The Mightiest Man

The Mightiest Man, by Patrick
Fahy

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Title: The Mightiest Man
Author: Patrick Fahy
Release Date: May 23, 2007 [EBook #21582]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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This e-text was produced from "Worlds of If" November 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

He had betrayed mankind, but he was not afraid of the
consequences--ever!
THE MIGHTIEST MAN
By PATRICK FAHY
They caught up with him in Belgrade.
The aliens had gone by then, only a few shining metal huts in the
Siberian tundra giving mute evidence that they had been anything other
than a nightmare.
It had seemed exactly like that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stood
helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered and
flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening had
not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That if it
had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been capable
of dealing with the terrible menace. It had been real. And they had been
no more capable of resisting the giant intelligences than a child of
killing the ogre in his favorite fairy story.
It was an ironic parallel, because that was what finally saved Earth for
its own people. A fairy story.
The old fable of the lion and the mouse. When the lion had exhausted
his atomic armor and proud science against the invincible and immortal
invaders of Earth--for they could not be killed by any means--the
mouse attacked and vanquished them.
The mouse, the lowest form of life: the fungoids, the air of Earth
swarming with millions of their spores, attacked the monstrous bodies,
grew and entwined within the gray convolutions that were their brain
centers. And as the tiny thread-roots probed and tightened, the aliens
screamed soundlessly. The intelligences toppled and fell, and at last
that few among them who retained sanity gathered their lunatic
brethren and fled as they had come.

If he had known the effect the fungoids would have on them, he would
have told them that too. He had told them everything else, when he had
been snatched from a busy city street, a random specimen of humanity
to be probed and investigated.
They had chosen well. For the payment they offered him he was
willing to barter the whole human race. As far as it lay in his power he
did just that.
He was not an educated man, though he was intelligent. It was child's
play to them to strip his mind bare; but they had to know the
intangibles too, the determined will of humanity to survive, the
probabilities of the pattern of human behavior in a situation which
humanity had never before faced. He told them all he could, gladly and
willingly. He would have descended to any treachery for the vast
glittering reward they tempted him with.
It wasn't easy for the Yugoslavs to guard him and, anyway, their hearts
weren't in the task. His treachery, the ultimate treason, the betrayal of
the whole human race, was commonly known.
Inevitably the mob got him and killed three policemen in the process.
When they had sated their anger a little and the traitor had lost most of
his clothes and the thumb of his right hand, they dragged him to the
junction where the Danube meets the Sava and held him under the gray
waters with long poles, as if he was some poisonous reptile.
He lay supinely on the bed of the river and smiled evilly while a
hundred thousand people writhed in neural agony.
* * * * *
Twenty-four hours later the neural plague had spread to Zagreb and
into Albania as far as Tirana. When it crossed to Leghorn in Italy the
Balkans held twenty million lunatics and the Danube was an artificial
lake a hundred miles wide.
They had used a "clean" bomb. So they were able to bring a

loudspeaker van to its edge and boom at him to come out. He allowed
them to do that for some inscrutable reason; perhaps to demonstrate
that his powers were selective. Then it seemed he got tired of the farce,
and cruel fingers twined themselves into the nerve centers of the
President of