Axwen stared at her. “About what?”
“The fact that you have the kind of second personality I was talking about,” Telzey said.
His eyelids flickered for a moment, and his jaw muscles went tight. He said nothing.
“Let me tell you about him,” Telzey went on. “He’s the things you haven’t wanted to be consciously. That’s about it. The way most people would look at it, it didn’t make him very evil. But he’s known what he is for quite a time, and he knows about you. You’re the controlling personality. He’s been locked away, unable to do anything except watch what you do. And he wasn’t even always able to do that. He hasn’t liked it, and he doesn’t like you. You’re his jailer. He’s wanted to be the controlling personality and have it the other way around.”
Axwen sighed. “Please don’t talk like that!” he said mildly. “I know the theory you refer to. It has nothing to do with, well, anything at present.” He considered, added, “However, if I did have such a secondary personality as a result of having purged myself of characteristics of which I couldn’t approve, I agree that I’d keep it locked away! The baser side of our nature, whatever form it takes, shouldn’t be permitted to emerge while we can prevent it.”
“Well, things have been changing there,” Telzey said. “You see, Mr. Axwen, you’re a psi, too.”
He was silent a moment, eyes fixed on her. Then he shook his head slowly.
“I would have preferred not to mention it,” he said, “but it’s obvious that the situation here has unsettled you temporarily. That’s quite understandable. However, it won’t be long before someone comes to take you away; and you’re young and resilient. It shouldn’t be long before you’re free of any ill effects of this experience.”
“You don’t believe you’re a psi?” Telzey said.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Axwen half smiled. “I’ll admit that for a moment you almost had me believing you were one!”
Telzey nodded. “That’s how the real trouble started,” she said. “You didn’t want to believe it. You should have realized a few years ago that you were beginning to develop psi abilities and could control them. But it frightened you. It wouldn’t fit in at all with your beliefs and philosophy. So that was something else you pushed out of awareness.” She added, “These last few months I’ve noticed other people doing the same thing. Usually it doesn’t matter—there isn’t enough ability there anyway to make much difference.”
“Then why should it make any difference to me?” Axwen said gently.
Telzey didn’t reply immediately. That gentleness overlay a mental rigidity strained to the breaking point. Axwen could hardly have avoided having uneasy intimations by now of what she was leading him to. But he still wouldn’t let himself see it; and if the barriers against understanding he’d developed over the years were to be broken down, he’d have to do it himself—immediately. His personality was too brittle, too near collapse under pressure as it was, to be tampered with at this point by a psi—certainly by a psi whose experience was no more extensive than her own.
Just now, in any case, she’d have no time at all for doubtful experiments . . .
She thought Axwen should be able to meet the demands that would be made on him. She’d prepared him as well as she could. What was left was to show him the unalterable and compelling factors at work here, exactly as they were.
“I never heard of a psi with anything like your potential in some areas, Mr. Axwen,” she told him. “I didn’t know it was possible. You’ve shoved control of all that power over to your other personality. He’s been learning how to use it.”
Axwen made a sudden ragged breathing noise.
“So he’s who has been haunting you this past half year,” she went on. “Really, of course, you’ve been haunting yourself.”
If it hadn’t been for the careful preliminary work she’d done on him, Axwen’s reaction, when it finally came, might have been shattering. As it was, she was able to handle it well enough. Some five minutes later, he said dully, “Why would he do such a thing to me?”
It was progress. He’d accepted one part of the situation. He might now be willing to accept the remaining, all-important part. “You said you thought he was trying to drive you out of your mind,” Telzey said. “He is, in a way. After he’s reduced you down to where you can barely think, he’ll be the controlling personality.”
Axwen said, in desperation, “Then he’ll succeed! I can’t hope to stand up against his persecution much longer!”
“You won’t have to,” Telzey told him.
He looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Telzey said, “I’ve checked this very carefully. You can take psi control away from him if you’ll do it at once. I can show you how to do it and help you do it. I know people I could send you to who could help you better than I. but we haven’t nearly enough time left for that. And we can do it. Then—”
“What you’re saying is completely repugnant to me!” Renewed shock distorted Axwen’s face. “I will not assume control of any such ability!”
Telzey looked at him.
“You won’t have to keep it if you don’t want it,” she explained. “You do have to control it first. Then you can step it down or go nonpsi. People do that sometimes. But whatever you decide about psi, you’ll have to start turning your other personality back to being part of you. He really is part of you anyway, of course. But he has to be something you know about and can work with. Otherwise you’ll have trouble with him the rest of your life.”
Axwen’s jaw had begun to tremble; his eyes rolled like those of a frightened animal. “I will not associate myself with whatever that creature has become,” he said hoarsely. “I deny that he’s still part of me!”
Telzey pushed her palm across her forehead, wiped away sweat.
