by C. L. Moore
He paused outside the old-fashioned photo-electric doors of the Last Chance, searching for his enemy. The rumors blew past him, fresh as if no voice had ever whispered them before. The whispers spoke of the string of freight-copters grounded with a fuel-leak at the edge of town, the repair man working among the cargo who accidentally broke a slat on a crate of oranges. Inside the liner of oranges were—queer-looking rifles—atomic? Three Eggs carefully packed in foam-rubber? Unconscious humans en route to a secret Baldy vivisection lab?
Then an invisible breath seemed to sweep through the hot, still air.
It was the paranoid aura. As, in grand mal, the epileptic attack is presaged by an indefinable feeling of impending disaster, so the physical approach of a paranoid carries before it the shadowy halo pulsing outward from the distorted mind. Cody had felt this before, but each time he knew afresh the same faint shrinking, as though his contact with the bright, hot, green world around him had thinned and snapped for an instant.
He turned slowly and crossed the street, threading past the uneasy, murmuring groups of unshaved men, past their hostile stares. Ahead was a little restaurant—the Copter Vane Eatery. The aura thickened. Cody stopped outside of the door of the restaurant and reached out telepathically.
The rumors flew past him. A man knew a man who had a Baldy neighbor who lost three fingers in a duel a month ago, and today had three fingers growing as good as new, grafted on in a private Baldy hospital. (But Baldies won't duel—never mind that!) They could work miracles in medicine now, but you didn't see them doing it for humans, did you? If they weren't stopped soon, who could tell what might happen next?
Stiff with arrogance, wary with suspicion, the mind of Jasper Horne, within the restaurant, sent out its own murky thoughts too—egotistical, prideful, sensitive, and inflexible. And there was a dim thought stirring in that cloudy mind, like an ember under gray ash, fading and brightening again into half-clarity, which made Cody, at the restaurant's door, pause and stiffen into immobility for fear that the telepathic paranoid might sense his presence.
Horne had not come to American Gun to start a pogrom.
His real motive was far more deadly. It was—
What?
That was what Cody could not see—yet. He had glimpsed the shadow of a thought, and that glimpse had been enough to flash a sharp warning to his mind, a signal of terrible urgency. Horne's real motive lay deeply buried. But it had to be found out. Cody felt quite certain of that.
He stepped aside, leaned against the wall of the building, and glanced idly around, while from under the Mute helmet his mind probed very delicately and sensitively toward Horne.
Gently ... gently.
-
The paranoid was sitting alone in a booth near the back of the restaurant. His thoughts were clouded with repression. And he was concentrating on his lunch, not consciously thinking of the thing which had drifted across the surface of his mind for a triumphant instant. Unless this concept was summoned into consciousness, Cody could not read it without deep probing, which Horne would immediately sense. _ Yet there was a way. The right cues would summon up the appropriate responses in any mind. But those cues would have to be implanted in Horne's thoughts very delicately, so that they would seem perfectly natural, and his own. Cody looked across the street, beyond the murmuring knots of men, at the Last Chance. Horne had been there half an hour ago. It was a fair cue. He sent the concept Last Chance softly into Horne's mind.
And that mind flinched warily, searched, found nothing (the Mute helmet guarded Cody), and then the cue summoned up its responses.
Last Chance gambling but I'm the one who's really gambling with them all of them their lives I can kill them all if in time—the thought-chain broke as videomusic swelled within the restaurant. Horne lifted his fork and began to eat again.
Cody fitted the beat of his thought to the music's beat and sent the message to Horne.
Kill them all kill them all kill them all.
Loose the virus, Horne's response came to the stimulus he thought was his own. Pomerance is getting closer every day control the resonance mutate a virus kill them all kill them all kill them all!
Cody braced himself against the red rage that poured out from the paranoid.
Pomerance, he thought. Pomerance. Pomerance in the labs, Horne thought, and formed a sensory image. Not far away—only two blocks away—were the research laboratories of American Gun, and in them was a man named Pomerance, a biochemist, a non-telepath. He was working on a certain experiment which—if it succeeded—would enable the paranoids to develop a virus as deadly and as specialized as the virus of Operation Apocalypse.
