Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  Consequently we selected as our first product an item unobtainable anywhere else, and utterly necessary in the changed world: effective nose plugs. I suggested them; Krishnamurti designed them and the primitive assembly line on which they were first turned out, and Dalhousie directed us all in their construction. All of us, men and women, worked on the line. It took us several months to achieve success, and by that time we were our own best customers—our factory smelled most abominable. Which we had expected, and planned for: the whole concept of Fresh Start rested on the crucial fact that prevailing winds were virtually always from the north. On the rare occasions when the wind backed, the Nose formed a satisfactory natural barrier.

  Once we were ready to offer our plugs for sale, we began advertising and recruiting on a large scale. Word of our plans was circulated by word of mouth, mimeographed flyer and short-wave broadcast. The only person who responded by the onset of winter was Helen Phinney, but her arrival was providential, freeing us almost overnight from dependence on stinking gasoline-powered generators for power. She was then and is now Fresh-Start’s only resident world-class genius, a recognized expert on what were then called “alternative” power sources—the only ones Carlson had left us. She quite naturally became a part of the planning process, as well as a warm friend of us all. Within a short time the malodorous generators had been replaced by water power from the streams that cascade like copious tears from the “bridge” of the Nose, and ultimately by methane gas and wind power from a series of eggbeater-type windmills strung along the Nose itself. In recent years the generators have been put back on the line, largely for industrial use—but they no longer burn gasoline, nor does the single truck we have restored to service. Thanks to Phinney, they burn pure grain alcohol which we distill ourselves from field corn and rye, which works more efficiently than gasoline and produces only water and carbon dioxide as exhaust. (Pre-Exodus man could have used the same fuel in most of his internal combustion engines—but once Henry Ford made his choice, the industry he incidentally created tended of course to perpetuate itself.)

  This then was the Council of Fresh Start, assembled by fate: myself, a dreamer, racked with guilt and seeking a truly worthwhile penance, trying to salvage some of the world I’d helped ruin. Krishnamurti, utterly practical wizard at both requirements analysis and design engineering, translator of ideas into plans. Dalhousie, the ultimate foreman, gifted at reducing any project to its component parts and accomplishing them with minimum time and effort. Phinney, the energy provider, devoted to drawing free power from the natural processes of the universe. Our personalities blended as well as our skills, and by that second spring we were a unit: the Council. I would suggest a thing, Krishnamurti would design the black box, Dalhousie would build it and Phinney would throw power to it. We fit. Together we felt useful again, more than scavenging survivors.

  No other recruits arrived during the winter, which like the one before was unusually harsh for that part of the world (perhaps owing to the sudden drastic decline in the worldwide production of waste heat), but by spring volunteers began arriving in droves. We got all kinds: scientists, technicians, students, mechanics, handymen, construction workers, factory hands, a random assortment of men seeking Civilized work. A colony of canvas tents grew in Northtown, in cleared areas we hoped would one day hold great dormitories. Our initial efforts that summer were aimed at providing water, power, and sewage systems for our growing community, and enlarging our nose-plug factory. A combination smithy-repair shop-motor pool grew of its own accord next to the factory in Southtown, and we began bartering repair work for food with local farmers to the east and northwest.

  By common consent, all food, tools, and other resources were shared equally by all members of the community, with the single exception of mad Gallipolis’s summer homes. We—the Council members—retained these homes, and have never been begrudged them by our followers (two of the homes were incomplete at the time of the Exodus, and remained so for another few years). That aside, all the inhabitants of Fresh Start stand or fall, eat or starve together. The Council’s authority as governing committee has never in all the ensuing years been either confirmed or seriously challenged. The nearly two hundred technicians who have by now assembled to our call continue to follow our advice because it works: because it gives their lives direction and meaning, because it makes their hard-won skills useful again, because it pays them well to do what they do best, and thought they might never do again.

