"Bitterness is unnecessary."
"Excuse me," he said, bitterly.
"I am sorry you feel cheated."
"If I promise not to open another mind, no one else—"
"We cannot trust in promises."
"But-"
The eyeless face disappeared and was replaced by blackness, leaving only the disembodied hands which, a moment later, also vanished.
"Whether or not you cooperate," the alien said, "the operation must now begin."
XVIII
He could feel the tension as they summoned their four alien consciousnesses into a single strike force, coalescing the energy that their quartet of minds possessed, directing it with precision, zeroing in on him where he lay pinned to the dais.
They had said, early in the conversation, just after he had awakened, that they would like his help for what they wished to do to him. Perhaps that indicated some doubt on their part. Did they think that he had grown so psionically powerful that even the four of them would be hard put to match him move for move? Had their bumbling surgical machines made him even more telepathically gifted than they?
Come on, he thought. Try me. Now.
And they struck.
They launched a cunningly strategic attack, not at all the sort of thing he had been preparing himself for. He had sought to protect himself from the insistent pressure he had sensed before. He strengthened those walls against such an eventuality, tensing himself to patch the ephemeral but desperately important partitions if the slightest crack should appear. And then they came to him with subtle weapons far more dangerous than force might have been.
They used Della against him.
They did not directly involve her, however. They were not a violent race, he supposed. They would never have considered harming her or torturing her either mentally or physically in order to break him. But they used her fears and images of her, designed to peel away his defenses and to leave the meat of him exposed for the bite of their more potent teeth.
A hundred thousand centipedes descended from the sky, like rain drope, fled across the dome protecting his mind, skittered along the walls as if hunting a damp crevice, a nook in which to draw up their spindly legs and devour their obscene foods. They copulated on the walls, writhing, their legs vibrating furiously, produced children in the passage of a minute. Generation by generation, their numbers grew geometrically until millions of them blackened the walls of his mind, so many that their movement produced an audible roar, like a small waterfall. They shifted, darted here and there, climbed over one another, died and were born, cannibalized each other, a billion legs kicking and trembling like the thinnest of rare feathers, two hundred thousand greasy, flicking antennae searching out food/shelter/mates/warmth/ dampness. . . .
Pete knew where the vision had originated, but he could not see any purpose to it. This was Della's dread, not his. It might make her a shivering, helpless mad-woman, but it would not bother him.
And then Della appeared. She was perched upon the top of his mental ramparts, a solitary figure against the sky, kicking frantically at the tiny insects that beat a path towards her. Every single centipede had set out up the wall, drawn toward her as if she were something too delicious to be ignored, as if she were the quantity which two hundred thousand antennae all sought.
"Della," he said.
He called to her even though he knew that he was only seeing a projected image, a fluff, the fantasy of the alien minds as they played upon his own consciousness.
Her terror was so real, her face a mask of death expectancy, her skin white and clammy, that he wanted to open his walls and take her in and caress her.
He saw centipedes stream across her feet.
They started up her long, lovely legs, beneath her dress, like cancerous spoors against her prettiness.
She screamed.
"Della!"
She could not hear him. She only had ears for the teeming insects that converged on her.
The sky darkened; more of them fell from it, raining over her as the hordes below swarmed upon her.
She fell.
She was soon covered by them. She batted at them with her open hands, tore them away from her mouth where they tried to scramble through her lips. She tore at her hair to be rid of them, slapped her thighs and breasts and legs and face, mashing them in her fingers
He refused to open up, making himself remember that this was no more than an illusion, no matter how real it seemed. Then the second phase of the attack came.
XIX
He was plunged into a chiaroscuro chaos, into acidic pits of fear, into caverns of unbearable terror where strange and unhuman shapes moved in the darkness and cried out in agony as he swept by them. He was confronted with open graves and the rotting corpses that they contained. Things rose out of the gray earth and walked like men but looked like death with maggots eating their flesh even as they arose. He could sense no up or down, no form to the void as one horrendous vision followed close after another. They had reconstructed the deepest parts of Della's id, the places where nightmares went on all day and insanity was never farther than a hand's reach. Into this hurricane of dreads, they propelled him, like a man stumbling through the crafty corridors of a carnival fun house, bumbling into things that, for a moment, made him leap and want to vomit and then made him want to laugh if only to break the tension that knotted his cuscles and made his mouth dry and stale.