And this was the real reason for Horne's presence in American Gun. The pogrom-plan was a cover-up. It was camouflage to deceive the Baldies, while Horne went about his real purpose of telepathically following Pomerance's experiments toward the goal of an Operation Apocalypse brought about by the paranoids themselves.
Pomerance was not aiming at such a goal, of course. He was a biochemist; his aim was to develop a more efficient bacteriophage—but the method he would need to develop that could also be applied to far deadlier aims.
-
Gently Cody manipulated the paranoid's mind. He learned a little more. Pomerance might fail—Horne realized that. But in that case, then the pogrom could be set off. It would be better to find and use a human-killing virus, for in a pogrom paranoid lives would be lost too—but there would be a pogrom if no better way offered. Conditions were ripe. Horne had built the tension in American Gun; he had located the potential mob-leaders; he could start the pogrom at any time he desired—and that would be the signal for other paranoids across the nation to do the same. That universal pogrom would force the Baldies to release Operation Apocalypse—so the same end would be achieved. But it would be better to wait a little, just a little, following Pomerance's experiments closely. He seemed to be very near his goal.
Too near, Cody thought, his body swaying a little toward the restaurant's door. He was wasting time. Kill Horne, kill him now, he told himself—but hesitated still, because there was something else in the paranoid's mind that puzzled him. Too much confidence was built on that twisted, shaky foundation of paranoid personality. There must be some reason for that surprising lack of anxiety.
Cody probed again with careful cues that brushed the other mind lightly. Yes, there was a reason. There was a bomb hidden in Pomerance's laboratory.
Why?
Horne had that information, and Cody gently extracted it. The biochemist must not be allowed to fall alive into the hands of Baldies. The bomb was triggered to explode whenever Horne summoned to consciousness a certain complex of symbols—the paranoid's mind shifted quickly away from that dangerous equation—and it would also explode if Horne's mind stopped thinking.
That is, if Horne died.
Like the pattern of a burglar alarm, an interruption in the flow of current, the radiations emitted constantly by Horne's mind sleeping or waking, would break the circuit and set off the alarm—the bomb that would kill Pomerance. Cody saw the location of that bomb very clearly in Horne's mental image of the laboratory.
So, if he killed Horne, Pomerance would die too. But why was this important to the paranoid?
Cody probed again, and suddenly understood the reason.
Pomerance's research was centered around resonance differential applied to the nucleoproteins that were viruses. But there were other types of nucleoproteins; the telepathic function itself depended on the resonance of nucleoproteins in the human brain. If Pomerance's experiment succeeded, it would mean ...
It would mean that telepathy could be induced in a non-telepath!
It was the answer to the problem of the Inductor, the one answer that could solve the universal problem of a world in schism. In the hands of the paranoids, Pomerance's method could destroy all humans. In the hands of the Baldies, it could make all mankind one. It could—
Suddenly Cody knew that Horne had disc
overed his presence.
-
Instantly Horne began to build in his mind the equation that would set off the bomb in Pomerance's laboratory. Cody's mind leaped into the future. He could kill Horne before the paranoid had finished, but if he did that, the other's death would trigger the bomb with equal certainty. Pomerance would die—and that must not be allowed to happen. More than lives depended on the biochemist's survival.
There was no way to stop Horne's thoughts except one. Cody's probing into the other's mind had told him a great deal about that proud, inflexible, unsure personality. He now knew more about Horne than the latter himself did. And he had discovered one vital point. Horne was not psychotic; he had not lost touch with reality, but, like many paranoids, he had psychopathological symptoms, and one of these was his strong tendency to what Allenby would have called hypnogogic hallucinations—vivid sensory images occurring in the drowsy state just before sleep. And such hallucinations can easily be produced by hypnosis.
All Cody had to do was to convince Horne that he had momentarily been hallucinated. That, and a little more—a good deal more.