  During that second summer we were frequently attacked by Muskies, invariably from the north, and suffered significant losses. For instance, Samuel Pegorski, the young hydraulic engineering major who with Phinney designed and perfected our plumbing and sewage systems, was cut down by the windriders before he lived to hear the first toilet flush in Northtown.

  But with the timely arrival of Philip Collaci, an ex-Marine and former police chief from Pennsylvania, our security problems disappeared. A preternaturally effective fighting man, Collaci undertook to recruit, organize and train the Guard, comprising enough armed men to keep the northern perimeter of Fresh Start patrolled at all times. At first, these Guards did no more than sound an alarm if they smelled Muskies coming across the lake, whereupon all hands made for the nearest shelter and tried to blank their minds to the semitelepathic creatures.

  But Collaci was not satisfied. He wanted an offensive weapon—or, failing that, a defense better than flight. He told me as much several times, and finally I put aside administrative worries and went to work on the problem from a biochemical standpoint.

  It seemed to me that extreme heat should work, but the problem was to devise a delivery system. Early experiments with a salvaged flamethrower were unsatisfactory—the cone of fire tended to brush Muskies out of its path instead of consuming them. Collaci suggested a line of alcohol-burning jets along the north perimeter, ready to guard Fresh Start with a wall of flame, an idea which has since been implemented—but at the time we could not spare the corn or rye to make the alcohol to power the jets. Finally, weeks of research led to the successful development of “hot-shot”—ammunition which could be fired from any existing heavy-caliber weapon after its barrel had been replaced, that would ignite as it cleared the modified barrel and generate enormous heat as it flew, punching through any Musky it encountered and destroying it instantly. An early mixture of magnesium and perchlorate of potash has since given way to an even slower-burning mix of aluminum powder and potassium permanganate which will probably remain standard until the last Musky has been slain. (Long-range plans for long-range artillery shot will have to wait until we can find a good cheap source of cerium, zirconium or thorium—unlikely in the near future.) Hot-shot’s effective range approximates that of a man’s nose on a still day—good enough for personal combat. This turned out to be the single most important advance since the Exodus, not only for mankind, but for the fledgling community of Fresh Start.

  Because our only major misjudgment had been the climate of social opinion in which we expected to find ourselves. I said earlier that we feared people would scavenge from cities rather than buy from us, even in the face of terrible danger from the Muskies who prowled the urban skies. This turned out not to be the case.

  Mostly, people preferred to do without.

  Secure in our retreat, we had misjudged the zeitgeist, the mind of the common man. It was Collaci, fresh from over a year of wandering up and down the desolate eastern seaboard, who showed us our error. He made us realize that Lot was probably more eager to return to Gomorrah than the average human was to return to his cities and suburbs. Cities had been the scenes of the greatest racial trauma since the Flood, the places where friends and loved ones had died horribly and the skies had filled with Muskies. The Exodus and the subsequent weeks of horror were universally seen as the Hammer of God falling on the idea of city itself, and hardcore urbanites who might have debated the point were mostly too dead to do so. The back-to-nature movement, already in full swing at the moment when Car
lson dropped the flask, took on the stature and fervor of a Dionysiac religion.

  Fortunately, Collaci made us see in time that we would inevitably share in the superstition and hatred accorded to cities, become associated in the common mind with the evil-smelling steel-and-glass behemoth from which men had been so conclusively vomited. He made us realize something of the extent of the suspicion and intolerance we would incur—not ignored for our redundance, but loathed for our repugnance.

  At Collaci’s suggestion Krishnamurti enlisted the aid of some of the more substantial farmers in neighboring regions to the east, northeast, and northwest. He negotiated agreements by which farmers who supported us with food received preferential access to Musky-killing ammunition, equipment maintenance and, one day (he promised), commercial power. I could never have sold the idea myself—while I have always understood public relations well from the theoretical standpoint, I have never been very successful in interpersonal diplomacy—at least, with nontechnicals. The dour Krishnamurti might have seemed an even more unlikely choice—but his utter practicality convinced many a skeptical farmer where charm might have failed.