And all the while, they kept him aware of the fact that these were his wife's fears, many unconscious, the hell she lived with every day of her life. And, slowly, they intimated that they would crack open her psychological defense mechanisms and let her see what evil and terror lived within her, let her see the animal part of herself that would drive her mad.
"You wouldn't do it," he said to them, fighting to keep his defenses intact.
"We would."
"But you don't believe in causing pain. Mental pain is as bad as physical."
"We would do it."
"If you make her face all that stuff, all those interior things she doesn't even know are part of her, she's going to go mad. It can't be faced, not all at once, by anyone.
"Haven't you looked into yourself?" they asked.
"Little. It will take a long time to know me."
"We will do it." Their response had begun to sound like some sort of litany. "Because we can return her to sanity. We can let her suffer, to bring you into line, then repair her. We believe, however, that you will acceed to our wishes rather than let her undergo even temporary madness."
"I'll cooperate," he said at last.
"Break down your walls. Let us into you, if you are sincere."
"Here," he said. He peeled away the first layer of his mental defenses, felt them pressure him.
"And here," he said, stripping himself of yet another layer of psionic insulation.
"And another," he said.
"This is most wise, Mr. Mullion," the newscaster said.
"Don't touch her."
"Of course not, Mr. Mullion."
He stripped away more of his wall, bringing himself closer to the utter helplessness that they desired. Around him, the four politin minds fragmented out of the super-entity they had formed. Their psionic talents were held in four individual bodies now, geometrically weaker. They considered him far less of a threat now.
The moment they had disengaged their gestalt, he lashed out. He put forth all the psionic energy he could generate, meanwhile throwing up his mental shield which he had half destroyed while lulling them into a false security.
One screamed, flamed and winked out of existence as he seared through its mental core and burned away everything that made it an individual. The body still lived, flopping on the floor of the command room like a fish thrown up on the beach during high tide.
"What are you doing?" they demanded of him. A pacifistic race, so concerned with intelligent life that they would spend weeks repairing one damaged earthling, they could not conceive of
the total destruction of a living, thinking organism when there was no intention of later restoration. And he was never going to restore them. He was going to leave them very, very dead.
They knew that and rebelled from it.
And even in this last moment, they could not gather themselves for a lethal retaliation. He was a sentient being. They could never kill him, never knowingly destroy him for all time, without a hope of rebuilding him as he had been.
He bored into a second alien consciousness, struck deep, shattered it and sent the blazing fragments into the void. The creature did not even have time to cry out for a last minute reprieve from the eternal sentence.
"Stop! Stop!"
The third one exploded, ashed and was gone as if he had never existed.
The fourth cowered, begging for mercy.
"I can't leave you," he thought.
"Why?" it asked.
"You mentioned a mother ship. You may already have called for aid."
"We haven't."
"I can't believe you."
"We do not lie!" it said, still capable of anger.
"But we do," Pete said.
"It was another of our miscalculations. We had insufficient time to study you. But if I should promise you freedom, and that promise is genuine, why kill me?"
"Because you haven't promised Della freedom. And I will want to liberate her mind as well."
"We will let the two of you have telepathic abilities."
"And if we wish to widen the mental ranges of friends?"
"You ask too much!"
"And you can't promise enough."
"You will kill me as you killed the others." The poli-tin's mental voice was permeated with disbelief, a lack of understanding.
"Yes."
"But why?"
"You are a threat to the things I want."
"But how?" it asked. "They cannot restore us. You will not restore us. You are condemning us to eternal, extinction, to an end of life and all the joys it contains. You are giving us no room for reconsideration. You are' behaving brutally, savagely, coldly. How can you live; with yourself; how can you justify what you do?" •;
"Della," he said.
"I do not understand." i
"Love," he said. '
"You kill for love?"
"I wouldn't have believed it myself, a month ago. A week ago. Even yesterday."
"You can't kill for love," the politin argued. He could feel the surge of hope it contained, and he felt sorry that its hope was founded on such swampy ground.
"You can do anything for love," he said.
"Limits restrict all—"
"For love, there are no limits. Men and women have killed for it, died for it, debased themselves for it. And, they have been acting out their plays for half-love, strangled, untelepathic love. But once I have killed you and have insured my freedom, I'll never have to kill for • love again. I will only have to liberate the minds of* others."
The alien's hopes had died. "Still—" it began.
"Death, even eternal death, is not the worst thing a sentient being can suffer," Pete said.
"What else?"
"Loneliness."
"I do not understand the word."
"I know."
"Will you—explain it?"
