by Dean Koontz
When I got out of his head, he had dropped his pistol and had turned to the wall, where, screaming, spitting, on the verge of losing his sanity, he smashed his fists into unyielding, gray concrete. I clubbed him mercifully with one of my pistols. The vision would not return when he woke, and he would probably not even remember what had given him his fit. But knowing that didn't make me feel any more heroic.
When he was tied and gagged, I took the cell block keys from the desk and went after Melinda.
She was sitting in her cell; her reading lamp was on, and she was absorbed in some propaganda literature she was permitted to read. I rattled the key in the lock and swung the door open before she looked up. When she saw it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before closing it and taking a much needed breath.
"If I'm interrupting a good book, I'll come back later,"
I said, nodding at the propaganda.
She threw it down. "That drivel is really fascinating," she said. "The guy who writes it is either the biggest con man in existence or he believes it himself-in which case he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question."
"Aren't you glad to see me?" I asked. "Aren't you going to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?"
"You can't be in my midst, because I'm only one person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison baggies do make me look like more than one woman."
She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. "You're here. I never expected you, don't know how you managed it, and doubt if we'll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies here..."
I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there before leaving her apartment. "Do me the honor of a striptease?" I asked.
She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and dressed in the clothes I had brought.
I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was yelling "Fool" at top volume.
As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was in her eyes: tears.
"Hey," I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot cope with tears. "Hey." Really stupid.
"Let's go," she said.
"Something wrong?"
"I've been wondering if you were alive, wondering if even you were whether you would care enough to come for me."
"But of course-"
"Shush," she said, stopping the tears. "We haven't time for this, have we?"
We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through which we could see the occupants. None of them, however, seemed to care much about us.
We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and second unconscious guards. When the second elevator opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I took Melinda's arm, and we walked down the steps-just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen and four young and dedicated men with guns in their hands!
"Good evening," he said, bowing to us.
The four men with guns did not bow.
"I do believe you're surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn't expect to see your cool broken like that." But whether or not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.
"Who is he?" Melinda asked.
"Morsfagen."
"The title too, please," he said. But he was not just being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath the surface delight.
"General Morsfagen," I told her.
"And you're under arrest, of course," he said.
The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow less wary than they had been at first. It would have been possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed, and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might have bought it but good before they realized what was happening.
Might have.
But nothing is certain.
Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.
I didn't want more blood on my hands.
I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them before one of those four boys panicked and put a few rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.
What had happened to the god?
What was this? Mere men overpowering me and outthinking me, me a god?
"This way, please," Morsfagen said.
We followed him.
VII
Morsfagen had directed the placement of armed soldiers in the storm drains under and within four blocks of the Tombs. He had positioned a man behind every one of the slit windows of the administration building where I might possibly be able to force entrance. Even in the maze of aluminum air-conditioning ducts which wound through the great structure, a hundred men waited in silence with their narcotics pistols drawn and their nerves honed to crisp attention. With all of this waiting for me, I had walked up the front steps and through the lobby as brazen as a man could be. But even that had been planned for, and a watch had been kept from one of the apparently empty howlers parked before the Tombs entrance. They had watched me go in, had identified me, had let me get the girl, had let me bring her out, and then had nailed us.
Perhaps Morsfagen let it go on that long so that he could level charges of jailbreak against both of us on top of what the government already had drummed up. But I half thought that he wanted to humiliate me as much as anything. And he had.
They put us in a howler, took us through snowy streets to the AC complex. They took Melinda away to a separate preventive detention apartment and placed me in another, where there were no sharp instruments or windows.
"General Morsfagen will see you tomorrow," the guard told me as he left.
"Can't wait," I said.
The door closed, the lock snapped, and quiet descended.
I flopped onto the bed and listened to the springs whine, and I thought about what a stupid, fumbling idiot I had been, even with Child's intellect integrated with my own. I had gone back to the house to pack, even when I should have realized that they would be coming for me.
That had ended in the deaths of an entire howler crew, smashed and burning on my beach. Then I had gone to the prison after Melinda, with my brilliant plan of boldness, though I should have known that they would have been expecting the unexpected. Perhaps part of the plan was based on Child's cleverness-but another part was based on my own impetuousness, and Morsfagen knew my personality like the back of his hand-or better.
Look at yourself, Kelly, I yammered inside my head.