“Mr. Axwen,” she said, “let me tell you some more about him, about the situation. I’ll talk about him as if he weren’t really you. He’s one kind of psi; I’m another. In a way, he’s much stronger than I am. I couldn’t begin to tap the kind of energies he’s been handling here, and if I could, they’d kill me. But since he started to develop his abilities, he’s given all his attention to working up his fright campaign against you. He makes noises, moves things, throws them around, breaks them. He creates effects in the world outside. He thought that was what psi was for, and until today he didn’t know there were other ways of using it. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand. I’m the first psi he met—he didn’t know there were others. He thought I was dangerous to him, so he tried to kill me, his way.
“I can’t do any of the things he does. What I’ve done mainly when I had the time was study minds. What they’re like, what you can do with them. Like I studied you today—and him. He didn’t know I was doing it for a while, and when he knew that he didn’t know how to stop me. There haven’t been any more of those manifestations because I didn’t let him produce them. He’s been trying to do things that will kill me. But each time I confuse him, or make him forget what he wants to do, or how to do it. Sometimes he even forgets for a while that we’re here, or what he is. I’m holding him down in a lot of different ways.
“But he keeps on trying to get away—and he is tremendously strong. If I lose control of him completely, he’ll kill me at once. He’s drawn in much more energy to use against me than he can handle safely—he still doesn’t know enough about things like that. He’s trying to find out how I’m holding him, and he’s catching on. I can’t talk to him because he can’t hear me. If I had the time, I think I could get him to understand, but I won’t have the time. I simply can’t hold him that long. Mr. Axwen, don’t you see that you must take control? I’ll help you, and you can do it—I promise you that!”
“No.” There was the flat finality of despair in the word. “But there is something I can do . . .”
Axwen started climbing to his feet, dropped awkwardly back again.
“That would be stupid,” Telzey said.
; He stared at her. “You stopped me!”
“I’m not letting you dive into the bay and drown yourself!”
“What else is left?” He was still staring at her, face chalk-white. His eyes widened then, slowly and enormously. “You—”
Telzey clamped down on the new horror exploding in him.
“No, I’m not some supernatural thing!” she said quickly. “I haven’t come here to trick you into spiritual destruction. I’m not what’s been haunting you!”
Something else slipped partly from her control then. Far back in the forested cleft behind them, high up between the cliffs, there was a sound like an echoing crash of thunder. Electric currents whirled about her.
“What’s that?” Axwen gasped.
“He’s got away.” Telzey drew a long unsteady breath. “He doesn’t know exactly where we are, but he’s looking for us.”
She blotted consciousness from Axwen’s mind. He slumped over, lay on his side, knees drawn up toward his chest.
She couldn’t blot consciousness so easily from the other personality. Nor could she restore the controls it had broken. The crashing sounds moved down through the cleft toward them. There was one thing left she could do, if she still had time for it.
She drew a blur of forgetfulness across its awareness of her, across its purpose. The noise stopped. For the moment, the personality was checked. Not for long—it knew what was being done to it in that respect now and would start forcing its way out of the mental fog.
Psi slashed delicately at its structure. It was an attack it could have blocked with a fraction of the power available to it. But it didn’t know how to block it, or, as yet, that it was being attacked. Something separated. A small part of the personality vanished. A small part of its swollen stores of psi vanished with it.
She went on destructuring Dal Axwen’s other personality. It wasn’t pleasant work. Sometimes it didn’t know what was happening. Sometimes it knew and struggled with horrid tenacity against further disintegration. She worked very quickly because, for a while, it still could have killed her easily if it had discovered in this emergency one of the ways to do it. Then, presently, she was past that point. Its remnants went unwillingly, still clinging to shreds of awareness, but no longer trying to resist otherwise. That seemed to make it worse.
It took perhaps half an hour in all. The last of Axwen’s buried personality was gone then, and the last of the psi energy it had drawn into itself had drained harmlessly away. Telzey checked carefully to make sure of it. Then she swallowed twice, and was sick. Afterwards, she rinsed her mouth at the water’s edge, came back and brought Axwen awake.
A search boat from the resort village picked them up an hour later. The resort had considerable experience in locating guests who went off on the lake by themselves and got into difficulties. Shortly before midnight, Telzey was in her aircar, on the way back to Pehanron College. All inclination to spend the rest of the weekend at the lake had left her.
The past hours had brought her an abrupt new understanding of the people of the Psychology Service and their ways. Dal Axwen was a psi who should have been kept under observation and restraint while specialists dissolved the rigid blocks which prevented him from giving sane consideration to his emerging talent. If the Service people had discovered him in time, they could have saved him intact, as she’d been unable to do. And there might be many more psi personalities than she’d assumed who could be serious problems to themselves and others unless given guidance—with or without their consent.