  Krishnamurti’s negotiations not only assured us a dependable supply of food (and incidentally, milled lumber), it had the invaluable secondary effect of gaining us psychological allies, non-Technos who were economically and emotionally committed to us.

  Work progressed rapidly once our recruiting efforts began to pay off, and by our fifth year the Fresh Start of today was visible, at least in skeleton form. We had cut interior roads to supplement the northern and southern loops left by gyppo loggers two decades before; three dormitories were up and a fourth a-building; our “General Store” was a growing commercial concern; a line of windmills was taking shape along the central ridge of the Nose; our sewage plant/methane converter was nearly completed; plans were underway to establish a hospital and to blast a tunnel through the Nose to link North- and Southtowns; the “Tool Shed,” the depot which housed irreplaceable equipment and tools, was nearly full; and Southtown was more malodorous than ever, with a large fuel distillery, a chemistry lab, and glass-blowing, match-making and weaving operations adjoining the hot-shot and nose-plug factories.

  Despite these outward signs of prosperity, we led a precarious existence—there was strong public sentiment in favor of burning us to the ground, at least among the surviving humans who remained landless nomads. To combat this we were running and distributing a small mimeographed newspaper, Got News, and maintaining radio station WFS (then and now the only one in the world). In addition, Krishnamurti and I made endless public relations trips for miles in every direction to explain our existence and purpose to groups and individuals.

  But there were many who had no land, no homes, no families, nothing but a vast heritage of bitterness. These were the precursors of today’s so-called Agro Party. Surviving where and as they could, socialized for an environment that no longer existed, they hated us for reminding them of the technological womb which had unforgivably thrust them out. They raided us, singly and in loosely organized groups, often with unreasonable, suicidal fury. From humanitarian concerns as much as from public relations considerations, I sharply restrained Guard Chief Collaci, whose own inclination was to shoot any saboteur he apprehended—wherever possible, they were captured and turned loose outside city limits. Collaci argued strongly for deterrent violence, but I was determined to show our neighbors that Fresh Start bore ill will to no man, and overruled him.

  In that fifth year, however, I was myself overruled.

  Collaci and his wife Karen (a tough, quiet, redheaded woman) had been given one of Gallipolis’s uncompleted cabins, the one farthest and most isolated from Northtown’s residential area. A volunteer house-raising had finished it off handsomely the previous spring. It was either bad judgment or ignorance that brought the seven-man raiding party past the Collaci home on their way to blow up the Tool Shed. But it was unquestionably bad judgment that made them kidnap Karen Collaci when they blundered across her in the forest. She was diabetic, and they had no insulin.

  Collaci left his duties without authorization and pursued them, found her body within a few days. He tracked the seven guerillas over a period of a week. Although they had split up and fled in different directions, those seven days sufficed him. He exacted from them penalties which cannot be repeated here, left each nailed to a tree, and upon his return to Fresh Start slept for three consecutive days.

  Collaci’s understandably impulsive action seems in the light of history to have been more correct than my own policy of tolerance. At any rate, we have never been raided since.

  With the advent of Dr. Michael Gowan, a former professor of psychology from Stony Brook who undertook to create and administrate an educational system, all the necessary seeds had, to my mind, been planted. Barring catastrophe, technological man now could and would survive. Someday, perhaps, he might rebuild what had been destroyed.

  And then, one day in 1999, I interviewed and “hired” a new arrival named Jordan Washington…

  Chapter Nine

  From the Journal of Isham Stone

  Breakfast had been ominously superb. After four days of foodtabs, it could hardly have helped it. One of the nice things about eating real food indoors is that the aromas remain, lingering on the palate long after the last bite has been consumed. The other comfort of home I really appreciated was having been allowed to bathe. Our group had spread out considerably in the last twenty miles or so, and not from fear of attack. Gee, it’s great to be back.

