Mutant (SF Anthology)

by Henry Kuttner

  This is Dave Barton, Melissa.

  Recognition and. pleasure-shading. A question: trust? So much danger—

  Utter trust, yes-strong affirmative.

  Many-(different)-messages coming strongly

  Shadow of menace of Sam Faxe Urgency -I A growing explosive stain in Galileo

  Cannot speak-another symbol for speak-long (_ Possible personal danger

  And all these gradations of meaning at once, three minds interlocking like a color wheel, focusing to the central white spot of revelation and truth. There were no barriers, as in oral conversation. Like light the thoughts intermeshed and wove in question, answer, and statement, and despite the concentration, all three had time for the more intimate shadings that took the place of tonal values. It was the capacity for such rapport that made round-table debates so popular among Baldies; the logical and aesthetic play of minds that could ultimately resolve into an ecstacy of complete common awareness. Physically there was no polygamy among Baldies, but mentally the social group had expanded, lending an additional depth and richness to their lives.

  But this was merely a hint of complete rapport. Barton was searching for clues in what Melissa told him. He was no technician either, so he was going at it from another angle; that of the naturalist, trained in probing protective coloration, skilled in unraveling the predator’s tangled tracks.

  How many?

  Three.

  No more?

  Three-and images of Galileo and other towns, symbols of names and identities. A feeling of shadowy communion, links of hatred—

  And suddenly, in her mind, he sensed something curiously, disturbingly familiar. He did not know what it was. But momentarily it broke the smooth flow of communication, while he searched.

  It was nothing; he concentrated again. Three?

  C Known name Sam Faxe Symbol -i Power-lust

  [_ Heavy lethargy

  There were other evoked connotations, but he thought he would know Sam Faxe now.

  The other symbols, resolving into names: Ed Vargan, mixed with a curious concept of size-difference; and Bertram Smith, where there was sensed a cruelty akin to that of the blood-drinking carnivores. Though with a difference; Barton had reached into the mind of a weasel when it was feasting, and the sheer flood of ecstacy had almost frightened him. Smith was intelligent, though he, like the others, had that singular quality of-of what?

  Darkness. Distortion. Blindness.

  Yes, Sue thought, they’re blind. Blinded by their paranoia. They can’t see this world at all-as ifs meant to be.

  And Melissa’s visualization of the three: vicious small things running through the dark, teeth bared. She identified them, Barton realized, with-what?-with mice; she had a horror of mice, which to her were far more horrible than insects or snakes. Well, he could understand phobias; he himself was abnormally afraid of fire. Most Baldies were phobic in one degree or another, a penalty paid for increased mental -sensitivity.

  He thought: “I must move fast. If they communicate, they may go into hiding. “I” must kill them at one stroke. Can they read your mind?

  They do not know Melissa Carr exists. But if one is killed, they will be warned. You must be kept safe. Where are you? Refusal, definite refusal.

  It would be best to tell me, so No one can find me as long as I don’t think my location. There are no directional finders for telepathy. The concept she expressed meant more than telepathy; it was the symbol for a whole race and its unity.

  Can you locate Vargan and Smith?

  Certainly; they spoke freely in their private wave length; Vargan is in Rye; Smith is in Huron.

  How is it you can catch their wave length?

  Puzzlement. A helpless mental shrug. Born to me?

  Barton thought: When one of them dies, the others will be warned. Listen carefully. Be sure to relay their plans. They must not escape.

  Melissa thought of the three small, gray, vicious things scuttling across the floor. Barton grinned tightly.

  See how they run, he told her. See where they run to. His hand touched his dagger. It was not a carving knife, but it would do.

  There was not much more. Melissa relayed some of the paranoid thoughts she had caught, and Barton’s guess at the menace of the paranoids was confirmed. They were deadly, in the long run, to the whole mutant group. Individual deaths did not matter much, in this era of the duello, but to risk the good will of the entire race was mad-dog tactics. Nor did there seem to be any motive. Sheer malice? It was not logical, and paranoids are always logical, though their structure is founded on a false keystone. The single clue that would give the whole a meaning was, so far, lacking. Nor could Barton find it by turning to his training as a naturalist. Animals do not commit sabotage. Nor do birds foul their own nests.

