it. Goddamn unfortunate situation. Naturally we’ll have to make emergency preparations to defend ourselves. I don’t think the AAnn computers will be overly discerning about ships which float into their target area.”
“Correct. I was just about to commence my own injections.”
“Myself also.” He snuggled back into the reaction seat, felt the field that enabled them to maneuver at high speed and still live take hold gently. “Best hurry about it.”
He followed accepted procedure and did his best to ignore the barely perceptible pressures of the needles as they slipped efficiently into the veins on his legs. The special drugs that heightened his perceptions and released the artificial inhibitions his mind raised to constrain the killer instinct immediately began to take effect. A beautiful rose-tinted glow of freedom slipped over his thoughts. This was proper. This was
right!
This was what he’d been created for. Above and behind him he knew that Truzenzuzex was undergoing a similar treatment, with different drugs. They would stimulate his natural ability to make split-second decisions and logical evaluations without regard to such distractions as Hive rulings and elaborate moral considerations.
Shortly after the Amalgamation, when human and thranx scientists were discovering one surprising thing after another about each other, thranx psychologists unearthed what some humans had long suspected. The mind of
Homo sapiens
was in a perpetual state of uneasy balance between total emotionalism and computerlike control. When the vestiges of the latter, both natural and artificial, were removed, man reverted to a kind of controlled animalism. He became the universe’s most astute and efficient killing machine. If the reverse was induced he turned into a vegetable. No use had been found for that state, but for the former. . . .
It was kept fairly quiet. After a number of gruesome but honest demonstrations put on by the thranx and their human aides, mankind acknowledged the truth of the discovery, with not a small sigh of relief. But they didn’t like to be reminded of it. Of course a certain segment of humanity had known it all along and wasn’t affected by the news. Others began to read the works of ancients like Donatien Francois de Sade with a different eye. For their part human psychologists brought into clearer light the marvelous thranx ability to make rapid and correct decisions with an utter lack of emotional distraction and a high level of practicality. Only, the thranx didn’t think it so marvelous. Their Hive rulings and complicated systems of ethics had long kept that very same ability tied down in the same ways humanity had its killer desires.
The end result of all the research and experimentation was this: in combination with a ballistics computer to select and gauge targets, a thranx-human-machine triumvirate was an unbeatable combination in space warfare. Thranx acted as a check on human and human as a goad to thranx. It was efficient and ruthless. Human notions of a “gentleman’s” war disappeared forever. Only the AAnn had ever dared to challenge the system more than once, and they were tough enough and smart enough to do it sporadically and only when they felt the odds to be highly in their favor.
It was fortunate that thranx and human proved even more compatible than the designers of the system had dared hope—because the nature of the drug-machine tie-up resulted in a merging of the two minds on a conscious level. It was as if the two lobes of a brain were to fight out a decision between themselves, with the compromise then being passed onto the spinal cord and the rest of the body for actual implementation. Some stingship pilots likened it more closely to two twins in the womb. It was that intimate a relationship. Only in that way would the resultant fighting machine operate at 100 percent effectiveness. A man’s partner was his ship-brother. Few stinger operators stayed married
“Correct. I was just about to commence my own injections.”
“Myself also.” He snuggled back into the reaction seat, felt the field that enabled them to maneuver at high speed and still live take hold gently. “Best hurry about it.”
He followed accepted procedure and did his best to ignore the barely perceptible pressures of the needles as they slipped efficiently into the veins on his legs. The special drugs that heightened his perceptions and released the artificial inhibitions his mind raised to constrain the killer instinct immediately began to take effect. A beautiful rose-tinted glow of freedom slipped over his thoughts. This was proper. This was
right!
This was what he’d been created for. Above and behind him he knew that Truzenzuzex was undergoing a similar treatment, with different drugs. They would stimulate his natural ability to make split-second decisions and logical evaluations without regard to such distractions as Hive rulings and elaborate moral considerations.
Shortly after the Amalgamation, when human and thranx scientists were discovering one surprising thing after another about each other, thranx psychologists unearthed what some humans had long suspected. The mind of
Homo sapiens
was in a perpetual state of uneasy balance between total emotionalism and computerlike control. When the vestiges of the latter, both natural and artificial, were removed, man reverted to a kind of controlled animalism. He became the universe’s most astute and efficient killing machine. If the reverse was induced he turned into a vegetable. No use had been found for that state, but for the former. . . .
It was kept fairly quiet. After a number of gruesome but honest demonstrations put on by the thranx and their human aides, mankind acknowledged the truth of the discovery, with not a small sigh of relief. But they didn’t like to be reminded of it. Of course a certain segment of humanity had known it all along and wasn’t affected by the news. Others began to read the works of ancients like Donatien Francois de Sade with a different eye. For their part human psychologists brought into clearer light the marvelous thranx ability to make rapid and correct decisions with an utter lack of emotional distraction and a high level of practicality. Only, the thranx didn’t think it so marvelous. Their Hive rulings and complicated systems of ethics had long kept that very same ability tied down in the same ways humanity had its killer desires.
The end result of all the research and experimentation was this: in combination with a ballistics computer to select and gauge targets, a thranx-human-machine triumvirate was an unbeatable combination in space warfare. Thranx acted as a check on human and human as a goad to thranx. It was efficient and ruthless. Human notions of a “gentleman’s” war disappeared forever. Only the AAnn had ever dared to challenge the system more than once, and they were tough enough and smart enough to do it sporadically and only when they felt the odds to be highly in their favor.
It was fortunate that thranx and human proved even more compatible than the designers of the system had dared hope—because the nature of the drug-machine tie-up resulted in a merging of the two minds on a conscious level. It was as if the two lobes of a brain were to fight out a decision between themselves, with the compromise then being passed onto the spinal cord and the rest of the body for actual implementation. Some stingship pilots likened it more closely to two twins in the womb. It was that intimate a relationship. Only in that way would the resultant fighting machine operate at 100 percent effectiveness. A man’s partner was his ship-brother. Few stinger operators stayed married
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