Koontz, Dean - Time Thieves

by Time Thieves(Lit)

  —and blazed and ashed, smoked and dissolved, under a bolt of psychic energy which he delivered to it.

  The quasi-sentient wire circuits melted, becoming nothing more than glimmering slag. The liquid, sealed core of the manufactured mind cracked open and evaporated.

  Pete pushed away from the wall and got to his feet. He turned to the small window in the door and surveyed the kitchen. The robot lay still by the kitchen table.

  He opened the door, entered the kitchen, closed the door gently, and listened to the stillness of the house.

  He heard footsteps. A second robot, apparently the one which had been watching the side lawn from the dining room windows, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, looking just the slightest bit surprised.

  Pete sought its white, spherical mental analogue, cracked it open like an eggshell and snuffed it out.

  It fell with a loud clatter and bounced twice without even a whimper of pain. Its face, from its mouth to its left eye, was melted, the features run together like wax.

  He had no more time for observation after he looked away from that ruined countenance, for he saw a third mechanical in the doorway. It was probably the one he had heard descending the stairs moments ago, and it held the amber, glasslike weapon.

  He twisted sideways as the first burst of silver darts whisked past him and chewed up the plaster. They made a humming sound as they quivered, like a dozen one-, pronged tuning forks. The plaster seemed just the slightest bit damp where they had penetrated it.

  He fell to the floor as the robot fired a second burst. The spines hissed past him, over his head. Had he been standing, they would have caught him in the chest and neck.

  He reached out, searching for the featureless, round mechanical pseudo-mind and the thought filament that would be trailing out behind it.

  "Please, please, please—" the robot chanted.

  Pete laughed aloud as he found the thing's mental analogue. He stabbed deep into it with a long, curved, imaginary knife, the edge of which he imagined to be serrated. The skin of the sphere split; air hissed out. It burst into a cold, white flame, ashed and dissolved, ceasing to be a thinking unit.

  The mechanical man sighed once and fell onto the table, bounced from it and struck the floor, hard.

  He laughed again. This was what it was like to come back from the brink of doubt, anxiety, to come from what you thought were the borderlands of insanity to a complete mastery of the world and all in it. He was exhilarated.

  He directed a thought to Della: "There's only one more of them. I'll have you free in a minute."

  "Be careful."

  "Yes."

  He entered the living room and looked up the steps.

  "No!" her thoughts screamed.

  "What?"

  He searched through the chaos of her thoughts and could not find the exact source of her fear. All that swirled there were images of him, of his corpses, dead and cold and gone from her forever. And roiling over the corpse were roaches, centipedes, snakes . . .

  "Think clearly!"

  She seemed to calm herself.

  "He went out the front door," she thought.

  "Who?"

  "That last of them. I thought you knew!"

  As the full impact of what she said reached him, he swung about, facing the darkness of the dining room. Just then, the fourth and last of the inhuman hunters appeared there. He was holding a second amber pistol.

  Pete threw himself at the thing.

  It fired, missed, and backstepped away from him, calling his name over and over again and urging him to cooperate.

  He rolled and struck the robot's feet, sending it tumbling backwards. It struck its head on the corner of the dining room table, sloughing off a few inches of the malleable plastic flesh. But that was all that it did. The thing did not seem either hurt or dazed. It grappled with him, bringing its superhuman resources into the fight.

  The amber weapon flew free of the robot's fingers, clattered against the hutch, spun around once on the carpet and was still.

  They rolled; the mechanical man had the top. He weighed so much that he might have cracked Pete's hips if he had wanted to do so. Instead, he leaned forward, holding the man beneath him, and clamped one hand over Pete's mouth and nose.

  He smiled, waiting.

  Pete could barely struggle against the heavy machine. He sucked desperately for breath, and he felt the first tingling of suffocation begin in his lungs.

  "Painless, really," the mechanical said in the new-caster's voice.

  As dizziness ballooned, he began to feel the thoughts of those nearby pouring across the threshold of his consciousness.

  He was innundated by Della's almost mindless fear as she watched him being strangled to death.

  It was her fear—and the ensuing rage he felt towards the eight-fingered alien for generating that fear—which drove him up from the brown shadows that had begun to blanket him. He blinked his eyes and looked into the robot's simple smile. He obeyed instinct this time and bit the robot's palm. He caused the machine no pain, but he managed to chew away most of the plastic flesh and gain breathing space. The steel would not mold to his contours and could not seal the air out effectively enough.

  Strength returned with the breath he took, enough strength to let him buck hard, driving upwards. He tilted the mechanical man and slammed it sideways, rolling out from underneath it.

  The room spun as he scrambled to his feet.

  Della projected a scream. He sealed it out, along with the other thoughts he was receiving and didn't want.

  When he turned, he saw that the robot had gotten to the amber pistol and held it once more. Even as this registered, he saw the darts spinning at him. He felt them prick his neck and cheek.

  He was surrounded by yellow as he lapsed into unconsciousness.

