The Kyben Stories

by Harlan Ellison

After a while Shreve stopped, and collapsed onto the couch, his face red and swollen. "Sorry, Karl," he said.

  "Why don't you try crying, it's easier on the metabolism," he suggested.

  Shreve gave a bitter laugh, thin and short. "Last time I cried I was eating cream cheese and jelly sandwiches and didn't know where little babies come from." Teller didn't smile. He knew Shreve was covering up. He had never seen the man break as he had today, and he knew the knowledge should go no further.

  "But why? Why?" Shreve pounded his fist into the yielding couch. "We came to help them, why won't they let us?"

  "Luther, Luther," Teller soothed him, sitting down beside him on the couch, "don't you see? They're adolescents. They don't know when to call for help. They've been hurt, and with the single-minded purpose of the immature they're bound not to let it happen again. You can't blame yourself for what's happened. You had no way of knowing about this power of theirs. Why don't we leave right now. If we lay on all power we can make the schedule still pretty close."

  Shreve stood up, flicked on the view-plates. He stared into them a moment, seeing nothing but tangled jungle. He drew up a bit, laid his hands flat on the console. "I've got to talk to them once more. To beg them again."

  We warned you came the cold, hard tones. The group-mind is infinitely stronger than our individual power now that you have seen our strength will you go?

  "I've come to beg you once more," Shreve pleaded, looking up at the masked Diamoraii, astride their mounts. He had made certain all outside pickup mikes were off. "We only want to help you. Won't you let us re-direct the coming eruptions. Please!" Shreve had plumbed the depths of his mind in an attempt to find reasons for sacrificing such efforts to save the Diamoraii. The only reasons he had found he had not been able to translate…yet there was a sense of identification with the long-legged and stubborn aliens. He wanted to save them!

  "Can't you read my thoughts?" he said, projecting truth, projecting honesty and sincerity. "Can't you see I want to help you, help your people?"

  They did not even bother answering. He knew their acquaintance with the truth that men of other worlds had offered. To be defeated because those who need your help had been spoiled by another race!

  The bitterness, the hatred, the distrust, washed over him, as the Diamorai leaned across his beast's neck, thought one snarled word: Go.

  Shreve felt the futility of everything he had done, suddenly caving in on him. He looked up into the blank stares of the masked aliens, said slowly, "We will hang above your atmosphere till you call us."

  He walked back to the Wallower. The huge plug-port closed behind him. The aliens sat astride their beasts, staring at the ship.

  Their minor-key whoops of victory rang and bounced in the jungle's treetops as they swung their mounts roughly, dug boney knees into their sides, and careened into the multi-colored vastness.

  The Diamoraii had won again!

  The Wallower spun slowly in space, the eternal dust of the universe lapping at her ports. Below her, enveloped by clouds of steam, the planet Diamore blasted and erupted and screamed and belched and tore itself apart.

  Luther Shreve sat before the control console, staring with almost hypnotized attention at the view-plates. He watched the world die.

  His face was hard and unyielding. He had refused entrance even to Teller, barring everyone from the control room.

  At every eruption, with each fissure that opened wide enough to be seen from that fantastic height, he felt a strange sinking in his heart. His throat was dry, and there was an odd pressure behind his eyes.

  He watched silently, every once in awhile letting the thought They didn't know when to ask for help filter through his mind.

  The Group of Deciders huddled in the blasted Council Hall. The floor…what was left of the inlaid tiles…shivered and heaved. Beyond the twisted lattices of the windows they could hear the mighty rending of the planet as it opened and swallowed all that stood.

  Within an hour of the first eruptions, so quickly and with such fury that there had been no time for preparation, almost three-fifths of their race had been decimated.

  The cities Kes and Uykvabask and Laylor had gone under with roaring flames and the scraping of stone against flesh. The Great Ocean had exploded with a red-hot bubbling and roared onto the land, washing everything before it. The lava flows raced Eastward to the Ceremonial Grounds and Westward to the Hunting Preserve. Everywhere the ground opened without warning or reason, and life sank beneath the earth.

