The next six weeks passed with Hommel running a big program to search out the effects of chronic overdosing with the pills, and, if possible, to find some antidote. While Hommel suffered from the gradual discovery that half his research staff was doped to the ears, Banner piled up frustrations trying to get official recognition of the possible dangers of the drug.
"
Phew!
" said Banner. "How do you convince them when they're already on the pills themselves, with their critical sense working overtime? It was all I could do to get the drug barred from the armed forces. One of the boobs even told me I should 'take medication to quiet an excessively active imagination.'"
"What I've run into is just as bad," said Hommel. He opened a portfolio, pushed some bulky reports out of the way, and pulled out a folder of large glossy photographs. "We've found out what chronic overdosing with the drug does. Here, for instance, we have a dog massively doped with the pills."
Banner leaned forward, and the two men looked at a photograph of a large lean dog inside a square, fenced-in pen, with the fence completely removed from the side behind the dog. The dog was looking hungrily through the woven wire at a bowl of what appeared to be big chunks of meat covered with gravy.
"Hm-m-m," said Banner. "All he has to do is to go back through the open side of the pen, go around the other side, and he's got the meat."
"His approach was different," said Hommel, and handed over another picture.
This photograph showed large and small stones, gravel, and dirt thrown back from the fence, a shallow hole dug under the fence, clumps of fur sticking to the bottom wires of the fence, and the dog, scratched up and exhausted, bolting down the food.
Banner stared. "Is this what it does to people?"
"Well, here are some first-rate chess players, who originally got started on the pills because they wanted to be clear-headed during a tournament."
The photograph showed half-a-dozen intellectual-looking individuals peering over each other's shoulders at a chessboard where a White Pawn sat on Queen's Knight 2, with the White King right beside it on QB2. Arrayed against White was the Black King on QB4, Rook on K4, Queen on K8, and Knight on QKt6.
"Whose move?" said Banner.
"Black's. Now, all that these doped-up chess players had to do was to find a good move. Three of them favored K-QB5. That's a stalemate. One liked Q-Q7ch. That loses the Knight. Another favored R-K7ch; that's another way to lose the Knight. The last one got excited and figured he had checkmate. He moved Q-B6ch. White has four different ways to get out of check, including a choice of two ways to take the Queen."
Banner passed his hand over his face.
Hommel pulled out a photograph of three mechanics squinting under a raised hood. The engine showed up clearly. Hommel said, "Look at that distributor."
"Hm-m-m. The high-tension wire from the coil is interchanged with one of the spark-plug wires. They've plugged into the wrong connections on the distributor cap."
"Right. These expert mechanics figured it out, too—in an hour and forty-seven minutes."
Banner shook his head. "What's that next one?"
"A highly-competent chemist who used the pills to improve his objectivity, and was so pleased with the effect that he gradually increased the dosage."
The photograph showed a man in a laboratory jacket holding a dripping Bunsen burner by the base. Before him was a distilling flask fitted with upright reflux condenser. A length of rubber tubing supplied water to the top of the condenser's water jacket. This water ran down through the water jacket, and was carried off by another length of rubber tubing, which coiled around and connected to the side-arm delivery tube on the distilling flask. Everything was thus neatly connected up, including the pointless side arm. The water from the jacket obediently flowed in through the side arm, filled up the distilling flask, rose up through the inside of the condenser, overflowed at the top, like a fountain, and poured down the outside.
"Ye gods," said Banner, "surely he could figure
that
out!"
"I think he secretly thought he was witnessing the spontaneous generation of matter."
"But how does this come about? The drug starts off by
stimulating
the critical faculty."
"Yes, and following repeated overstimulation comes fatigue, exhaustion, and malfunction. Eventually, people get into such bad shape from overdose of the pills that if they stay off them for a while and start to recover, the first flickers of returning intelligence strike them as 'weird ideas,' instability, and so on. They're afraid that they're getting 'strange.' So, they take more pills."
Banner shook his head. "What's that next picture?"
