Mute

by Piers Anthony

  Finesse brought him a laser rifle. “Will this do?”

  “Maybe.” He squirmed painfully around, aimed the rifle, and fired at the lock. There was a bright splay of light, and metal dripped down. Knot squinted at it, aimed, and fired again. This time the lock released, and Finesse was able to get into the elevator.

  “This gives access to everything, I believe,” she said. “But I’m sure Piebald will have barricaded himself behind triple sets of locked doors. I wish we had Hermine and Mit to tell us for certain.” She paused. “You’re sure they’re—?”

  “The lobos don’t know about them,” he murmured. “They think I have all the psi.”

  “Oh.” She was quiet, realizing that it remained unwise to yield any information at all to the lobos while the present issue remained in doubt. She took his hand.

  Knot squeezed it, using the same code he used for the gross one. Would she understand? I DIDN’T WANT THEM TO GET CAPTURED.

  To his gratified surprise, she squeezed back. She knew the code! SO WE’RE ON OUR OWN RESOURCES. I FEEL NAKED.

  SEND TO HERMINE, AS YOU DID BEFORE. JUST SO SHE KNOWS.

  YES. She concentrated a moment. THERE. JUST A SPOT SUMMARY. NOW WE MUST ACT.

  The elevator operated. It was on a fail-safe circuit that could not be broken from Piebald’s control unit. They dropped to the basement. Here the doors were not locked; it was more like a warehouse area.

  “So you used the elevator,” Piebald’s voice came over another speaker. “Very intelligent. I hoped you would not be able to manage that, but am not surprised, given your assorted psi talents. At least it freed your lobo hostages. But you cannot accomplish anything from the nether region.”

  “He’s guessing; he doesn’t know where we are,” Finesse whispered. “Those speakers are all over the premises.” She dragged Knot’s pallet out of the elevator.

  “You can’t get anywhere like this,” Knot said, keeping his own voice low so as to make pickup difficult. Squeeze-talk was much slower, and now that they were off the subject of Hermine and Mit it did not matter so much if they were overheard. If the system was so designed that the lobos could not pick them up, all the better.

  And why should such an elaborate two-way system be installed here in the lobo headquarters? They could hardly have anticipated a situation like this! So it should be merely a variant public-address system. “Park me here and circle around. See if you can get within psi-range of him.”

  She considered. “I may have to. He’ll have more armed lobos after us before long, searching all the rooms. But—”

  “Put me near a circuit box. I’ll create a diversion.”

  “You’re almost unconscious already! Just relax and be inconspicuous.”

  “And be forgotten? I’m better off participating!”

  “Um, yes.” She checked quickly. “I wish—a certain party were here. We could locate a circuit box immediately. Ah—this should do it.” She dragged him across to a terminal box. “I don’t know what you can do from here, but if you’re sure—”

  “You get on your way. I’ll work out something.”

  She leaned down to kiss him again. She was in a plain flower-print dress, and the front fell away to give him a pleasant peek into her bosom. How sweet these fleeting glimpses became, when life threatened to be short! “Luck, Knot.”

  “Luck, Finesse. Don’t bang your nose.”

  She was gone. His gut hurt, but his condition seemed to be stable. He refrained from looking at the wound, afraid it would be worse than it felt. Right now he had a job to do, if he could figure out how. He had to create a distraction.

  Yet his concentration was diverted by his guilty conscience. Should he have told Finesse about her husband? Yes, of course he should have! He made himself a resolution: at the next opportunity, he would tell her. If things worked out so that one of them died, his silence would really have made no difference, but if they escaped the lobos he would tell her. Yes.

  Now he was able to focus on the problem. He used the rifle to melt off the box-lock, and looked inside. There was a complex of connections and switches and several sophisticated fuses. His electrical expertise came into play; he didn’t remember studying the subject, but he had certainly learned it well enough for this. This was a configuration typical of an access-lead to heavy power outlets, such as miniature cyclotrons or hefty industrial lasers. But the layout was not right for that sort of operation. Where, then, did these lines lead?

