight flying,” shouts the voice of Major Tom in your helmet-radio earphones, and he twists, turns, spins, loops, somersaults, and handstands the X15 past the crisscrossing Zygon fighters and the laserfire of the Flagship. The immense metal bulk of the enemy ship swells up before you, so close that you can see the space-armored crews at their batteries.
    “Arm pulsar torpedoes’ smart systems.”
    Click switch, press button; green lights reflect in your visor.
    “Pulsar torpedoes armed.” The infinitesimal white X15 Astrofighter hurtles over a crazy metal landscape bursting with laserfire. Before you loom the engine ports, ponderous as mountain ranges, vulnerable as free-range eggs. Your mouth is dry, your hands are wet, your eyeballs as desiccated as two round pebbles. Red lights …
    “Squadron coming in behind us, fast.” The metal landscape blurs beneath you; this alien vessel is so huge …
    “Damn. Orange Leader to Force Orange, what happened to the cover? Mark three bogies on my tail, take care of ‘em, I’m going for the engine ducts … five”—the iron mountains open like jaws—“four”—on your rear screen, three evil black Zygon pursuit ships slip into tight cover—“three”—you veer down a sudden valley in the huge geography of the flagship’s drive section—“two”—ahead is the white doomsday glow of the stardrives—“one … Fire.” Orange Leader climbs away from the engine pods. The pursuit ships come after you, never seeing the tiny blob of light detach itself from your fighter at count zero and steer itself down the engine tubes into the miles-distant bowels of the enemy flagship. Major Tom loops twelve thousand miles high above the doomed starship and declares, “Detonation!”
    At first there is nothing, as if it has taken time for Major Tom’s voice to travel across space and the torpedo to hear him, but then, as if by his express command, the Zygon flagship silently expands into a rainbow of glowing particles. The afterblast paints the cockpit pink, a beautiful bathroom pink. The glow takes a long time to fade, a man-made nova.
    “Yahoo!” you shout. “Yahoo! We got him!”
    “We sure did,” says Major Tom. “Son, we sure did.”
    “What now?” you ask. “Take care of those pursuit ships and then back to
Excalibur
?”
    “Not yet,” says Major Tom and there is a strange note in his voice that reminds you of something you have purposefully forgotten. “We’re pressing on, continuing the attack on our own, because there’s a planet out there beyond the lines of Zygon ships, a planet hidden for a million years away from Galactic knowledge, and we, and we alone, must go there to destroy Zygon power forever.”
    PRESS RELEASE: DECEMBER 22, 1968 (EXTRACTS).
    [THIS IS] THE concept of the “Mind Box,” the baggage of beliefs and values which determine the individual’s response to the events of his life. Research into depression has shown the relationship between psychosomatic symptoms and the state of the individual’s “Mind Box.” Dr. Montgomery hypothesized in his doctoral thesis that this Mind Box concept might account for many of the more severe medical cases which are never diagnosed as psychosomatic but which otherwise have no medical reason for their lack of response to conventional treatment.
    [The concept of] “deep dreaming” [was developed] from Luzerski and Baum’s work on lucid dreams, dreams in which the dreamer exerts conscious control over the content of his dream. It is a highly refined version of Luzerski and Baum’s dream techniques whereby an individual enters a state of