  After Melissa had left them, Sue showed her impatience. “I want to help,” she said, orally now. “There must be some way.”

  “There isn’t. You said yourself that this takes a very special skill. You’re a biologist. You don’t react instantly, the way I do, and if you were along, my attention would be diverted. I’ve got to concentrate.”

  “You’ll kill them, then?”

  “Certainly I’ll kill them. Luckily there are only three, according to Melissa. She wasn’t lying; I could tell that.”

  “Oh, she’s honest,” Sue agreed. “But she’s certainly hiding something.”

  Barton shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What this calls for is prompt action. I can’t do much investigating. If I plant any thoughts or questions in non-Baldy minds, the paranoids will start wondering. I’ve got to eradicate those bichos before the infection spreads. There are plenty of paranoid Baldies who’d join a movement like that, if they were able to master the secret wave length.”

  “So what’ll I do?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Barton said, “now. Your job’s .finished. It’s my meat now.”

  They stood up together. Outside, on the village sidewalk, he left her, with a handclasp that held a deep significance. All around them the casual, evening life of the town was moving, brightly lighted and symbolic of the vast, intricate check-and-balance system that held civilization together. The civilization that tolerated Baldies, and, though perhaps a little grudgingly, gave them a chance to work out their own salvation. Both of them were thinking of the same thing: how easily that ordinary throng could be integrated into a blood-hungry mob. It had happened before, when Baldies were still new to the world, and the danger still smoldered.

  So Barton went off alone, with the unspoken commission of his whole race commanding him to do what since birth he had been conditioned to do. The race was important; the individuals were not. His helicopter had already been serviced, and he took off for Galileo, on the Atlantic Seaboard, still thinking about what he had to do. He was so abstracted that only automatic radio signals kept him from colliding with other copters. But, finally, the lights of the technicians’ town glowed on the horizon.

  Like all the communities devoted to technology, Galileo was larger than most villages. Scientists were peaceful folk, and no tech-town had ever been dusted off. Niagara, with its immense source of power, held more people than Galileo, but the latter had a far larger area. Due to the danger of some of the experiments, the town sprawled out for miles, instead of being the tight, compact village that was the general American pattern.

  Because of this there was surface-car transport, an unusual thing. Bartin guided himself to Denham’s house-there were no apartments, of course, in a highly individualistic though interdependent culture-and by good luck found the man at home. Denham was a mild, round-faced Baldy whose wigs had year by year grown grayer until his present one was shot with white. He greeted Barton warmly, but orally, since there were people on the street, and Baldies were tactful about demonstrating their powers.

  “Dave. I didn’t know you were back. How was Africa?” “Hot. I haven’t had a game of skip-handball for six months. I think I’m getting soft.”

&n
bsp; “You don’t look it,” Denham said, with an envious glance.

  “Come on in. Drink?”

  Over a highball they talked nonessentials, except that they didn’t-talk. Barton was feeling his way; he didn’t want to tell Denham too much, especially since Sam Faxe was here in Galileo, and he went all around the subject without finding out much. It proved more difficult than he had expected. Eventually they ended in the game room, stripped to shorts, facing a vertical wall, scooped into innumerable convolutions, divided into segments that jiggled erratically. There they played skip-handball. It was easy to tell in advance how hard Denham would swat the ball, but there was no earthly way of judging the angle of reflection. The two bounced around a good deal, getting plenty of exercise, and carrying on a telepathic conversation as they played.

  Denham indicated that his favorite game was still crap shooting. Or roulette, by preference. Either of them he could play with his non-Baldy friends, whereas bridge or poker-uh! Who’d play poker with a mind reader?

