by Dean Koontz
When this vision passed, he found himself curled at the waist against the awful pain—both physical and psychological—of dying. "The deterrent worked much faster than his ESP power ever could, negating any chance of opening the wall by force. He simply could not withstand too many spiralings down into the grave, artificial or real, without being thoroughly unhinged by them. And if he lost his sanity, he was not at all certain he would be able to make use of the extrasensory powers to heal himself. If his mind were unhinged, so might be his psionic abilities.
He floated before the shimmering emerald panel, searching for a switch that might send the wall up or sideways, knowing even as he looked that such a thing was impossible. This was no cleverly disguised door before him, but a thick and sturdy wall. As he had thought, there was no sign of a switch.
He did not even consider returning topside, to the mountainside home that had once been the main part of his life. That was unthinkable. Now that he had discovered the source of PBT and had cracked the hold of the Brethren on the underworld and on all the people addicted to their amber-colored drug, he needed another goal, something more to be met and engaged and conquered. If he did not tackle the challenge of this wall, the time would have come when he would have to stop deluding himself about the unimportance of his new-found powers. He would have to plan for the future. And the future scared him. If he had been a freak in a normal world before, he was a superfreak now. There was no possible way he could fit into the fabric of modern society. No way at all.
His life had been a desperate race to be accepted, to have at least a goodly number of peripheral friends, if he had to be restricted to only Taguster as a confidant. Enterstat had connected him with the beautiful people, the favored, the talented, the wealthy. He had boosted himself into the second-echelon corridors of high society. Now he had completed the circle of his mutation and had passed out of their world, forever and without question. He was alone.
In the back of his mind he knew there was one other thing he could try—to get beyond this wall. And though it was a dangerous plan, it was far safer—psychologically—than giving up and returning to the surface. The answer was simple enough: he must teleport . . .
The problem was that he had only the vaguest of impressions concerning the area beyond this wall. It was not nearly enough to fix it in his inind as a solid point in space-time. As a result, he was not certain that, if he teleported without a distinct destination embedded in his mind, he would end up where he wished to go. He might find himself inextricably wound up in the molecular patterns of this partition, his own molecules hopelessly enmeshed in those of the emerald substance. It was not the pleasantest of thoughts—especially if it were to happen and he were to maintain his mental powers as he had while teleporting the first time . . .
Yet he had not known any exact co-ordinates when he had come to this farm from New England. He had known what it looked like and that it was close to Charter Oak, Iowa, but that was hardly hair-fine sighting. Perhaps an exact impression of the destination was not essential. If it were, then he could never teleport beyond this wall, for he would have to be there first to ascertain the landscape. Therefore, he stopped worrying about it and decided to take the plunge.
The life he would have to lead once he was in the outside world again, and reported this to the United Nations was more frightening with each passing moment And though his ESP might have expanded, his emotions were still primitively human. Out there, it would be an emotional problem, some-thing his great power could not help him cope with.
He turned back to the green wall, examined it carefully, tried to establish a mental image of the ghostly X-ray he had seen of the chambers beyond.
He sucked in breath; the air seemed infinitely cooler than it had been moments earlier.
He teleported . . .
The time spent in transit was no different than it had been when he had taken the much longer jump from New England to the Brethren farmhouse. The landscape of the eerie, non-matter universe through which he passed like a beam of black light was just as it had been before: dark, singing yet silent, warm yet cold . . .
Then he was standing within the core of the vast ship, beyond the green barrier that had been erected to stop him. He felt a flush of triumph, of superiority—which a glance around at the marvelous ship dispelled immediately. He was at the very front of the starship, in a small chamber that served as a minimal guidance deck. It was very bare of decoration and contained only three seats, all on swivel bases, all heavily padded. He would have to walk backward toward the barrier through which he had traveled to see what the other rooms contained.
In this tabu section of the vessel, his curiosity had been whetted even further, and he had forgotten all about the future and his place in it. Or at least he pretended that he had.
As he drifted through the circular port of the guidance deck, into the tubeway that led to the next room, the alien voice spoke to him like sand spilling down a marble slope: whispers, whispers, whispers . . .
CHAPTER 16
". . . del esseda esseda esseda , . . quaol mi o esseda . . . esseda . . ."
He came to an abrupt halt, the submerged fear rising as the cold, quiet voice echoed softly through the tubeway. He looked back into the room he had just left. There did not seem to be anything there, though the darkness made it difficult to tell for certain. He uncapped his psionic talents and searched that chamber, questing for the spark of life, the jumble of thoughts and impressions that would have accompanied even an alien mind. But he could find nothing.
Even as he searched ahead, he began to realize that the words had not been spoken, that they had impressed themselves in his mind without need for verbalization. That meant the speaker, using ESP powers, might not even be present.
He stood quite still for several minutes, waiting for a repetition of the words. When he was met with only silence and an uncomfortable feeling of being watched, he started forward again. Before he had progressed another half dozen feet further along the tubeway, the same, alien, cold whisper began again: ". . . saysi del esseda esseda esseda . . . quaol mio . . ."