Hommel handed him a photograph of three keen-eyed men, one gnawing the end of a lead pencil, and all studying a circuit mounted on a board.
Banner said, "What's the difficulty?"
"It doesn't work."
Hommel watched Banner's face change expression as his gaze shifted from one part of the picture to another.
"Where's the power supply?" said Banner.
Hommel laughed dryly. "They overlooked that."
Banner shook his head and turned away, to gaze out the window. "This thing has got to be stopped. If we were the only people making the drug, we could shut down our plant to stop it." He banged his fist into his hand. "What we need is some kind of dramatic incident, to jolt people to their senses! But what—"
A pill-colored, pale green sound truck went by off beyond the fence, on the road that paralleled Banner Drugs' main building. Pale-green pennants whipped from poles mounted on the fenders and at the corners of the truck's roof. Banner and Hommel followed it with their eyes as it passed, reading the big sign on the side:
8:00 p.m. Tonight
THE
SOLID
PHALANX
Be at the Stadium to hear Big Jim!
They stared after the truck as it disappeared down the road.
"What," said Banner, "is the Solid Phalanx?"
Hommel scowled. "I've heard our men talk about it. It's apparently a pseudo-Nazi organization of dead-end pill-addicts looking for someone to blame. 'Big Jim,' I think, serves as imitation Fuhrer, and blames all the troubles in the world on 'eggheads.' The last I heard, his supporters were supposed to get guns and ammunition, and be ready for The Day."
"What happens then?"
Hommel shrugged. "I don't know."
"Hm-m-m," said Banner. "8:00 p.m., in the stadium. Pill addicts." He glanced thoughtfully at Hommel. "Mort, could you make up a few bottles of imitation pills? The same color, size, shape, and flavor—but without the drug?"
"Ye-s," said Hommel, "but—"
"It might pay us to find out more about Big Jim."
Eight o'clock that night found Banner and Hommel getting out of their car in a big parking lot, bottles of fake pills clinking in their pockets. They made their way with a stolid mass of dour-faced people, past black-uniformed guards wearing black leather belts, black boots, and black-and-white armbands, and who relieved them of fifty cents apiece, into a stadium full of silent people, whose only visible movements consisted of breathing, tossing pills into their mouths, chewing, and swallowing. The only perceptible sounds in the stadium were the moaning of the wind, and a continuous low crunching noise, like twenty or thirty cars rolling slowly downhill on a gravel road with their engines off.
The dour faces and endless working of jaws began to get Hommel after a while. He could feel himself starting to get a little choked. His hand wasn't quite steady as he tossed fake pills in his mouth. His stomach muscles twitched in incipient spasms. The effort to keep his face straight was becoming a struggle.
All around him, the
munch-munch
sound went on endlessly.
Hommel could feel the irresistible burst of laughter build up. Desperately, he told himself what the consequence of that would be.
Munch-munch-munch-munch-
Just as his self-control neared the snapping point, there was a movement down below. Instantaneously, everyone around Hommel, including Banner, only a fraction of a second late, sprang to their feet.
What happened was a little hard for Hommel to follow, because he was still struggling not to laugh. Between sudden shouted roars of approval, that ended just as abruptly, he could hear a voice shout:
"Who made the first gun?"
The crowd roared. "Eggheads!"
The voice shouted, "Who made the first plane?"
"Eggheads!" roared the crowd.
"Who made the first bomb?"
"
Eggheads!
"
The
munch-munch-munch
was clearly audible in the pause between shouts, and Hommel, gagging and straining, was only vaguely conscious of the progression through poison gas, germ bombs, intercontinental missiles, and radioactive fallout, which led to the comparison of murderers and eggheads, which in turn brought up the question of punishment, and "execution of The Plan."
By this time, Hommel had himself in hand again, heard the rousing unified scream of "Death to the Murderers!" and something in the atmosphere of the place got across to him so that he had no further temptation to laugh.
"Big Jim" now finished up with the command to buy more guns and ammunition, and announced that armbands would be distributed on the way out.