  Games that depended on luck or pure muscle were OK., Barton agreed, but there weren’t many of the latter. Wrestling or boxing involved pre-planned thought. But many Olympic trials were possible: shot-putting, high-jumping, racing. In those you didn’t face your opponent. Any war game, like chess, was impossible.

  Well, Denham thought, your vocation’s a sort of war game.

  Game hunting? Barton let his mind skim over the field, settling on a tiger after a heavy feed, lethargic, and with the deep consciousness of power as in a silently humming dynamo. He tied that in, subtly, with a hunger, and with something, vague and unformed, that was similar to the symbol by which Melissa knew Sam Faxe. His thought then paralleled the identity of Faxe as one musical chord parallels its complement. If Denham knew Faxe at all, he’d probably respond.

  And he did. A sense of elation mounted in Barton as he caught the stray fragment, filtering out nonessentials, squeezing—

  ing it dry of the accumulated Denham-detritus: What remained was a fat, less competent interpreter who served as liaison man sometimes between technicians of different language-groups. Barton hastily changed to another subject so that Denham would not attach any importance to this particular mnemonic ideation.

  After that, Barton was anxious to leave. He let Denham win the game, and the novelty of this so delighted the winner that he accepted Barton’s excuse of an appointment without obvious skepticism. A a man just back in America, after six months of jungle life, would be looking for something more exciting than skip-handball. But it was swell of Barton to drop in-Barton strolled along the streets, park-bordered, smooth-tiled, letting his receptive mind absorb the thoughts that boiled around him. Now that he knew what to look for, it was not difficult, though* it took patience. Patchwork scraps of information came to him very occasionally. And Barton did something to which Baldies very seldom resorted, he put leading questions into the minds of non-Baldies.

  This had to be done, for Barton could read only what layv above the threshold of conscious awareness. And it took real, straining effort to force even a brief stimulating impulse into a nonreceptive mind. The average man is not a telepath, and to communicate mentally with him is like trying to push a needle between closely-fitted tiles. He can, under special circumstances, receive thoughts, but he himself cannot recognize them as impulses from another mind.

  Barton was sweating when he had finished. Yet he had managed to pick up considerable information. Moreover, he had done it so subtly that Faxe himself, if he tuned in, would certainly be unsuspicious. A good many people had thought of Faxe tonight, but they were ordinary thoughts-except to Barton, who fitted the jigsaw together. A little here and a little there. And finally he had the picture-an interpreter, altering a shade of meaning as a Tibetan talked to a Bengali, and as both of them turned to a Yankee physiochemist. It was the easier because technicians, immersed in their work, were apt to be insensitive to the finer gradations of human contact, and the result was that here in Galileo a gadget was being built that would eventually cause trouble.

  Just how, not even Faxe knew, of course, but his smattering of technical knowledge was sufficient to enable him to smear up the works. A shade of meaning in one man’s mind, a slightly different hue in another’s, when hoth should have matched exactly-these, and other things, told Barton that Faxe was a racial traitor.

  Moreover, he found out where Faxe lived.

  Now, standing outside the man’s bungalow, he tried to communicate with Melissa Carr. Almost immediately her thought touched his, in the ordinary radiation level.

  Play it careful, he ordered. Use generalities. And again he was deeply conscious of her femininity, of the softness of curling hair and the smoothness of a curved, youthful cheek. Through the cool, fresh night air breathed something like a wisp of perfume.

  Agreement.

  Can you locate the others for me quickly? And exactly?

  Yes. In—

  Keep tuned in to… you know what.

  Again agreement, and that delicately feminine demure-ness, soft and curiously attractive. She was a little afraid, Barton sensed, and he felt a strong impulse to protect her. A picture of Melissa Carr was beginning to form in his mind, though he knew that it was of necessity prejudiced. Mental concepts and visual ones may differ a great deal. But he thought that Melissa had a small, triangular face, fragile and with delicate features, and that that face was framed with glossy, jet-black curls. He seemed to see her features from inside, reversing the usual procedure in which an individual’s face helps form the concept of what is behind it.