It seemed then that in a society in which psis were a factor, something like the Psychology Service was necessary. Their procedures weren’t as arbitrary as they’d appeared to her. She’d keep her independence of them; she’d earned that by establishing she could maintain it. But it would be foolish to turn her back completely on the vast stores of knowledge and experience represented by the Service . . .
Her reflections kept returning unwillingly to Dal Axwen’s reactions. He’d been enormously, incredulously grateful after she restored him to consciousness. He’d laughed and cried. He’d kept trying to explain how free, relaxed and light he felt after the months of growing nightmare oppression, how safe he knew he was now from further uncanny problems of the kind. Forgetting she still was able to read his mind, knew exactly how he felt—
Telzey shook her head. She’d killed half a unique human being, destroyed a human psi potential greater than she’d suspected existed.
And Axwen—foolish, emptied Axwen—had thanked her with happy tears streaming from his eyes for doing it to him!
She sighed. It wasn’t going to be at all easy sometimes, being a psi.
THE LION GAME
First of Two Parts. Telzey intended to be bait to mousetrap some mysterious troublemakers—but the game turned out not to be mice!
I
Telzey was about to sit down for a snack in her bungalow before evening classes when the ring she’d worn on her left forefinger for the past week gave her a sting.
It was a fairly emphatic sting. Emphatic enough to have brought her out of a sound sleep if she’d happened to be sleeping. She grimaced, pulled off the ring, rubbed her finger, slipped the ring back on, went to the ComWeb and tapped a button.
Elsewhere on the grounds of Pehanron College several other ComWebs started burring a special signal. One or the other of them would now be switched on, and somebody would listen to what she had to say. She’d become used to that; the realization didn’t disturb her.
What she said to her course computer was, “This is Telzey Amberdon. Cancel me for both classes tonight.”
The computer acknowledged. Winter rains had been pounding against Pehanron’s weather shields throughout the day. Telzey got into boots, long coat and gloves, wrapped a scarf around her head, and went out to the carport at the back of the bungalow. A few minutes later, her car slid out of Pehanron’s main gate, switched on its fog beams and arrowed up into a howling storm.
Somebody would be following her through the dark sky. She’d got used to that, too.
She went into a public ComWeb booth not long after leaving the college, and dialed a number. The screen lit up and a face appeared.
“Hello, Klayung,” she said. “I got your signal. I’m calling from Beale.”
“I know,” said Klayung. He was an executive of the Psychology Service, old, stringy, mild-mannered. “Leave the booth, turn left, walk down to the comer. There’s a car waiting.”
“All right,” Telzey said. “Anything else?”
“Not till I see you.”
It was raining as hard on Beale as on Pehanron, and this section of the town had no weather shielding. Head bent, Telzey ran down the street to the corner. The door to the back compartment of the big aircar standing there opened as she came up. She slipped inside. The door closed.
Clouds blotted out the lights of Beale below as she was fishing tissues from her purse to dry her face. The big car was a space job though it didn’t look like one. She could see the driver silhouetted beyond the partition. They were alone in the car.
She directed a mental tap at the driver, touched a mind shield, standard Psychology Service type. There was no flicker of response or recognition, so he was no psi operator.
Telzey settled back on the seat. Her life had become complicated these weeks. Some secretive psis were taking a hostile interest in her.
With reason—she might be the first to have escaped alive after a mental encounter with them. She knew they existed, knew at least a few things about them.
She barely had escaped alive. They’d sent a savage creature of unknown type after her which traced victims by their mind patterns and teleported to them when they were located. She’d tricked her spooky pursuer into materializing inside a mass of mountain rock, which was destructive to both rock and monster; but she had to expect that when it failed to show up again the psis would start hunting for her. And a careful investigation should turn up sufficient clues to lead them to her in time
.
She’d reported her experience immediately to the Psychology Service, which, among other things, handled problems connected with psi and did it quietly to avoid disturbing the public. The Service people went to work on the information she gave them. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to tell them very much. While she waited for results from that quarter, there was something she could take care of herself, and should take care of at once.
Until now her psi armament had seemed adequate. She’d experimented occasionally with her recently acquired abilities in that field, improving them here and there; but she’d intended to wait until she’d wound up her law studies before giving serious attention to psi and what could be done with it—or, at any rate, to what she could do with it.
That idea had better be dropped! Half a psi talent, it appeared, might turn into a dangerous gift when it attracted the attention of others who didn’t stick to halfway measures. She could use an immediate crash course in expanding the talent. The Service might be willing to train her but not necessarily along the lines she wanted. Besides, she preferred not to get too involved with them. But there was a psi she knew, an independent like herself, who should have the experience, if she could get him to share it. Sams Larking wasn’t exactly a friend. He was, in fact, untrustworthy, unethical, underhanded and sneaky. The point now, however, was that he was psi-sneaky in a very accomplished manner, and packed a heavy mind clout. Telzey looked him up.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 233