  Knot did more exploring, supporting his hurting body with increasing difficulty, drawing himself up to peer closely at the leads. In due course he found a schematic diagram, necessary to enable repair crews to correct damage, replace fuses and such without complicating the situation. He studied the diagram with the same mysterious expertise he had for locks and wiring. It seemed this power connected to the detonation mechanism for explosives set in a deep cave in the mountain. There was a fifteen minute time delay between commitment and execution, but the sequence, once initiated, was irreversible—assuming this setup were typical of its type.

  Knot considered. Were they doing blasting for mining? In a volcano?

  A volcano! Quiescent now—but surely titanic forces lurked below, and if these were triggered—

  A self-destruct system! Naturally the paranoid lobos would include something like that. They didn’t want the normals of CC prying into their sinister secrets. If there were any frontal attack on this fortress, and it seemed likely to be successful, the lobos would simply activate the detonator and take a hovercraft out of here within fifteen minutes, leaving the enemy to its fate amidst seeming victory. A nasty trap, typical of this organization. But perhaps it could be made into just as nasty a counter-trap.

  Knot worked carefully, pausing when he grew faint from pain and fatigue willing consciousness to return. What use to save his immediate body, if the lobos won and lobotomized him? He used his fingers to pry key wires into a position for ready connection. Now the extra finger on his right hand was helpful; he could hold more wires safely separated, while moving new ones into place with his left band. At length he was satisfied. Now he could short the mechanism in a moment, starting the destruct process.

  If it turned out that he and Finesse could not escape, that they both faced torture and lobotomy, he would initiate the one-way sequence, taking Piebald and this whole fortress with him. Perhaps the resulting detonation would alert CC to the nature of the lobo threat. Even if not, it would still be a very satisfying way to die.

  “Finesse,” Piebald’s voice came over the speaker. “You have tripped a signal beam, and we have located you. If you will glance at the ceiling, you will observe a laser weapon trained on you. I suggest you remain motionless until our police-robot comes to apprehend you.”

  They had spotted Finesse! And a robot would not be vulnerable to her psi, any more than it would be to his own psi. They would recapture her in moments, or gas her unconscious, and that would be the end.

  Knot had to act. He drew out the key wires and held them in his hands as he slumped down against the wall. His consciousness faded with every physical effort he made, but this had to be done. “Piebald!” he called, hoping that there were pickups here as well as speakers. He had grown dependent on Mit and Hermine for such information, and now felt inadequate. “I have shorted your station-destruct system, and I doubt you can bypass my connection before I can use it. Release Finesse, or I will blow up your mountain.”

  There was a pause. Then Piebald answered. That much had worked! “It seems we are at another impasse,” the lobo said with seeming calmness. “My circuit sensors verify that there is an interruption in the destruct system. Yet if I release the woman, this station is surely doomed. If I do not—”

  “Knot, he’s stalling!” Finesse cried. “Don’t trust him! Blow it up!”

  But Knot hesitated, hoping for some better way to wrest control from the lobos. It seemed to him there was a missing element, a special key. Something they all had overlooked.
But what was it? He concentrated, but instead felt his consciousness slipping away again. There was fresh blood on his thigh, leaking out, the injury aggravated by his activity. He had overextended himself, expending his last reserves of energy, losing too much blood; his brain was running dry, and was—

  “Don’t wait, Knot!” Finesse cried. “Do it!”

  “You have foolish courage,” Piebald said to her. “He hardly wants to destroy you, after coming all this way to rescue you. One can hardly blame him for hesitating.”

  Damn the man’s insidious insight! That was a factor in Knot’s hesitation. He had been led astray all along by his passion for Finesse, making wrong moves when he really knew better. The whole episode of the chasm enclave—

  “He came to alleviate the threat to CC!” Finesse retorted. “By destroying you, he can accomplish that. The rest of us don’t matter.”