At least, Cody had a good insight into what forms such imagery would take for the paranoid, with his strong delusions of persecution and grandeur. So Cody projected the idea that he, representing the Baldies, had come to Horne to offer a truce, to make a pact with the paranoids against the humans—exactly the kind of vivid wish-fulfilling fantasy Horne must often have experienced. And at the same time he summoned up the mental image of Jasper Horne and let Horne see it.
That action was natural enough, even within the frame of an hallucination. When you communicate with another, you visualize him in your own mind, in many more dimensions than the purely visual ones. Your impressions of his emotional patterns, his memories, his thoughts, the complex image of his whole personality as you perceive it, is summoned up as a subjective correlative of the objective man with whom you communicate. The burning brightness of that Luciferean image stood clear between the meeting minds, blazingly sharp and vivid, in a way that the murky mind of the paranoid had never known.
The ancient Greeks knew what the mechanism of identification meant—they told the story of Narcissus. And the lure caught Jasper Horne, who could identify with no other man than himself, or a god made in his own image. His paranoid egotism reflected itself in that ego-image and was reflected again and so endlessly, while Cody delicately tested and touched the thoughts of the other and watched for the first slackening of consciousness.
At least Horne had paused in his mental building of the concept that would destroy Pomerance. The paranoid hesitated, unsure, his grasp of reality telling him that the Baldies could not, would not send an emissary to capitulate, and that therefore his senses, which had warned him of Cody's presence, had lied. Such panics were not unknown to Horne. So he could accept—tentatively—the suggestion that his senses had tricked him.
Very, very gently, still maintaining that dazzling ego-image of Jasper Horne like a glittering lure on a baited hook, Cody sent quiet cue-thoughts slipping into the hesitant mind. At first they were obviously true thoughts, true, at least, according to the paranoid's system of belief. They were pleasant, reassuring thoughts. Lulled, Horne watched the ego-image which he himself had often summoned up—yet never before so clearly and dazzlingly. Narcissus watched his image in the clear, deep pool of Cody's mind.
So, sitting alone in the restaurant booth, Horne let his wariness relax little by little, and Cody's soft assault moved into a new area. The thoughts Cody sent out now were not quite true, but still not false enough to startle the paranoid, who took them for his own thoughts. I've had these hallucinations before. Usually just before going to sleep. I'm having them now. So I must be going to sleep. I am sleepy. My eyelids feel heavy ...
The lulling, monotonous thoughts began to submerge Horne's consciousness. Gradually the hypnosis grew. Narcissus watched Narcissus ...
Sleep, sleep, Cody's mind whispered. You will not waken until I command you. Nothing else will waken you. Sleep deeply—sleep.
The paranoid slept.
-
Cody began to run along the street as fast as he could. No other Baldy in American Gun was nearer to the research laboratory than he was, and if Pomerance were to be saved, it was his job alone. And he might easily fail. Jasper Horne was sitting in hypnotic sleep in a crowded restaurant, and at any moment someone might speak to him or shake him back into consciousness. The hypnosis was not deep. It might hold, or it might break at any moment. In spite of Cody's final suggestions to the paranoid, the latter could be awakened quite easily, and by anyone.
Cody ran on. Suppose he got Pomerance out of the lab in time? Could he get back to the restaurant again before Horne wakened?
No, Cody thought, the hypnosis isn't deep enough. It'll be a miracle if Horne stays under more than a few minutes. If I can save Pomerance, that will be miracle enough.
But as soon as Horne realizes what's happened, he won't wait. He'll start the pogrom. It's all ready, here in American Gun; he's planted the dynamite, and all he has to do is touch the detonator. All right. I can't be sure that what I'm doing is right. I think it is. I can't be sure. If I save Pomerance, Horne will probably start the pogrom before I can get back and kill him. But I can't let Pomerance die; he can solve the problem of the Inductor.
Hurry!
He ran toward a group of long, low buildings. He knew the way; he had seen it in Horne's mind. He ran toward one of the buildings, thrust open the door, and was in the laboratory.