The only esper in the world, amplified by a partial absorption of the psychic energies of the most complete genius-and still a failure. Still charging around with delusions that invariably trip you up.
Before my meeting with Child and my therapy in the mechanical psychiatrist, I had been going on the assumption that I was some holy character, some bright and shining product of godly grace, the Second Coming. Basically, I had been nothing more than a man, and I had only suffered by my refusal to understand that. I blundered into things acting like a god, and when I got hurt or frightened, I couldn't cope. I had never prepared myself against hurt and fear, for I could not see where either commodity would impinge upon a god.
Now, with Child, I had unconsciously begun to accept the god role again. Smug in the knowledge that I was esper with a genius inside me, I slipped back into the habit
of looking on lesser mortals with contempt. And in my self-assurance, I had failed to use all my talents and intellect, had underestimated my enemy as the first CroMagnons underestimated the Neanderthals for a while.
For a while...
I stood up, suddenly less angry than I had been, and more determined. Okay, so I was not a god. I was not omniscient and omnipotent and superior to the military. I could not excuse past stupidity, but I could improve my outlook until I was able to be something which they could not cope with. The reason Morsfagen and other men could trip me up was simple to see: they were less powerful men, but they were fully developed, capable, and sure and confident. And I was fractured and unsteady and filled with doubts beneath the sheen of smugness. It was time to get to know myself, understand what I was and what I could expect to accomplish. After countless circuits of the main room of the apartment, I sat down on the bed again and relaxed. And that night, I came to know myself better than I ever had in my life.
I turned esp fingers back among the streaming thoughts of my own conscious mind. It was something I had never attempted before, though it now seemed the most natural exercise in the world. Perhaps I had always felt that I knew what I WPS thinking, that I was aware of myself.
But, of course, like every man, I hadn't the faintest damn idea of what was going on inside my head. Head-tripping in countless other minds, I had left the territory of my own thoughts sacrosanct. Perhaps because I was afraid of what I might find.
In those rambles, stirring down into my own id and ego and superego, I found that I was purer, cleaner, less rotted than I might even have hoped for. There were things, of course, that terrified me and revolted me. But I took heart in that they indicated my basic humanness, my basic brotherhood with men, despite the fact I was made from chemical sperm and chemical ovum.
In that one long night, I finally understood the nature of society as I never had before. I had wrongly judged men. I had labeled them as inferior to me, when this was not the case. Some were inferior, some my equal, some even my superior in ways. Each minim of intelligent life on this planet was such an individual spark, such a varying quantity and quality that no sweeping comparison could ever be made. What I had always sensed and what I had misinterpreted was that society was inferior to me. No man. Society.
Society was an agglomeration of individuals equaling less than its separate parts. In governments and institutions, the men chosen to rule, chosen to make policy and enforce decision, were those elected by the society that supported them-and because each member of society is different, because some median must be reached through the ballot, mediocre men assume office. The very intelligent vote for the intelligent candidates, but no one else does, for everyone else distrusts intellect. The reactionary and blind vote for their own slogan shouters, but no one else does. In the end, the people in the middle range elect their people, simply because they are in the majority. We get the mediocre. And because the mediocre are ill-gifted to deal with the problems of all factions of society, they make bad government and bad institutions. They distrust the intellectual and do not rely upon his wisdom. They fear the reactionary and the blind because such people threaten progress (a commodity the middle has been told to embrace all its life). They repress the intellectuals and the reactionaries and embrace their own people. But because they are mediocre, their own people are not served well, and corruption flourishes. Where each individual of society may be capable of governing his own sphere, the agglomerate government is incapable of governing anything except through intimidation and pure luck.
It may have been something that most people understand early in life, but it was a revelation to me. To win the games of existence, one must not attempt to fight by society's rules, because in most cases, one is fighting individuals, and not society. To win, one must attack the game on individual terms-not against a stereotype, not against a societal image, but against the other man, the single adversary.
The way to deal with Morsfagen was not as a tendril of the military plant, but as a man. His weaknesses did not lie in his adherence to the consensus-the consensus was too huge ever to be weak at all-but with himself, in his own human psyche.
Still, my problem was not solved. If I was not god, not the superior creature I had thought I was, how could I act at all? How could I function as an ordinary man? From birth, I had come to think of myself as something special, something sacred and superhuman. The attempt, now, to operate as just another man, would run against the grain of a lifetime of smug theory and self-delusion.