Hommel and Banner found themselves sitting in the car a little later, holding black armbands marked with a large "X," which symbolized what The Solid Phalanx was supposed to do to all eggheads at no very distant date.
Hommel had expected Banner to be worn out by all this grimness and activity, but as the old man contemplated the armband, he gave a smile that Hommel would have hated to have inspired, and was cheerful all the way back to the plant. Hommel couldn't get a word of explanation out of him.
Next day, ground was broken for an addition that reached at right angles all the way from the main building to the front fence bordering the road. This addition, seen from above, formed an upright to the long crossbar of the main building, to make a sort of massive T, the lower end of the upright of the T toward the road, and the crossbar parallel with the road and well back from it.
The new addition was wide and deep, massively built, with a broad ramp that led up on either side to a huge loading deck, so that trucks could drive in one electrically-controlled gate in the extra-heavy fence, roll along the curved drive, up the ramp onto the loading deck that ran through the building in a wide tunnel from one side to the other, load or unload, roll down the other ramp, along the other curved drive, and out the second gate to the street.
There was no doubt in Hommel's mind that this addition could serve five times Banner Drug's present needs, to say nothing of some enigmatic fittings in the ceiling of the loading tunnel, that could serve no useful function Hommel could think of.
Hommel, however, had no time to ponder this. It was at this point, with the Phalanx growing daily more formidable, and with a monster rally scheduled for early the next afternoon, that Banner chose to appear on a TV program and remark that Banner Drugs appeared very close to having an antidote to the De-Tox pills.
This was news to Hommel, whose effective research staff was reduced to himself, Viola Manning, and young Peabody. Worse yet, it dawned on Hommel that the people behind the Phalanx would not take kindly to this mythical antidote that would cut their following out from under them. But Banner didn't stop there. When asked about the Phalanx, he referred to them offhand as "a mass of addled brains. I hope we can cure them soon." "Big Jim" got passing mention as "that vulture." Banner finished the interview with the remark that, "I hope we can collapse the Phalanx bubble sooner than anyone expects."
The next day, the big parking lot at Banner Drug was all but empty, as frightened employees stayed away.
Shortly after time for the Phalanx's monster rally, a long line of cars stopped along the road outside the gates, and a crowd of men with black-and-white armbands climbed out carrying guns, and headed for the fence. To Hommel's horror, someone threw the switch that opened the electrically-controlled gates. The mob poured through, spread out, and swarmed toward the main building, directly in front of them.
Hommel, lying under the table, with Viola Manning clinging to his left arm, and Peabody muttering something about pills in his right ear, was just living from moment to moment. It was obvious to him that Banner's foolhardy actions had doomed them all. He felt a momentary pity for the old man, at this moment cowering, no doubt, in his office.
An electrically-amplified voice, unmistakably that of Banner, boomed out over the din. With a kind of pitying contempt, it demanded:
"What's wrong, you poor boobs, can't you find us? Afraid of eggheads?
Come on
! Let's see if you're yellow."
The volume of fire that answered this left Hommel all but deaf. But after the first few moments, not a shot came into the room. Hommel's curiosity got the better of his judgment, he pulled loose from Viola and Peabody, stood up in a half-crouch, and peered out the window.
Gun-carrying figures wearing armbands ran past outside.
Banner's amplified voice rose over the din:
"You want to fight, do you? O.K.
Here we come
!"
A host of armbanded figures sprinted toward the sound of the voice.
The building trembled continuously.
Peabody's lips were moving, and Viola had both hands pressed to her ears, her face contorted.
It made no difference. All Hommel could hear was one continuous crash and roar, that left him dazed and unconscious of the passing of time.
Finally it came to Hommel that the noise was dying down.
Someone tapped Hommel on the arm. He looked around.
Banner, an old but efficient-looking Springfield .30-06 in one hand, and a bandolier of ammunition slung across his shoulder, jerked his head toward the door. Dazedly, Hommel followed him outside.
When they were a few yards from the door, Hommel came to his senses. "Listen . . .
that mob might—
"