The Beginning Of The End.
I am sitting on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive drab. It isn't comfortable; but of course they expect to make me still more uncomfortable.
They expect to take me out of this precinct jail to the District prison and eventually to the death house.
Sure, there will be a trial first, but that is only a formality. Not only did they catch me with the smoking gun mounted on my hoof and the Doctor bubbling to death through the hole in his throat, but also I admitted it.
I, knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought—deliberately shot to death Doctor Whooves.
They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me.
Especially because Doctor Whooves had saved my life.
Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury.
The Doctor and I were close friends for years. We lost touch during the Third Equestrian War. We met again in Manehatten, a few years after the war was over. We had, to some extent, grown apart; he had become a stallion with a mission. He was working very hard on something and he did not choose to discuss his work and there was nothing else in his life on which to form a basis for communication. And—well, I had my own life, too. It wasn't scientific research in my case—I flunked out of med school, while he went on. I'm not ashamed of it; it is nothing to be ashamed of. I simply was not able to cope with the messy business of carving corpses. I didn't like it, I didn't want to do it, and when I was forced to do it, I did it badly. So, I left.
Thus I have no string of degrees, but you don't need them in order to be a Palace guard.
Does that sound like a terribly impressive career to you? Of course not; but I liked it. The Princesses are relaxed and friendly when the guards are around, and you learn wonderful things about what goes on behind the scenes of government. And a Palace guard is in a position to do favors, for newspaper stallions, who find a lead to a story useful; for government officials, who sometimes base a whole campaign on one careless, repeated remark; and for just about anyone who would like to be in the visitors' gallery during a hot debate.
Doctor Whooves, for instance. I trotted into him on the street one day, and we chatted for a moment, and he asked if it was possible to get him in to see the upcoming foreign relations debate. It was; I called him the next day and told him I had arranged for a pass. And he was there, watching eagerly with his large, bright eyes, just when one of the head Senators near Princess Celestia got up to speak and there was that sudden unexpected yell, and the handful of Elephantiain fanatics dragged out their hoof-mounted weapons and began trying to change Equestrian policy with gunpowder.
You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two with guns, one with a hoof grenade. The pistol ponies managed to wound two Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to The Doctor. I spotted the little fellow with the hoof grenade and tackled him. I knocked him down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I lunged for it. Doctor Whooves was ahead of me.
The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was miraculous that The Doctor, who had fallen right on top of the grenade, had managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded no one was hurt.
For it did go off - and the flying steel touched nobody. The papers mentioned that Whooves had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was unconscious, all right.
He didn't come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next whole day in a stupor.
I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me.
"That was a close one, Thunder Lane," he said. "Take me back to Ponyville."
I said, "I guess you saved my life, Whooves.
"Nonsense, Lane! I just jumped. Lucky, that's all."
"The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody could see exactly what happened."
He made a deprecating gesture, but his bright eyes were wary. "Nopony was really watching, I suppose."
"I was watching," I told him flatly.
He looked at me silently for a moment.
"I was between you and the grenade," I said. "You didn't go past me, over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade."
He started to shake his head.
I said, "Also, Whooves, you fell on the grenade. It exploded underneath you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?"
He cleared his throat. "Well, as a matter of—"
"Cut it out, Whooves! What's the answer?"
He grumbled, "Don't you read the papers? It went off a yard away."
"Whooves," I said gently, "I was there."
He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Doctor Whooves was a small stallion, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking at me as though I were Discord himself.
Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said, "Well, hey, Lane—I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why not you?"
I can't tell you all of what he said. I'll tell most of it—but not the part that matters.
I'll never tell that part to anybody.
Whooves said, "I should have known you'd remember." He smiled at me ruefully, affectionately. "Those bull sessions in the cafeterias, eh? Talking all night about everything. But you remembered."
"You claimed that the Earth and Pegasai ponies mind’s possessed powers of telekinesis," I said. "You argued that just by the mind, without moving a hoof or using a machine, a pony could move their body anywhere, instantly. You said that nothing was impossible to the mind."
I felt like an absolute fool saying those things; they were ridiculous notions. Imagine a pony thinking to him or herself from one place to another! But—I had been on that gallery.
I licked my lips and looked to Doctor Whooves for confirmation.
"I was rambling," Whooves laughed. "Imagine!"
I suppose I showed surprise, because he patted my head.
He said, becoming sober, "Sure, Lane, you're wrong, but you're right all the same. The mind alone can't do anything of the sort—that was just a silly foals notion. But," he went on, "but there are—well, techniques—linking the mind to physical forces—simple physical forces that we all use every day—that can do it all. Everything! Everything I ever thought of and things I haven't found out yet.
"Fly across the ocean? In a second, Lane! Wall off an exploding bomb? Easily! You saw me do it. Oh, it's work. It takes energy—you can't escape natural law. That was what knocked me out for a whole day. But that was a hard one; it's a lot easier, for instance, to make a bullet miss its target. It's even easier to lift the cartridge out of the chamber and put it in my pocket, so that the bullet can't even be fired. Want the Elements of Harmony? I could get them, Lane!"
I asked, "Can you see the future?"
He frowned. "That's silly. This isn't supersti - "
"How about reading minds?"
The Doctors expression cleared. "Oh, you're remembering some of the things I said years ago. No, I can't do that either, Lane. Maybe, some day, if I keep working at this thing, Well, I can't right now. There are things I can do, though, that are just as good."
"Show me something you can do," I asked.
He smiled. The Doctor was enjoying himself; I didn't begrudge it to him. He had hugged this to himself for years; from the day he found his first clue, through the decade of proving and experimenting, almost always being wrong, but always getting closer.... He needed to talk about it. I think he was really glad that, at last, somepony had found him out.
He said, "Show you something? Why, let's see, Lane." He looked around the room, then winked. "See that window?"
I looked. It opened with a slither of wood and a rumble of sash weights. It closed again.
"The radio," said Whooves. There was a click and his little set turned itself on.
"Watch it."
It disappeared and reappeared.
"It was on top of Canterlot’s highest peak," Doctor Whooves said, panting a little.
The plug on the radio's electric cord picked itself up and stretched toward the baseboard socket, then dropped to the floor again.
"No," said Whooves, and his voice was trembling, "I'll show you a hard one. Watch the radio, Lane. I'll run it without plugging it in! The electrons themselves—"
He was staring intently at the little set. I saw the dial light go on, flicker, and hold steady; the speaker began to make scratching noises. I stood right behind Whooves.
I used the telephone on the table beside him. I caught him on the right temple and he slumped to the floor without so much as a murmur. Methodically, I hit him twice more, and then I was sure he wouldn't wake up for at least an hour. I rolled him over and put the telephone back in its cradle.
I ransacked his apartment. I found it in his desk: All his notes. All the information. The secret of how to do the things he could do.
I picked up the telephone and called the Ponyville police. When I heard the siren outside, I took out my hoof mounted service revolver and shot him in the throat. He was dead before they came in.
For, you see, I knew Doctor Whooves. We were friends. I would have trusted him with my life. But this was more than just a life.
Twenty-three words told how to do the things that Doctor Whooves did. Anyone who could read could do them. Criminals, traitors, lunatics - the formula would work for anyone.
Doctor Whooves was an honest stallion and an idealist, I think. But what would happen to any stallion when he became a God? Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you?
They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a pony of any jail or give him anything he wants. The Doctor was my friend. But I killed him in cold blood, knowing what I did, because he could not be trusted with the secret that could make him king of the world.
But I can.
Author's Note
Power corrupts.