  Wrong, the Group of Decid rs admitted in their last refuge. We were wrong we have been foolish we have rejected our only salvation we must prepare the group-mind send our plea for aid into space speak to the outsiders ask them to help us.

  They thought their instructions away from themselves, to their kin across Diamore's blasted face. Prepare! Join! Speak to the outsiders!

  And when they had gathered together every last Diamorai, with more dying as they joined the chain, with the feeling of agony radiating through the group-mind, the message weakly rose. Tentatively it probed at the inner surface of Diamore's atmosphere.

  The power was, perhaps, insufficient to reach the space ship. Three-fifths of the Diamoraii were lost to the group-mind.

  The group-mind struggled, frantically beaming, in hopelessness trying to get through to the Earthmen who rode above them.

  The men who rode above them…waiting for a signal from the Diamoraii.

  Shreve turned away from the plates, flicking them off. "I can't stand it, Karl! How senseless! Because one race dealt them unfairly, they closed their eyes to help from anyone else."

  Teller crossed his legs as he sat on the couch. He did not appear to be disturbed by the sight from below.

  "Luther, you can't go on destroying yourself. You did everything you could. You were as resourceful as any man could have been.

  "Now you'd better get back to the schedule. We're over four and a half months due at our next landfall." He saw his words were having no effect. "Look, Luther, I've been in this business almost as long as you. I've seen this time and again. When you come up against an adolescent race, that doesn't know when it's got something too big to handle, there's nothing you can do but back off and let them handle it themselves. If they don't get smart enough to know when to call the fireman…that's their agony. Not yours!"

  "What's the next stop on our itinerary?" he asked the last almost jauntily, consciously trying to take Shreve's mind off the cinder that spun below the Wallower. He rose and stretched, as though from a profound sleep.

  For a moment he stared in wonder. Then he stepped into the shaft and quietly left the control room.

  He had never thought he'd see the day when Luther Shreve cried like a child.

  DEEPER THAN THE DARKNESS

  They came to Alf Gunnderson in the Pawnee County jail.

  He was sitting, hugging his boney knees, against the plasteel wall of the cell. On the plasteel floor lay an ancient, three-string mandolin he had borrowed from the deputy, he had been plunking with some talent all that hot, summer day. Under his thin buttocks the empty trough of his mattressless bunk curved beneath his weight. He was an extremely tall man, even hunched up that way.

  He was more than tired-looking, more than weary. His was an inside weariness … he was a gaunt, empty-looking man. His hair fell lanky and drab and gray-brown in shocks over a low forehead. His eyes seemed to be peas, withdrawn from their pods and placed in a starkly white face. It was difficult to tell whether he could see from them.

  Their blankness only accented the total cipher he seemed. There was no inch of expression or recognition on his face, in the line of his body.

  More, he was a thin man. He seemed to be a man who had given up the Search long ago. His face did not change its hollow stare at the plasteel-barred door opposite, even as it swung back to admit the two nonentities.

  The two men entered, their stride as alike as the unobtrusive grey mesh suits they wore; as alike as the faces
that would fade from memory moments after they had turned. The turnkey — a grizzled country deputy with a minus 8 rating — stared after the men with open wonder on his bearded face.

  One of the grey-suited men turned, pinning the wondering stare to the deputy’s face. His voice was calm and uprippled. “Close the door and go back to your desk.” The words were cold and paced. They brooked no opposition. It was obvious: they were mindees.

  The roar of a late afternoon inverspace ship split the waiting moment, outside, then the turnkey slammed the door, palming it loktite. He walked back out of the cell block, hands deep in his coverall pockets. His head was lowered as though he were trying to solve a complex problem. It, too, was obvious: he was trying to block his thoughts off from those goddamned mindees.

  When he was gone, the telepaths circled Gunnderson slowly. Their faces softly altered, subtly, and personality flowed in with quickness. They shot each other confused glances.