  XVII

  He woke, feeling empty. Strangely, he felt no pain, not even the slight uneasiness of a cramped muscle or a headache. It was just this hollow feeling, as if he had been used, taken and directed and run through his steps like some sophisticated puppet.

  There was intense darkness on all sides of him, so deep and unremitting that, for a moment, he thought that he might be blind. When he looked down at himself, however, he knew his eyes were functioning. He could see his bare chest. By turning his head, he could see the white dais on which he lay.

  He tried to rise up.

  He could not.

  He called out.

  His mouth spoke silence.

  He stopped struggling and tried to remember how he had gotten here, and where "here" was. In time, he could recall every detail of his last waking moments. The return of his memory did nothing to quiet his nerves.

  "Della?"

  Instantly, the alien being was there, pressing down on him with its telepathic powers. He sensed a relentless enemy that would not quit, ever.

  "Where is Della?" he thought.

  "She is safe."

  "I want to see her."

  "Later."

  "Now!"

  "You are in no position to argue or to bargain, Mr. Mullion," the creature said. "You were a match for one of us, working through the robotic mind constructions. But here, in the ship, we are all cooperating to hold your powers in check. I wish you to understand this and to cease your opposition. Cooperate. You will not be harmed. Neither will your wife, who is presently sedated and undergoing mind-scouring."

  "Mind-scouring?" The sound of it was ominous.

  "We must remove all traces of our presence from her memory. When she wakes up, she will not remember the robots nor anything you might have told her telepathically."

  "And the same for me?"

  "More for you."

  "Death?" It was projected in blacks, with more fear than he would have liked to let them see.

  "No, no!" the alien assured him. "You have misunderstood our motives, from the beginning."

  "I was shot."

  "Only with narcotic darts, Mr. Mullion."

&n
bsp; He directed a telepathic bolt of energy at the center of the alien mind. At the same time, he gritted his teeth and wrenched every muscle in his body, trying to sit up. If he could only sit up, all would be fine. From there, he would gain his feet, find Della, and escape this place.

  The alien fielded the psychic lance and plummeted Pete into quiet sleep where, this time, there were no dreams.

  "Shall we cooperate this time?" the newscaster's thoughts asked.

  He said nothing.

  "You see, four of us can handle you. There is no possibility of resistance. And, I must stress yet again, there is no need for resistance." It seemed to sigh in exasperation. "We honestly have only your best interests in mind."

  "Where did you come from?" he asked. He closed his eyes, preferring not to stare at the intense blackness on all sides.

  "Our home world is of no significance to you. You could not place it, even if you were familiar with star charts—which you are not.'

  "I didn't mean that," he said. "What I meant was, why did you come into my life?'

  "Yes, of course, the creature said. "We owe you that much, at least. And, too, we will need your cooperation, later. I am certain you will give that more freely when you can conceive of the background to the drama of these past few weeks.'

  He waited. He sensed some sort of consultation on the telepathic channels, beyond reach, shielded.

  "We never intended to have direct contact with an intelligent creature," the alien said, returning to their conversation as if they had never broken it off. "We chose the mountainside for a soft landing in this scout vessel because it was remote, yet near subjects for study. It was necessary to settle on the paved highway long enough for our engineers to run an analysis of the earthen bank on the other side of the road. That analysis would have taken three minutes. In five minutes, we would have meshed the molecules of our ship with those of the earth and would have traveled into the mountainside far enough to find a cavern in which the scout ship could reside for the duration of our studies here."

  He was beginning to see what had happened.

  "That's correct," the alien said, receiving his thoughts on the matter. "You rounded the curve in the road and struck the side of the ship. Your car went out of control, over the edge of the roadway, down the mountainside. Fortunately, it did not catch fire. Though it was too early in the morning for the noise to attract anyone, someone might have seen the flames, no matter if they were a mile or two away."

  "Dead?"

  "Yes, you were dead."

  Impossibly, the hollowness within him deepened.

  "But death does not have to be a permanent condition —not when you have politin medical technology on your side.'

  "That is what you call yourselves?" he asked.

  "Politins. It doesn't translate."

  "And you put Humpty Dumpty back together again, is that it?"

  "I read the associations with that allusion, but I cannot quite grasp the import."

  "Skip it. You made me live again, right?"

  "Your body was no problem," the politin said. "That required but a day's study and another day with the ship's special robotic surgeons. It was your mind that caused us trouble."

  "With the body, we have only a one-dimentional puzzle. This is the digestive system, this the respiratory, this organ leads to this one, does this for that, produces this hormone or enzyme which accomplishes this duty or ' that, and so forth. But with the mind, the problem becomes four dimensional, with width and breadth and depth and time all considered. Too, though the brain is organic and easily studied, it does not actually tell us much about the mind it engenders. We did the very best we could and sent you back, with a robotic observer to tail you for a few days to see what you functioned like in your everyday life."

  "The car?"