He stopped to listen but heard nothing more. At last he found his throat sufficiently unconstricted enough to say, "I can't understand you."
He did not think to impart the words without speaking them, as the alien had done. He was not yet quite accustomed to the new abilities of his mind. He had never even considered the possibility of telepathy, and he was more than a little stunned by the prospect now.
There was another minute during which nothing was said. Then another. Finally, when his patience had worn thin and he was prepared to advance to see if that would spark interest in the alien's part where there now seemed to be none, the soft, ethereal whisper came again—this time with the same sort of English that Timothy might have used himself.
"I thought that you were one of us." Despite the English, the voice was eerie, thin, rasped like the voice of a man stricken with some disease of the vocal cords.
"No," he said. "No." And for a horrible moment he was certain that his powers of concentration would desert him, that he would be able to do nothing more than babble inanely, like some mentally deficient child, at what was most certainly a historical moment, this first meeting of man and extraterrestrial. His feeling of inadequacy had been resurrected. He had not felt this insecure and worthless since his days in the hospital and the first year or so after his release. But then there were words, issued haltingly but nonetheless sensibly. Not profound, to be sure. He did not have the presence of mind, right then, to be philosophical. But sensible, at least. "I'm from this world—not yours," he said.
"In what manner did you gain entrance?"
"Teleportation," he said. That gave him at least a little pride. "Just as your kind used to travel from the rear portion of the ship to these private chambers."
"You know of us."
It was not a question so much as a statement, but he said, "Some. Not very much."
&
nbsp; "How?"
"From deduction," he said. He recounted the things he had found since entering the starship, speaking swiftly in hopes that he was not boring the disembodied voice with ramblings which might seem relatively petty to it. For two races to meet and speak, though they were of different and distant star systems, was a thing for wonder. Not for boredom.
He found he was perspiring. He felt as if he were on a great stage before an audience whose faces were invisible beyond the brilliant footlights, but which must number in the thousands.
"You speak of the Brethren," the whispering voice said, picking that piece of datum out of the information Timothy had supplied. "Explain them, please."
He obliged, explaining the nature of Brethren hierarchy, then of the Brethren activity itself. It was not that he felt all of the minute facts should be transmitted to the listening alien or that—once transmitted—they would serve any purpose through their illumination; it was more of a fear, actually, that if he stopped talking for even a short moment, the creature would have learned all that it wished to know and would send him on his way without satisfying his own curiosity. Or destroy him. That was what one expected, that was the stereotype procedure for all extraterrestrials. He was not surprised to realize that he would prefer being destroyed, just as in all the cliche horror stories, to being patted on the head and sent blithely on his way . . .
Again, a pause when he was finished. Then: "And this PBT which you describe—what is the source of the name?"
"From the words 'Perfectly Beautiful Trip,' which users coined when they learned the stuff had no chemical formula —known, anyway—from which to devise a catchphrase." It now seemed to be time for him to ask something instead of waiting for the next question. It was time to get at least a little of the situation under his control He said, "What is the drug? What is it made from?"
"It is not a drug at all," the voice whispered. "It is . . . plasma . . . blood. It is the blood of one of the six non-psionic races of the Inner Galaxy. Intelligent race, but no extrasensory perception. The medical room keeps a constant supply of it on hand for emergencies in which our guests might be injured. It is produced through our biological engineering module."
Timothy tried to envision a race so alien in its physical makeup that its blood was a powerful narcotic and hallucinogen to earthmen. He wanted to ask the speaker what they were like, then decided that was only infantile curiosity and that there were more important matters at hand.
"Where are you speaking from?" He asked. "I can't see you." He was anxious to examine the alien in its living state, to see how it walked, how its face moved when it talked, thousands of minutiae such as that.
"My cube. If you move into the next chamber, you will see me in my cube—you will see all of us."
Timothy floated down the corridor and into a large chamber, fully as extensive as the theater in the far rear of the starship. Suspended midway between the high domed ceiling and the floor, on single, finger-thick strands of coppery metal, were cubes of a smoky green transparent material in which the bodies of nearly two hundred aliens hung like flies in amber, staring out at the room without actually seeing anything there, immobile, quiet, but not dead. There was no doubt that life still seethed within these beings, for their faces were caught, not in slackness, but with expressions of fear, anticipation, and relief. The brother of theirs, in the other half of the ship, in the morgue drawer, was dead. Not these.
"The dead man in the drawer?" he asked as he recalled that frozen busk. "What happened to him?"
"A little over a thousand years ago, we ventured forth to explore your world, to see if it had changed in the million and a quarter years we had been sleeping here. He was killed by a bow and arrow. The wound was too sudden and penetrating for our psionic powers to go to his aide. When we saw the creatures of that time possessed intelligence but would require dozens of centuries to develop into anything we could contact, we entered these cubes again to wait. We wanted to solicit help for the repair of this vessel, but such would have been impossible with those semi-savages."
"And you have all been here, except for that short time, inactive for a million and more years?" It was impossible to conceive of that, and he felt old and tired when he tried.