And then, quite suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It came like the nick of a razor in the morning, making me jerk with more surprise than it deserved. I should have understood what had to be done some time ago. I had to, finally, become the supreme being, the god, that I had always thought I was!
I began pacing the room again. My feet swished on the thick carpet. A clock ticked in the wall. Otherwise: heavy silence.
Be God...
God lay inside Child's mutant body, insane as He had always been, trapped as Child and I had been for that month. And though I did not want His madman's personality, I could make a great deal of use of His psychic energy. It was there to be tapped, the power that had made worlds, had generated galaxies and universes, that had established the infinitely fine balance of the cosmic scale. I could delve back into Child's twisted body and find the core of God's being, absorb Him and dissipate Him throughout my own mind, as I had Child. God would be part of me, a deeply threaded part without His own identity. I would, indeed, for all purposes, be God.
I could not sleep for the rest of that night. I wanted to see Morsfagen, wanted to try to work him as a human being long enough to have him get me to Child. Then, once he had done that, I would not have to deal with him on a man-to-man basis. I would be above that.
I was frightened that night, seeing hulking creatures in every shadow. In God's mind, down in that colossal id and ego, what would things be like? Would I be able to handle them, or would I be swamped and driven down, consumed? I forced the latter possibility from my mind and thought more positively. But the fear remained. It was not unlike the fear a child feels the first time he enters a great cathedral and sees the towering, somewhat menacing figures of the saints carved in great pillars of marble.
Morsfagen came at nine o'clock, smiling. "I thought you'd like to hear today's schedule," he said.
I said nothing, playing the role I had decided on.
"We start with a press release about the gun battle you had with the police last night. Did you know that you were seriously injured in that, perhaps fatally injured?"
He wanted some response that he could slap me down for, but I didn't give him the satisfaction. I accepted.
"Later in the day, we'll release some film of that shootout," he said. "We've already staged it. Looks very real with lots of blood. We found a fairly good double for your part, and we kept him mostly in the shadows so that it's hard to tell, really, who he is."
I said nothing.
He shuffled the papers in his hand, went on. "According to the reports, three officers will have died under your guns. We've made up life histories for them, all very touching. Two of them had large families and one had a brother who was a priest We've put together composite photographs of various real officers to release to the press.
Later tonight, word will be flashed to an outraged nation that you have died on the operating table. Even though you slaughtered the howler crew and three other policemen, we were trying to save you, see? Now, the first order of business today is for you to come along and help us film the operating room sequences. A double won't work in bright lights. I hope you can die convincingly, or at least pretend to look dead while you're lying there.
Otherwise, you'll have to be drugged for it.
He stopped, watching me. It was time for my part, and my lines were crystal clear to me. "Look, how about a bargain," I said. I sounded fairly desperate.
He smiled. He was eating this up. M
orsfagen's weakness was not in his rigid acceptance of military codes and consensus views, but in his need for power over other human beings, his delight at being on top of another man.
I was giving him exactly what he wanted.
Maybe he would just hang himself with it.
"I fail to see," he said, "just what you have to bargain with." He motioned around at the windowless walls.
"Something you don't know," I said. "Something that, if you knew, would help you a great deal."
He frowned, smiled again. "And what would you want for this valuable piece of information?"
"My freedom. Melinda's freedom. We'd stay in the city.
I'd do whatever you want."
"Oh, I hardly believe you would," he said.
"Look, Morsfagen, I'm not kidding you. I have something to tell you that could make a very big difference to the Alliance. I am not lying, and you must believe that."
"I'd love to hear it," he said, dragging this out to relish every moment of my groveling. "But you must choose some other reward besides your freedom."
"Let the girl and me live here together. At least don't keep us in separate apartments."
He smiled, seemed to consider it. "All right. She is some nice piece, I'll tell you. That ought to be a big enough reward. Now tell me what this secret is?"
I started to speak, then stopped abruptly, just as I had planned, examining him with a great deal of suspicion. I must have looked pathetic, hunched there on the edge of the bed, unshaven, trying to bargain for petty favors that would come without question to a free man. It was the image I wanted him to have of me. "How do I know I can trust you?" I asked. "How do I know you'll keep your promise?"
He laughed sharply, deeply. "You don't."
"But that's not right!" I said. There was just the edge of a whine in my voice. I was a broken man, yes I was. I was just so many pieces for him to break further into dust.