  True. Knot’s hand moved toward the critical connection. His mind and body were so numb that he could master only one impulse at a time. Destroy the villa, save CC...

  “It is obvious he loves you,” Piebald said. “He could have attacked the villa by stealing a min-nuke from the Macho arsenal and crashing his aircraft into the mountain. He did not, because you were prisoner here. He will not destroy the mountain now, for the same reason. Love restrains him, and why not? You are eminently lovable.”

  “I love him too!” Finesse cried. “Knot, if you love me, activate that destruct system now!”

  “How can you love him,” Piebald asked, “when you are married to another man, and have a child by that husband?”

  Piebald had known! He had done it! The demon!

  “Oh, God, I—” Finesse choked off, remembering. The lobo’s strike had been unerringly timed. Now her will, as well as Knot’s, had been sapped. She had been caught expressing adulterous passion.

  Better death than this dual shame! With abrupt determination Knot took the wires. But his head seemed to be reeling, his hands shaking. The wires drew out from his grasp as his hand fell. Piebald had been right; Knot did not really want to destroy Finesse, even to save CC, and that vitiated his imperative, sapped his strength, and denatured his will. The room shook and wavered as he struggled to retain volition. But he was too far gone. He slid ignominiously down the wall.

  Men burst into the room. They grabbed Knot roughly and hauled him away from the box. He was barely conscious, unable to resist.

  “We have secured the man,” the lobo in charge announced. “The destruct system has not been activated.”

  “Excellent,” Piebald replied. “Now, Finesse, you realize that you have no option except to cooperate with us.”

  “Is that true, Knot?” she called. “Do they have you?”

  Time for the lie. “No!” he exclaimed weakly. “I shorted the wires before they got me.”

  “Then we must move,” she said.

  There was a sound, followed by a kind of scream and thud, as of a slight body hitting the floor.

  “I’m sorry you did that,” Piebald said. “That weapon was set on automatic, and I fear it has killed you. Your friend was bluffing, of course. Bring him here, men.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lobo in charge of Knot’s detail said. They hauled Knot into the elevator and began the ascent.

  They had lasered Finesse! He should have known that a hardened criminal like Piebald would not be bluffed. What had he gained? Only her injury or death.

  The doors were now operative. Piebald had released them, since his own men were in charge again. In this spot engagement the lobo had outplayed the psi team. In a moment Knot was dragged before Piebald himself.

  The lobo was exactly as Finesse’s sendings had rendered him: a normally conformed man rendered grotesque by virtue of his striking coloration. But for that, he would have been handsome, for he was tall and robust with finely chiseled facial features.

  “So you are the anonymous one we have labored so hard to apprehend,” Piebald said. “I can see why you have been so formidable an opponent. You are, like me, a double mutant. A minimal physical distortion, and a major psi ability, together with considerable determination and natural aptitude for espionage. I think we should have liked each other, had we met in other circumstances. I, like you, possessed the pride of the flesh.”

  There seemed to be little hope, but Knot decided to try to stall by drawing the lobo out in conversation. Maybe Finesse was not badly hurt, and would recover consciousness. He had to hope! “What kind of psi were you?”

  “So good of you to inquire,” Piebald said with pseudo-affability, and now Knot was sure he was not being fooled. He would stall precisely the length of time he chose to, then get on with his business, regardless anything Knot might attempt. “I was an exploder. I could detonate virtually anything. I was not a pyro, able to set off only conventional explosives; I caused the nuclei of atoms to reverse their cohesion and fly apart. Nothing was safe from my power.”

  “I remember,” Knot said. “I didn’t realize you were that one. About ten years ago the news was all over the galaxy. The human detonator! They had to use a telepathic stunner to subdue you, and even so there was quite a blast.”

