by Fritz Leiber
For a moment the emotion he felt was not so much eagerness as fear.
“Package of Camdens,” Greer told the girl at the tobacco counter, a tiny bower of garish plastics in the vaulted immensity of the Steelton Terminals.
“Self-lighters?”
He shook his head. While she was getting them, he jerkily tried to analyze what it was that struck him as so peculiar in the behavior of the people around him. There was something set about their expressions, something tense about their movements. They were a little like the robot mannequins parading shimmering garments in the display front opposite. The hum of conversation wasn’t as loud as it should be. The amplified voice of the newscaster rang out too clearly. From the moment he’d landed, the atmosphere of apprehension had been as palpable as fog. Steelton was like a city awaiting attack.
Probably just a reflection of his own nervousness.
Impatiently he turned back toward the counter and caught the girl staring at him fixedly. He took the package from her hand. She smiled, nervously this time. As she was getting his change, she still watched him guardedly.
He lit a cigarette. He heard the newscaster say: “Tonight Police Director Marly assured a committee of Steelton citizens that it will only be a matter of time before Robert Carstairs is apprehended. ‘Every police officer is on the alert,’ said Marly. ‘Our nets are closing in. Robert Carstairs’ hours of liberty are numbered.’“
Suddenly Greer realized that the hum of conversation and the echoing tramp of footsteps had ceased almost altogether. The girl at the counter turned away to look at the huge tele-screen. That was what the rest of them were doing.
“We take this opportunity to repeat a previous statement of Police Director Marly,” continued the newscaster. “It is the duty of every citizen to aid in ridding Steelton of this menace. Robert Carstairs is dangerous. As the terrible tragedy at the Carstairs residence proved only too well, he displays a fiendish talent for ingratiating himself with his victims and subjecting them to his will power. If you see this man, instantly inform the police.”
Then Greer saw flashed on the tele-screen what was, in every detail and particular, a gigantic picture of himself.
What happened next seemed to Greer to happen in slow-motion. The girl turned around. Her mouth sucked in air for a scream.
But the scream never came. He exerted his power. He did not see her thoughts—he seldom could see thoughts. He merely exerted his power. She stood there, staring woodenly.
Ducking his head so that half his face was masked by hat brim, he walked away rapidly. He could hold her for perhaps a hundred feet. By that time—
A big man carrying a black suitcase looked at him sharply, then looked again. He dropped the suitcase. He turned on Greer, his hands coming up to grab.
But they never grabbed. Under Greer’s control, he picked up the suitcase and walked on.
Several people noticed the incident. They peered at Greer curiously. First two of them, then three, he had to bring under his control, as he saw that they recognized him as the man they had seen on the tele-screen. He didn’t know how many he could dominate, because he had never tried. Not more than four or five, he had the feeling.
From behind came a piercing scream, as the girl at the tobacco counter escaped from his influence.
The way everyone jumped at that scream gave him an idea. Distraction. There was a young man approaching in a gray coat and hat not unlike his own. Just as the number of people who recognized him was getting beyond his control, he caused the young man to break into a run, and sent three people after him yelling, “There he goes! There he goes!” Then he continued toward the exit.
He felt a profound thrill of satisfaction. It was good to have to use his power without having time to be afraid of it, to think, to weigh the consequences. He walked purposefully, eyes searching the crowd ahead for the tell-tale signs of recognition, exerting control when he saw them.
Here and there behind him men and women awoke with a jerk—to fear and to the disquieting realization that four or five seconds had vanished unaccountably. They had seen the archcriminal Robert Carstairs. They had been about to do something. Then he had suddenly vanished—as if life were a film and the film had jumped a couple of feet ahead. Had it been an hallucination? Or—what sort of being was this Robert Carstairs. There were stories—stories which the newscasters played down. Around their hearts twined the tendrils of an icy terror.
A surging agitation followed Greer through the crowd, like a wave that lapped at his heels but never quite caught up. He was constantly shifting control from one group of persons to another.
The young man in the gray coat and hat came to himself and began to make profuse, bewildered apologies to an elderly woman he had careened into. His pursuers stopped and stared around, as baffled as he. Individual communicators clicked an alert to the police and detectives stationed in the terminals, as an observer in the gallery sought to fathom the nature of the commotion.
Greer was nearing the exit. But the agitation was increasing, and more and more it was centering around him, closing in. Too many people were staring at him. The situation was getting beyond his control. If he had to hold off a dozen at once, he was done for. Five or six was the limit.
He changed his tactics—caused four men to form a cordon around him, shielding him from view. He had them walk briskly and assume important, official-looking expressions, so that people got out of their way.
There were two policemen at the exit, trim in blue and silver, suspicious-eyed. But as they came within range of Greer’s power, their expressions became first blank, then different. They opened the doors for him. He slipped away from his cordon. He kept control of the policemen, causing them to stand at the exit and block off any possible pursuit.
There was a sleek black monocab cruising past the Terminals. He summoned it to the curb. It gave to his weight as he sprang abroad. The gyro brought it smoothly back to even keel as it lunged ahead.