  The room was one I knew well, although I hadn’t seen it for years. It was large and comfortably furnished. Three walls were stacked floor to ceiling with a mighty collection of books that spilled over into a series of standup library shelves on the opposite end of the room. Escher and Frazetta prints lined what free wall-space there was, and there was not an uncomfortable chair in the room. From the huge curtained picture window on my right, dawn splashed the long oak table at which I sat, with the remains of my breakfast scattered before me.

  I had spent a good many hours of my life sitting at that table, often alone with a book, as often with the owner of books, table and room: Dr. Michael Gowan, Fresh Start’s Director of Education. The room held his spoor, and I wondered where he was, now that his home had been picked for V.I.P. prison.

  Collaci watched in impassive silence while I ate, ate in silence while I watched. Since that one burst of loquaciousness after the Musky attack three days before, I hadn’t been able to get a rise out of him. He didn’t seem to regret having explained the facts of life to me—but his interest in further conversation was negligible. I wondered if he had opened up that night from a sense of obligation, payment of a debt of honor—Teach’ hates to lose men under his command. The notion left me feeling cheapened, as if he’d left fifty dollars on the bed on his way out.

  The two armed Guards also watched me in silence, as they had since we arrived in the middle of the night, and there was never the faintest chance of suckering anyone into the line of fire. I had dozed off in the uncanny stillness before dawn, but I’m certain no one else gave sleep a thought. Four days and three nights of good behavior hadn’t earned me so much as an inch of slack, and if I wanted to get a high-velocity slug through my head, all I had to do was look clever when I buttered my toast. Collaci might have been sneakingly grateful for my pacifist powwow with the Sirocco Brothers, but his hired guns appeared to lack the imagination. If anything, their fear-hate had smelled stronger than ever lately. They had seen me commune somehow with things that mankind had sensed, feared, and loathed for centuries, and the happy outcome was irrelevant. If he’s on our side went one grumble I had overheard on the trek home whyn’t he line them Muskies up where we c’d pick ’em off?

  Of course, they were by no means an accurate reflection of the kinds of minds I’d have to deal with when the Council convened, but they were a depressing preview of the sort of grass-roots reaction I could expect. It soured the maple syr
up right on the pancakes.

  All that silence got oppressive, so I got up and heated up Dr. Mike’s radio (which he still calls a “tuner,” even though the useless tuning knob has long since been removed for salvage). But it didn’t help much. Dan O’Connor, who replaced me at the board when I split for New York, had become just as rotten a DJ as I’d known he would. His voice was a thin monotone over the AR-4s, and he had apparently decided on a morning program of Latin music. Worst, he forgot to change the selector when he shifted from disc to tape, and let a good twenty seconds of dead air go out before he noticed the absence of signal.

  I switched off in disgust, sat down again, and watched Collaci gulp the remains of his coffee, which unlike my own was still hot. Mine had been given to me with too much milk, too cool to seriously discommode anyone if I happened to spill it in their eyes. It’s those little ego-boosts that keep you going.

  “Hey Teach’,” I asked him cheerily, “can I call you for a witness?” I wanted to needle him, to break through that impenetrable cool and wrest from him a genuine emotion, any emotion at all. Fat chance.

  “Son,” he said, looking me in the eye, “you can call Wendell Carlson for a witness. You can call Marie Antoinette, or the Spirit of Christmas Past. No one’ll stop you.”

  I nodded. “It is expedient that one man should etcetera.”

  He nodded right back at me. There was just enough expression on his face to half-fill a gnat’s pocket. If Teach’ had any feelings at all, they were so well shielded a telepath might have missed them. I felt a surge of anger, and sat on it fast. Who’s needling who? I asked myself. Keep your cool, my man.

  Myself replied that it made no slightest bit of difference whether I was calm in the next few hours or not—it would have made precious little difference if I’d been unconscious, or absent. The script’s conclusion was written; this was only the performance, and to a closed house at that.