  “Yes. I retain an affinity for explosives, though the chemical ones to which I am now restricted are but a shadow of the psi ones of my former ability. You very nearly turned that against me, by shorting the detonator control circuit, as a worthy opponent should. I am exceedingly glad to have you in hand, though there would have been no way for you to have shorted my psi control, in my better days.” He frowned, and Knot knew he genuinely missed his old power.

  Some strength was returning as Knot lay still on the pallet. “What do you want with psis?” Knot demanded. “Why go to all the trouble of capturing and evoking them, when all you do is kill or lobotomize such people?”

  Piebald smiled. “That does appear counterproductive, doesn’t it? Yet there is a rationale. We are not idly abolishing psi-talents; we are performing experiments. Our actual quest is for a mechanism to reverse the effect of lobotomy. You can appreciate that should we succeed in this, we would have at our disposal a tremendous reserve of devastating psi talents, my own included. We might well be in a position to dominate the human galaxy.”

  “Yes,” Knot agreed. All that psi, in criminal minds. The lobo thought such psis would take over the government of the galaxy, but the more likely result would be the opposite, as psi fought psi, knowing no sane limits. What devastation would ensue!

  “We lobotomize under controlled conditions, then attempt surgically to reverse the operation, to restore the burned-out nerves while the loss is yet new. With minimal damage and immediate restoration, while the habit-patterns remain, we might achieve the key. But most important, we shall be free at last from the burden a cruel society unfairly placed on us. We shall be whole again! That is our grail, our ultimate objective. That unifies us, gives us courage to continue.”

  The man was serious. Knot still hated him, yet could see the point. If he himself should lose his psi, he would desperately want it back, just as the recent lobos Finesse had interviewed did. Still, this did not seem to account for the remarkable unity and discipline of the lobo movement. Success in restoring lobo-psi would mean only that men like Piebald had the ultimate power over lobos; any lobo wanting restoration would have to cater to Piebald, and become in effect a slave. Why strive so hard for that? Individual lobos should give up in disgust, start quarreling in the face of repeated failures, fighting each other, walking out. They were, after all, criminal types, and there was little honor among thieves. Instead they acted like truly responsible citizens, handling public services reliably, and organizing themselves efficiently. Again: how was this possible, in the absence of any psi ability among them?

  “I see you do not entirely accept this thesis,” Piebald said. “There is of course more to it than I have told you, but that is information we entrust only to committed lobos, and not to all of them. Perhaps the time will come, for you. As it happens, we now have t
wo new, potent psis to experiment with. We value major talents, and especially the highly motivated individuals; these seem far more likely to achieve the breakthrough for which we are striving. We had some lesser psis, now out of the picture, that were too weak to be good prospects. But Finesse, if she lives, is excellent; you are even better. You actually fought free of our solar power station and out of the chasm enclave—feats thought to be prohibitively difficult. You may be our most promising prospect to date.” He raised his voice. “Status of the female psi?”

  “Stable,” a man answered over the speaker system. “The beam grazed her head and burned her left collarbone; no internal damage.”

  “That’s a relief,” Piebald said. “It would have been a shame to lose her, after I struggled so hard to evoke and classify her psi.”

  The lights went out.

  “Who is responsible for this?” Piebald snapped. “We are in control of the situation; there is no need for—”

  “I did it, Mister Pie,” a child’s voice came. “I psied out the main illuminator circuit cable, and now I am using the console to release the poisonous snakes from the snake pit.”

  Klisty, the ten-year-old dowser girl Finesse had saved when her psi was evoked. That was the missing element Knot had not been quite able to recall. The child, loose, on the side of the psis! Klisty could have no love for the lobos, after her ordeal.

  “The child,” Piebald muttered as if in pain. “I forgot the child!”

  “You sure did, Mister Pie!” Klisty’s voice came. “Now all the snakes are crawling out. They’re nice and warm, very active, and sort of ornery. I’m up on a counter where they can’t reach me, I hope, but I think they’ll bite anyone walking around on the floor. So watch your step, Mister Lobo-Pie; we wouldn’t want you to get bit!” She sounded gleeful.