  How does she do it? He wondered at the lucky chance as he crossed the street. Out of all the people in the world, only she can tune in on the special wave length of—

  Barrier!

  He stood now on the porch, facing a closed panel. Through that grained plywood a doubt and a question fingered out, touched his mind, and recoiled. Instantly the man within the house erected a barrier of his own.

  Very good. While the mind was thus walled off, Faxe could probably not utilize his super wave length to communicate with the other paranoids. Or … or could he?

  Barton stepped aside to a circular window. He could see nothing through the one-way glass. With a wary look around, he lifted his foot and kicked the glass into splinters. He stepped through the gap cautiously, into a well-furnished room where a fat man stood against the wall, facing him. The masculinity of the decor told him that Faxe probably lived alone; that was natural for the true paranoid type, which required a wife’s subjugation. Faxe would not have married a telepath, and no non-Baldy could have lived with him for long.

  Twenty years ago Faxe would have been wigless, but this particular type had learned caution since then. The man’s wig was of gleaming yellow that went oddly with his heavy, ruddy face.

  And suddenly the barrier slipped from Faxe’s mind; his brain lay fallow and blank, and Barton felt Melissa’s urgent warning thrill through him. He’s warning the others—Barton ripped out the dagger from his belt and plunged forward. Instantly Faxe’s barrier tightened again, as quickly as his own weapon leaped ready to his fat hand. When dueling with another telepath, it is highly advisable to keep your mind guarded, so your intentions cannot be anticipated. As long as Faxe felt himself seriously menaced, he dared not lower his barrier.

  Barton moved in, his eyes calculatingly alert, as he might watch the swaying hood of a cobra. He kept his thumb on the hilt of the dagger and held it at thigh-level. The fat man stepped forward from the wall, balancing on his toes, waiting.

  It was, after all, too easy. Telepathy wasn’t necessary to forestall the stroke of that clumsy arm. With surgical neatness Barton put his knife in the right place, and made certain that Faxe did not communicate with his colleagues before he died. Then, satisfied, he let himself out of the house by the front door and walked quietly toward the nearest surface-car door.

  That was done. He sent his thought probing in search of Melissa. Somewhere, far away in the hidden d
ark, she heard and answered.

  Did they receive Faxe’s call?

  No. No, you were too fast, and they didn’t expect him to touch them.

  Good. Vargan and Smith now, then.

  Tonight?

  Yes.

  Good. I don’t think you can reach me tomorrow.

  Why not!

  Evasion. Vargan-at Rye.

  Listen. This is important. If there are only three of them, fine. But if they try to communicate with others, be sure to let me know!

  Yes. That was all, but the personality of Melissa lingered with Barton as he drove his helicopter northwest through the night. He was not at all affected by the fact that he had committed murder. He did not regard the act as such; there was, undoubtedly, a touch of fanaticism in the way Baldies regarded betrayal from within. Nor was this ordinary betrayal. The means of communication Faxe and the others had discovered was the deadliest menace to the race that had ever existed-more serious than the lynchings a few decades after the Blowup.

  Barton had fallen into a mental pattern that always was dominant when he hunted. Now his quarry was human, but far more predatory than any jungle carnivore. Animals killed for food. That was simple Darwinism, and a basic law of nature. But the three paranoids had violated another basic entirely: preservation of the species. They menaced it.

  In any new culture there must be conflict, Barton thought, watching dim lights flicker past below, the innumerable torches of the towns that dotted America. And certainly the Baldies had a new culture. It was almost embryonic as yet, a mutation heading for an ultimate end that was so far inconceivable. But it was the first true forward step that mankind had made in a million years. Always before mutations had been very slight, or they had been failures. Now, with hard radiations providing the booster charge, a true mutation had opened a thousand possible doors. And before each door lay blind pitfalls.