  Him? The first man thought, nodding slightly at the still, knee-hugging prisoner.

  That’s what the report said, Ralph. The other man removed his forehead-concealing snapbrim and sat down on the edge of the bunk trough. He touched Gunnderson’s leg with tentative fingers. He’s not thinking, for God’s sake! the thought flashed. I can’t get a thing .

  Incredulousness sparkled in the thought.

  He must be blocked off by trauma barrier, came the reply from the telepath named Ralph.

  “Is your name Alf Gunnderson?” the first mindee inquired softly, a hand on Gunnderson’s shoulder.

  The expression never changed. The head swiveled slowly and the dead eyes came to bear on the dark-suited telepath. “I’m Gunnderson,” he replied briefly. His tones indicated no enthusiasm, no curiosity.

  The first man looked up at his partner, doubt wrinkling in his eyes, pursing his lips. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, Who knows?

  He turned back to Gunnderson.

  Immobile, as before. Hewn from rock, silent as the pit.

  “What are you in here for, Gunnderson?” He spoke as though he were unused to words. The halting speech of the telepath.

  The dead stare swung back to the plasteel bars. “I set the woods on fire,” he said shortly.

  The mindee’s face darkened at the prisoner’s words. That was what the report had said. The report that had come in from one of the remote corners of the country.

  The American Continent was a modern thing, all plasteel and printed circuits, all relays and fast movement, but there had been areas of backwoods country that had never taken to civilizing. They still maintained roads and jails, and fishing holes and forests. Out of one of these had come three reports, spaced an hour apart, with startling ramifications — if true. They had been snapped through the primary message banks in Capitol City in Buenos Aires, reeled through the computalyzers, and handed to the Bureau for check-in. While the inverspace ships plied between worlds, while Earth fought its transgalactic wars, in a rural section of the American Continent, a strange thing was happening.

  A mile and a half of raging forest fire, and Alf Gunnderson the one responsible. So they had sent two Bureau mindees.

  “How did it start, Alf?”

  The dead eyes closed momentarily, in pain, opened, and he answered, “I was trying to get the pot to heat up. Trying to set the kindling under it to burning. I fired myself too hard.” A flash of self-pity and unbearable hurt came into his face, disappeared just as quickly. Empty once more, he added, “I always do.”

  The first man exhaled sharply, got up and put on his hat. The personality flowed out of his face. He was a carbon copy of the other telepath once more.

  “This is the one,” he said.

  “Come on, Alf,” the mindee named Ralph said. “Let’s go.”

  The authority of his voice no more served to move Gunnderson than their initial appearance had. He sat as he was. The two men looked at one another.

  What’s the matter with him? the second one flashed.

  If you had what he’s got — you’d be a bit buggy yourself , the first one replied. They were no longer individuals; they were Bureau men, studiedly, exactly, precisely alike in every detail.

  They hoisted the prisoner under his arms, lifted him off the bunk, unresisting. The turnkey came at a call, and still marveling at these men who had come in — shown Bureau cards, sworn him to deadly silence, and were now taking the tramp firebug with them — opened the cell door.

  As they passed before him, the telepath named Ralph turned suddenly sharp and piercing eyes on the old guard. “This is government business, mister,” he warned. “One word of this, and you’ll be a prisoner in your own jail. Clear?”

  The turnkey bobbed his head quickly.

  “And stop thinking, mister,” the mindee added nastily, “we don’t like to be referred to as slimy peekers!” The turnkey turned a shade paler and watched silently as they disappeared down the hall, out of the Pawnee County jailhouse. He waited, blanking fiercely, till he heard the whine of the Bureau solocab rising into the afternoon sky.

  Now what the devil did they want with a crazy firebug hobo like that? He thought viciously, Goddam mindees!

  After they had flown him cross-continent to Buenos Aires, deep in the heart of the blasted Argentine desert, they sent him in for testing.