A gaunt, gray-haired man in a stained smock turned to stare at him. It was Pomerance; no telepath can ever be mistaken on a question of identity. It was Pomerance—and as Cody realized that, he also realized that two blocks away, in the Copter Vane Eatery, Jasper Horne had stirred, wakened, and reached out in sudden panic to touch Pomerance's mind.
Instantly Cody was racing down the length of the long laboratory. Beyond Pomerance were floor-length windows opening on hot sunlight, blue sky, and parched brown grass. If they could reach the windows—
It seemed to Cody that he crossed the room in no time at all. No time, and yet another kind of time seemed to draw out endlessly as, in the distant mind of the paranoid, he saw the triggering equation building up that would set off the bomb's mechanism. Now the equation was complete. Now time would stop in one bursting moment of death.
Yet there was time. Cody sent out a wordless call, a summons that rang like a great alarm bell in the minds of every Baldy in American Gun. At the same moment he reached Pomerance and used his own momentum to lift the other man bodily as he plunged toward the windows. Then the floor rose underfoot and the air rushed outward before the first soundless compression wave that moved in front of the explosion.
The window loomed before them, bright, high, patterned with small panes. Cody's shoulder struck, he felt wood and glass shatter without a sound because of the great, white, bursting roar of the explosion, louder than any sound could be.
The blast exploded in a white blindness all around him and beyond shattering glass the void opened up under him.
He was falling with Pomerance through hot, dry outdoor air and darkness, darkness in the full heat of the sun, falling and turning while glass rained down around them and the noise of the explosion went on and on forever ...
-
In front of the Copter Vane Eatery two transients scuffled. Jasper Horne, in the crowd, said something under his breath. Another man repeated it, louder. One of the transients flushed darkly. (It was a trigger-phrase as certain to rouse this man's aggressions as the equation that had exploded the bomb.) In a moment a dagger was pulled from its sheath, and a full-fledged duel was in progress in the middle of a noisy circle. The winner was a hairy-faced, hairy-chested man with a partially bald head. His knife-work had been very deft and sure. Too sure, Jasper Horne said in a loud whisper. The whispers flew around the circle. Anybody could win a duel if he could read the other man's mind. If They could grow
fingers maybe they could grow hair.
Jasper Horne said something, exactly the right something, to the potential mob-leader beside him.
The potential mob-leader scowled, swore, and took a step forward. Deftly he tripped the winner from behind as he was sheathing his dagger. The knife flew spinning across the pavement. Three men'were on the falling baldhead as he went down. Two of them held him while the third tugged at his tonsure-fringe of hair. It held. The victim bellowed with rage and resisted so strongly that four or five bystanders were sent sprawling. One of them lost his wig ...
-
This was neither sleep nor waking. It was Limbo. He floated in the womb of non-self, the only real privacy a telepath can ever know, and what he wanted was to stay here forever and ever. But he was a telepath. He could not, even in the secret fastness of his own mind, pretend what was not true, for his mind lay quite open—at least to wearers of the Mute helmets like his own.
Yet it was hard to waken. It was hard to force himself, of his own volition, to stoop and pick up whatever burdens might be waiting for him, new and old. If his life could be lived as had been the last minute he remembered, without any indecision or unsureness, but with only the certain need for physical action (is Pomerance alive, something in his wakening mind asked), then it would be easy indeed to lift himself up out of this warm, gray silence which was so infinitely restful, without even dreams (but Pomerance?).
And as always, the thought of another made something in Cody brace and lift itself with weary stubbornness. Instantly he was oriented. He did not need to depend on his own sleep-confused senses alone. All through the Caves, and above them, and in copters in midair, was a stirring and a confused sense of urgency and troubled motion, and each mind held one thought under whatever other thoughts might be preoccupying the upper levels of the mind.
The thought was pogrom.
Cody asked one question: Should I have killed Horne instead of trying to save Pomerance? But he did not wait for an answer. The decision had been his own, after all. He opened his eyes (knowing in what infirmary bed in what sector of the Caves he lay) and looked up at the round, ruddy face of Allenby.