  "That required far more time to rebuild, for we knew we dared not miss a detail. We understood, from you, how many of your kind are—what you would call enthusiasts over automobiles. When we had both you and the car functioning and looking right, we sent you home and released your mind as you entered your garage."

  "And then the problems started."

  "Yes."

  "With numbers. I couldn't make change or remember how many bags of popcorn to buy at the theater. Then it was accelerated into a time-space incomprehension, and I passed out on the stairs, looking for my office downtown."

  "Actually, it began before that," the newscaster said. "We should have given you a detailed false memory, so detailed that it could not be found false. But, in your mind, we found the concept 'amnesia,' along with all the amnesiac folklore you had picked up, and we decided to take the easier way out by letting you think you'd been a victim of just such an attack. To cement that we finished painting your cabin living room."

  "And Della accidentally discovered what you'd done."

  "Yes, because we overlooked placing any corroborative detail to substantiate the amnesia until it was almost too late."

  "Question."

  "Ask it."

  "How did you remove me from the office building downtown? I presume you brought me back here, for more corrective surgery."

  "You spent two days in surgery and one in testing the second time. When you passed out on the stairwell, we had an observer closeby. Our robots are capable of teleportation, or what you would call that, but only when they have the coordinates of their destination. They can teleport to this ship or the mother ship, but nowhere else until it has been mapped and pointed. They can take a passenger with them. This one brought you here."

  "And this time you gave me a false set of memories, the Emerald Leaf Motel and everything."

  "But we underestimated your species. It is a common fault every time we encounter a new galactic race. We did not do a good enough job with the false memories. We approached the night clerk and brought him here, implanted coinciding data in his mind and returned him to his post. We should have done the same with the maid. We thought, erroneously, that the clerk was responsible for bed changes. Your society breeds different institutions and circumstances than does ours."

  "And I caught sight of your robot observer there."

  "Only because, already, your mind was growing more observant, more careful of detail. We did not realize what we had done, how we had opened new regions of your brain and given you new talents. The first time, we under-performed; the second, we made you better than you had been before the accident."

  Pete said, "What about that house where it was necessary for you to put everyone to sleep, where you had to break down two doors?"

  "Regrettable. But we simply erased the proper memories from their minds. We had learned enough from you to manage that without complications, though we didn't like tampering more than we had to. The doors, of course, were a different matter altogether. We knew they had to be perfectly rebuilt. It required four times as long as reconstruction of their memories did."

  "And now what?"

  "We would like to try another operation on your brain. We have been doing much analysis in the last few days; we feel we know where we went wrong, and we don't think we'll do anything wrong this time."

  "Why operate?"

  "That should be obvious."

  "It isn't."

  "But it is. You know what I mean. You are only playing games with me now."

  "Tell me anyway."

  "We will restore you to the human being you were before the accident, without deficiencies."

  "And without psionic abilities, either."

  "Yes."

  "I don't like that idea."

  "You have no choice, after all. There are four of us. We will make the change with or without your cooperation."

  He decided to try a more diplomatic tact. If argument would not get him what he wanted, perhaps begging would. For this prize, he did not mind humbling himself.

  "But I can cope with the telepathic talent I have. It will enrich my life. It's no detriment to me or mine. I can't see why I shouldn't be per
mitted it. You owe me something for all this trouble, you know."

  "We owe you life. And we will give it to you. Beyond that, we cannot be expected to provide anything."

  "Let me see you."

  In the void, the eyeless face appeared.

  "A projection? You aren't really here, are you?"

  "You are seeing me on a viewscreen. On several view-screens."

  Hands appeared as well, eight-fingered and still.

  "Look, what harm will it do to let me keep my abilities?"

  "You will become a loner, a man without friends, too knowing and eventually unhappy with your lot."

  "Let me struggle with that," he said.

  "We choose not to."

  "There's more. Tell me."

  "You have the ability to unlock telepathic talents in others of your kind. Eventually, you'll learn how to use it."

  "What's wrong with that? I won't use it against people. You know me well enough to know I won't try to make a fortune or to persuade anyone to do what they don't want to do."

  "You are an honest and gentle member of your species," the alien acknowledged.

  "Well, then?"

  "But that isn't what concerns us, Mr. Mullion. If you began to open the minds of others, the process would explode geometrically, each new telepath liberating the minds of friends and acquaintances, each of those friends liberating the minds of their friends."

  "It couldn't hurt our race."

  "No, but maybe it could hurt others. Each race must evolve, slowly, into telepathy. At that point, as all men's minds are opened, the state of society changes. Peace flowers, for war is impossible, subterfuge without hope. The race stops bickering and begins, slowly, to build a racial unity that lets it grow faster than it ever has before. A hundred years after worldwide telepathic liberation, your people would have starships. And, because they haven't developed their telepathic abilities naturally, they would be like barbarians among other civilized creatures who frequent the starways."

  "We're too much like animals to be allowed to play with the big boys," Pete said.

  "We do not wish to insult. We are merely stating a truth."

  "Naturally."