  The testing was exhaustive. Even though he did not really cooperate, there were things he could not keep them from learning; things that showed up because they were there:

  Such as his ability to start fires with his mind.

  Such as the fact that he could not control the blazes.

  Such as the fact that he had been bumming for fifteen years in an effort to find seclusion.

  Such as the fact that he had become a tortured and unhappy man because of his strange mindpower.

  “Alf,” said the bodiless voice from the rear of the darkened auditorium, “light that cigarette on the table. Put it in your mouth and make it light, Alf. Without a match.”

  Alf Gunnderson stood in the circle of light. He shifted from leg to leg on the blazing stage, and eyed the cylinder of white paper on the table.

  It was starting again. The harrying, the testing, the staring with strangeness. He was different — even from the other accredited psioid types — and they would try to put him away. It had happened before, it was happening now. There was no real peace for him.

  “I don’t smoke,” he said, which was not true. But this was brother kin to the uncountable police line-ups he had gone through, all the way across the American Continent, across Earth, and from A Centauri IX back here. It annoyed him, and it terrified him, for he knew he was trapped.

  Except this time there were no hard rocky-faced cops out there in the darkness beyond his sight. This time there were hard, rocky-faced Bureau men, and SpaceCom officials.

  Even Terrence, head of SpaceCom, was sitting in one of those pneumoseats, watching him steadily.

  Daring him to be what he was!

  He lifted the cylinder hesitantly, almost put it back.

  “Smoke it, Alf!” snapped a different voice, deeper in tone, from the ebony before him.

  He put the cigarette between his lips. They waited.

  He seemed to want to say something, perhaps to object. Alf Gunnderson’s heavy brows drew down. His blank eyes became — if it were possible — ever blanker. A sharp, denting V appeared between the brows.

  The cigarette flamed into life.

  A tongue of fire leaped up from the tip. In an instant it had consumed tobacco, paper, filter and denicotizer in one roar. The fire slammed against Gunnderson’s lips, scaring them, lapping at his nose, his face.

  He screamed, fell on his face and beat at the flames with his hands.

  Suddenly the stage was clogged with running men in the blue and charcoal suits of the SpaceCom. Gunnderson lay writhing on the floor, a wisp of charry smoke rising from his face. One of the SpaceCom officials broke the cap on an extinguisher vial and the spray washed over the bod
y of the fallen man.

  “Get the mallaport! Get the goddamned mallaport, willya!” A young ensign with brush-cut blond hair, first to reach the stage, as though he had been waiting crouched below, cradled Gunnderson’s head in his muscular arms, brushing with horror at the flakes of charred skin. He had the watery blue eyes of the spacemen, the man who has seen terrible things; yet his eyes were more frightened now than any man’s eyes had a right to be.

  In a few minutes the angular, spade-pawed, malleable-transporter was smoothing the skin on Gunnderson’s face, realigning the atoms — shearing away the burned flesh, coating it with vibrant, healthy pink skin.

  Another few moments and the psioid was finished; the burns had been erased; Gunnderson was new and whole, save for the patches of healthier-seeming skin that dotted his face.

  All through it he had been murmuring. As the mallaport finished his mental work, stood up with a sigh, the word filtered through to the young SpaceCom ensign. He stared at Gunnderson a moment, then raised his watery blue eyes to the other officials standing about.

  He stared at them with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.

  Gunnderson had been saying: “Let me die, please let me die, I want to die, won’t you let me die, please!”

  The ship was heading toward Omalo, sun of the Delgart system. It had been translated into inverspace by a driver named Carina Correia. She had warped the ship through, and gone back to her deep sleep, till she was needed at Omalo snapout.

  Now the ship whirled through the crazy quilt of inverspace, cutting through to the star system of Earth’s adversary.

  Gunnderson sat in the cabin with the brush-cut blond ensign. All through the trip, since blastoff and snapout, the pyrotic had been kept in his stateroom. This was the newest of the Earth SpaceComships, yet he had seen none of it. Just this tiny stateroom, in the constant company of the usually stoical ensign.