Others finally sought him out.

"Well, Professor, it was your idea that did the trick. Don't you feel
like celebrating?" one of them asked.

Prof. Tomlin shook his head. "If only George had been a little more
benign, we might have learned a lot from him."

"What gave you the idea that killed him?"

"Oh, something he said about the unconscious and subconscious," Prof.
Tomlin replied. "He admitted they were not penetrable. It was an easy
matter to instill a post-hypnotic suggestion in some proven subjects and
then to erase the hypnotic experience."

"You make it sound easy."

"It wasn't too difficult, really. It was finding the solution that was
hard. We selected more than a hundred men, worked with them for days,
finally singled out the best twenty, then made them forget their
hypnosis. A first lieutenant--I've forgotten his name--had implanted in
him a command even he was not aware of. His subconscious made him blow
his nose fifteen minutes after he saw George. Nearly twenty others had
post-hypnotic commands to shoot George in the eyes as soon as they saw
the lieutenant blow his nose. Of course we also planted a subconscious
hate pattern, which wasn't exactly necessary, just to make sure there
would be no hesitation, no inhibition, no limiting moral factor.

"None of the men ever saw each other before being sent to Minerva. None
realized that they carried with them the order for George's
annihilation. The general, who was not one of the hypnotics, was given
loose instructions, as were several others, so they could not possibly
know the intention. Those of us who had conducted the hypnosis had to
stay several hundred miles away so that we could not be reached by
George's prying mind...."

* * * * *

In a pasture next to a wood near Brentwood, a metal box buried in the
ground suddenly exploded, uprooting a catalpa tree.

On a planet many millions of miles away, a red light--one of many on a
giant control board--suddenly winked out.

A blue humanoid made an entry in a large book: _System 29578, Planet
Three Inhabited_.

_Too dangerous for any kind of development._

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Seventh Order, by Gerald Allan Sohl

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