Under his control, the driver turned several corners at random, then headed for the rendezvous at Damon Place.
Since Steelton was a young metropolis, indirect street lighting was the rule. The result was ghostly, unreal—a shadowless city half materialized from the night. It seemed to Greer that there were unusually few people abroad. None of them loitered. Their taut apprehensiveness was more marked even than that of the crowd at the Terminals.
The monocab purred like a satiny cat. Greer felt himself slipping into a mood of black reaction. There was something fundamentally loathsome about using people like puppets. You didn’t know where to stop.
Was that what had happened to his twin? Had he yielded to the temptation to use his mutant power to his own aggrandizement, make people his pawns?
Greer’s mind veered away from the possibility. Much more likely, he told himself, that his twin had gotten into trouble by unwisely revealing his power. That was enough to make people hate you, fear you, fabricate hysterical accusations, lay all manner of crimes at your door. How else could you expect people to behave toward a mutant with the power of direct hypnotic control?
Yet why the change of name from Hallidane to Carstairs? Why—He fought the ugly suspicions that crowded up into his mind. Partly from unreasoning loyalty. Partly because he so ached for contact with his own kind, that he could not bear to think of anything standing between them. His brother’s attitudes must be like his own!
A police monocar droned past. Greer ducked his head, acutely aware that, whatever predicament his brother was in, he was in it, too. For the present, there were two Robert Carstairses in Steelton.
Of course, if he had to, he could prove his identity. Or could he? Steelton’s panic was of the hysterical, shoot-on-sight sort. And suppose he did prove that he was Robert Carstairs’ identical twin. Wouldn’t that only mean two monsters to be exterminated instead of one?
His brother must stand in desperate need of help. Now he could understand the last line of the radiogram. “If you come
, hurry.”
The monocab swung into a wealthy residential district. The houses drew back, screened themselves with trees. The diminished street lighting was a ghostly counterpart to the cold beams of the high-riding moon. At reduced speed the motor was almost silent. From somewhere far off Greer heard the wail of a siren mount and die away. The face of the driver was placid but very pale. Greer shuddered, although it was his own power which controlled the man. It was too much like traveling under the guidance of the undead.
Quietly, almost furtively, because the driver responded to Greer’s present mood, the monocab drew up in front of a yawning archway on which appeared, in glowing metal, the numerals “1532”.
Greer stepped out, looking around puzzledly. Something seemed definitely out of key. This was not the sort of neighborhood in which he had expected to meet his brother.
In response to his unspoken question, the driver turned. Moonlight blanched the last color from his features. He enunciated tonelessly, “Yes, I know this place. It is the Carstairs residence.”
At that instant Greer’s mind darkened with the cloudy telepathic warning that there were minds inimical to himself within his range of control.
From the archway, and from a similar archway across the street, narrow beams of white light struck him like dazzling spears. That such beams traced the course along which police bullets would follow, Greer knew. But the telepathic warning had given him the split second he needed. Before fingers could press triggers, the minds which the fingers obeyed were under his control.
Yet something whipped past his ear with a faint, high-pitched squeal. A gout of momentary incandescence blossomed from the pavement beyond him as an explosive bullet struck. From a roof perhaps a hundred yards away a lone searchbeam was seeking him out, inexorable determining the path of a second shot.
Once again, as at the station, it seemed to Greer that everything was going slow-motion except his thoughts. His mind reached out to overpower that of the police gunman. But, as he feared, the distance was too great. The lone searchbeam seemed to crawl as it swung in on him. Yet its crawl was airjet speed compared to anything he could get out of his muscles. The gunman would get at least two more shots before he could reach cover. Perhaps three. There was only one thing to do.
Almost before he realized it, the searchbeams of the police under his control swung away from him, scattered, reconverged on a high, tiny figure silhouetted against the massed black tubing of a sun-heater. As one, their guns spoke. The lone searchbeam careened wildly. There was a nerve-racking pause. Then the sickening hollow smack of a body hitting pavement.
A spasm of revulsion went through Greer. It was murder he had commanded. The man on the roof hadn’t had a chance.
Yet even as he fought that reaction of self-loathing, even as he strained to maintain control of the police, he realized that it was not alone the impulse of self-preservation which had motivated him.
There was a job to be done, a job that only he could do. There was a monster at large in Steelton, and Steelton must be ridded of that monster.
“Not only Steelton. The whole world.”
In one dizzy instant, his fears and suspicions crystallized. Only loyalty to his unknown brother, and an aching desire for the companionship of his own kind, could have blinded him to the obvious truth.
Why had his brother summoned him to Steelton, without even warning him of the deadly danger to which he would be exposed? For one reason, and one alone—so that Greer Canarvon would be killed. So that Steelton would think that Robert Carstairs had been killed. So that his twin would be free to exploit his power without suspicion—with more caution and subtlety, no doubt, but with infinitely greater danger to mankind.