"Hardly. We have frozen our bodies, but not our minds. We remain in intimate mental contact with our homeworlds, with those we love. Our mates, our relatives and friends, have all died, of course. They lived their proper eight thousand years and passed on. But we keep in touch with our ancestors and with developments on the homeworlds. We take turns keeping watch over these inner sanctums of the ship. Life, you see, is much more than having a body whose metabolism continues."
He had always felt that way himself, of course. It would have destroyed him, quite early in life, if he had contained the physical egotism of a beach bum muscleman.
"But now it is possible for us to leave these cubes and seek aid from your people."
"No," Timothy said, realizing how harsh that word must sound to the creature in the cube, to all of them who had been waiting such an unimaginably long time.
"Explain?"
"I'm the only one of my kind who has the psionic powers you spoke of." He went on to explain his heritage, the artificial womb, and his expansion of ESP powers achieved through the application of alien blood. "I'm certain, now, that it was only because of my latent ESP that the chemical composition of the blood expanded my powers. It can do absolutely nothing for the others of my race—of that race. It can only lead to addiction and death. You've got to tell me how it can be rejected, with what counter drugs its hold on my people can be broken."
"May I scan your mind? I ask for this privilege only because I wish to ascertain the nature of your race, biologically, in order to deduce what effect the drugs of this blood could have had. It will be simpler than a question and answer period, and I'll learn more. If you wish your privacy unviolated, I will understand. But I assure you that I will only scan for what subject is in question.''
Since the alien could have initiated the scan without his permission and, more than likely, without his knowledge, Ti could see no reason why it would violate its promise now. "Go on," he said.
He felt nothing as the unearthly fingers sifted through his large store of knowledge, though he did wonder what sort of analogue the mind of this alien created to explain Timothy's thoughts. What would the analogue of his own subconscious mind look like? He did not mind the alien sopping up his life history so much as he was perturbed by the possibility of the creature seeing what condition his innermost mind was in, what hideous and twisted longings it might possess.
He was relieved when the voice hissed: "I am satisfied.''
"What did you find?"
"Cold withdrawal," the alien said.
"But that's agonizing. They say it can even lead to death if someone is completely addicted."
"It's the best method and the most sure. There is no drug to combat addiction, for no earthly chemicals could have such effect and we never created such a drug, not having seen the need for one. The PBT, as you call it, latches on to the red corpuscles of the human blood. Each corpuscle-like cell of the alien plasma piggy-backs a human cell. If one withdraws, totally, the production of new blood will eventually do away with the old cells which have the alien corpuscles attached to them. The alien cells cannot transfer allegiance in their piggy-backing."
"Then by cutting the Brethren off from the source, we put an end, theoretically, to the problem."
"Not theoretically. Actually"
He realized, even as the alien whisper reinforced the certainty of its assumptions, that the time he had been dreading had arrived at last. He had achieved this interim goal and must now take time to worry over the future, to decide what it was to be like. How was he to cope with a world in which he was vastly superior to everything and everyone? There was no question that he was destined to be an outcast, without even the friendship of the most intelligent men, like Taguster. Mankind had
spent centuries proving its disdain and often downright hatred for anyone different, anyone not conforming to the norm, whether that norm be dress, hair length, accent, political beliefs, or physical condition. It was easy to imagine, then, how great the hatred of a superman would be. Because, basically, the reason the average man hated anyone different could easily be deduced. He hated anyone who seemed to have met the forces of normalcy, of conformity, of oppression and authoritarianism, who had met them and defeated them. It made him seem somehow less important, less of an individual, less worthy. The reaction to a superman who not only disregarded the rules of conformity, but who could smash them at whim, would be a thousandfold more vicious.
And then, how was he to find any task challenging enough to make it worth wrestling with? If his psionic powers made all things possible, then it must be true that they also made all things uninteresting. And a man needed something to motivate him, something to conquer. Otherwise he rotted.
Quickly, before he could wind his way into the maze of problems awaiting him, he asked, "May I return to speak with you further once I have taken care of the Brethren? I will not announce your presence. I'll buy the farm, if necessary, to assure the secret of the ship."
"You are avoiding your decision," the whispering voice berated him, the tone somewhat accusatory.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You know perfectly well. You must decide whether or not to go back into the world as you know it, back where you will be a greater freak than ever. A physical abnormality makes a man an outcast in your world. But a mental abnormality—be it either for better or worse, retardation or genius—leads to the same rejection, though even more swiftly and with more vehemence on the part of those expunging the undesirable element."
Ti nodded, having reached the same conclusion some time ago, even before he had fully developed his psionic awareness through the PBT. Mentally deficient men were damned to lives of ridicule, forced into lives of loneliness in basement rooms or in institutions. Society ignored them and patted its own back for, at least, not chaining them in dungeons as once was done. Men falling into the upper limits of genius were scorned by those less fortunate in intellect who demeaned them and their opinions at every possible opportunity. They preferred the blandness of the average. The less-than-average was worthy only of disdain by the middle. The more-than-average was a target of jealous anger and petty accusations. It should not be that way, of course. But it was. And there was nothing he could do, even with his psionic powers, to . change the thinking of an entire society.