The politin was only trying to postpone the moment of its final death, but he permitted it extra seconds while he explained the word.
"You cannot understand the word easily," he said. "You come from a culture which has been telepathic for thousands of years. No one of you need ever crave companionship or affection and be unable to obtain it. Each of you needs only to drop your voluntary veil of privacy and accept the conscious emanations of those around you, absorb a free-flowing love open to everyone. When a male meets a female of your species, you play no games. You meet, read minds and know. If you want each other, there is no comedy or tragedy of manners to be played out, as with us. If you are alone at night and want someone of similar interests to talk to, you only have to open your mind and seek others who are seeking. You are not blind, cold creatures hunting warmth and bypassing it by inches more often than you find it."
"And your people are—sealed off from each other."
"More than sealed off. In different worlds, side-by-side but farther apart than one star from another."
It could not understand loneliness and never would. The politin changed its tact. "How will you escape the ship?"
"We will find our way."
"It is buried deep inside the mountain."
"In a cavern," Pete corrected. "I learned that earlier. You could juggle molecules to move it through solid earth, but you couldn't suspend it in other matter indefinitely. We'll get from the ship into the cavern, find other caves that lead to the surface. The mountain has many limestone sinkholes in its depressions. We'll probably go out through one."
"But you-"
He struck out, suddenly weary, and ended the politin's existence.
XX
For Della, for love.
He stood above her in another room of the politin scout ship. She was asleep, and she was dreaming. Now and then, the corners of her sensuous mouth turned up in some secret smile that delighted him.
The events of the last few weeks had been predetermined by his love for Della. He had bought the cabin and had been working on it, in the first place, because she liked bow-and-arrow hunting more than he did and had hinted at the fun their own cabin would be. When he had rounded Jagger's Curve, going to that cabin, and had been killed in his plunge down the mountainside, the affair could have ended no way but this. His love for her had always narrowed his prerogatives, had funneled him to this moment and to this possible future that had now become the probable one. He had not understood this fundamental condition of his life until just moments ago, when they had threatened to drive her temporarily mad and when it looked as if he would lose his telepathic key to her inner mind. But then he had understood, and he had acted with a vengeance.
When he returned from his first period of amnesia, it was his love for her which had made him inquisitive about his stolen days. On his second return, after the follow-up period of amnesia, it had been his need to reassure her and to erase the possibility of infidelity from her mind which had driven him back to examine his memories of the Emerald Leaf Motel. He had loved her, and he had gone back to the house to rescue her from the mechanical men when she had been a captive there. He had loved her, and he had refused to surrender the telepathic powers which he could use to make her life more full. He had loved her, and he had killed for her. Four times.
He looked into his own mind and found no regret. He would murder four times again, if necessary, to preserve their chance at complete love through telepathic communion. A hundred times, a thousand. Loneliness was the key word and his weapon. When he had destroyed the quartet of politin minds, he had not merely struck them down with unformed bolts of psychic energy. He had been afraid that alone would not be equal to the task. He had, instead, reached into the most private regions of his own soul, had dredged up the loneliness of youth, the loneliness he had known before he had met Della, and he had struck them with that. They could never have fielded such a pitch. It was gunshot directed at a primitive savage who could never understand the source of the thing which had done him in. But, if there were no regret now, it would come later. A great deal of it. And he would need Della's deepest understanding to help himself weather it.
In time, man would be as the politin were now. He would forget his loneliness and bask in telepathic unity with his fellows. His only fear would be death, the last loneliness there was. And then he would mourn these four alien deaths.
And will I be the hero then? Pete wondered. Or will I be the last villain?
The alien chamber felt terribly cold.
He reached into Della's mind.
He passed over the things she feared. In time, she would cease to fear them.
He touched, instead, on the things she loved.
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So many of them. . . .
He nestled in her love and spent long minutes there, being cleansed and made pure.
Sinless, he arose and ascended into her consciousness.
What did the stars matter? What did alien creatures mean to him? What care had he for spaceships and robots, computer surgeons—or half a hundred other phantasmagorical gadgets and staggering concepts? They were as chaff to grain compared to what he and Della meant together. There was more wonder, more staggering concepts in their telepathic love-to-come than in all the stars together.
At least, that would be the case for a hundred years or so, as the politin had warned. Maybe then, they would think about the stars. Meanwhile, they had inner space.
"I love you," he thought.
She still slept; she did not respond.
And so he woke her to begin.
Koontz, Dean - Time Thieves Page 9