It was not so much hate that filled Greer, as a cold and unswerving determination. Already he had made his plan. The police under his control were escorting him to their monocar.
His thoughts were coming with a machinelike rapidity. All Steelton was engaged in a man hunt. If his brother’s mind worked like his own, there was one very obvious place for his brother to be.
And if he were at that place, Greer knew a very simple way of getting at him.
Once again tattered clouds marched across the moon. Through lonely streets the monocar raced toward its destination, the siren wailing a challenge, like some night-thing. Greer sat between two policemen, and there were two more on the seat ahead. To all intents, he was their prisoner.
One of them was reciting a brief history of the Carstairs case. Only a certain lack of color in his voice indicated that he was under direct hypnotic control—unconscious, yet as obedient to Greer’s wordless commands as the man at the monocar controls.
“At first we only thought that an unusually clever pickpocket must be at work. Even at that time there had been a crop of odd suicides, but we didn’t connect them up until later. Some of the people who were robbed claimed that their minds had gone blank, usually while strolling down a busy street. They had come to themselves perhaps a half a block later and found their valuables missing. We supposed they’d day-dreamed and that the pickpocket had taken advantage of their abstraction. Later we had to change that opinion, for in two cases witnesses reported having seen the victim hand over his pocketbook to a young man, apparently of his own free will.
“About the same time, there had begun an inexplicable series of burglaries. Householders would go to answer the door chimes, their minds would blank out, later they would recover consciousness and discover that their homes had been ransacked. A newscaster got hold of that and started a wild story about a criminal who used a mysterious gas to render his victim helpless. The police doctors found no support for any such view.”
The monocab banked sharply around a corner. But the voice went on without a break, calmly.
“At first we thought the robberies and the other cases were fakes, done to collect insurance or perpetrate similar frauds. But there were too many of them, and the faking wasn’t good enough.
“Then a woman came to us with a story that the Carstairs girl had blurted out to her. The Carstairs are about the richest people in town. The Carstairs girl claimed that they were being victimized by a young man who had installed himself in their home and was passing himself off to visitors as a distant relative. He could control their minds, she said, cause them to lose consciousness and make them do anything he wanted them to. He had made very explicit threats as to what he would do if any one of them squealed to an outsider while not under his influence. They were all terrified of him. The Carstairs girl herself was pitiably frightened, but she just had to talk.
“At any rate, that was the story the woman told us. It was pretty wild, like a lot of groundless accusations we’d been getting. But we went to the Carstairs home to investigate, taking the woman along.
“The Carstairs girl denied the whole story. Said the woman had invented it. Yes, their cousin Robert was visiting with them, but he was a completely respectable young man. The accusations were absurd. And so on. We didn’t know at the time that Robert Carstairs must have been in the next room.
“She talked in a very calm and reasonable way—there wasn’t the slightest indication that she was hiding any fear. That was what was so convincing about it. It was our woman who got hysterical.
“But because we were at our wits’ end and not passing up anything, a detective was assigned to shadow Robert Carstairs.
“Two days later that detective carefully locked himself in a room and committed suicide.
“A real locked-room suicide, with a note in his own handwriting and everything else. No chance of fake. Still—the coincidence. Police Director Marly started some general inquiries about Robert Carstairs. Very quietly, of course, for the Carstairses had enough influence to stop an inquiry if they got wind of it—and if they were under his power that was presumably what they’d do.
“Gradually, adding one bit of information to another, we got at the truth. Friends of the Carstairs complained that the whole family was beco
ming moody. On some occasions, usually when Robert was present, they would be very pleasant—though there was something unfamiliar about their manner. At other times they would appear very miserable, as if haunted by some secret which they dared not divulge. Some of those same friends mentioned feeling acutely uncomfortable in Robert Carstairs’ presence. For some reason they could not define, they were afraid of him. One or two of them spoke of experiencing unaccountable mental lapses in the Carstairs home.
“A discharged servant told an ugly story which indicated that Robert Carstairs’ word was law in the household.
“We tried to find out his background, where he came from. We were up against a brick wall.
“Businessmen talked of how old Carstairs was changing the financial policies of his firm. Some of them thought that Robert Carstairs was somehow responsible for this.
“Meanwhile, the crime wave continued. More and more of the crimes seemed to be of a purely wanton sort, done to satisfy a whim or to display power, rather than for the sake of gain. You got the feeling that the criminal was amusing himself with his victims.
“Then a picture of the Carstairs attending a social function went out on the telecasts. One of the witnesses of an early pickpocket episode came to headquarters and identified Robert Carstairs as the young man to whom he had seen the victim hand over his valuables.
“That was all we’d been waiting for.
“Maybe Marly had a hunch about what might happen, for he sent half a dozen men to make the arrest.
“Well—he didn’t send enough. Inside the Carstairs home, something happened to their minds. They became insane—homicidally. Up to now, this has been kept out of the newscasts. They killed each other. At least, they were found dead by their own weapons.
“It was the same thing with the Carstairs family, only there the indications pointed at suicide.”