Chiotza's house was only a few hundred yards away. Sammy skirted it, went around behind it, pushed open the rickety door of the old shed.
Where was Cliff Burns?
It had taken Sammy perhaps five minutes to reach the shed form the telephone in the hostel. Nevertheless, it seemed like a rank discourtesy that Cliff shouldn't be waiting for him.
He sat down on the stone floor, finding a piece of sacking to insulate his bare bottom from the concrete. Mus' watch this Cliff, he thought. Capable of anything, that man. Mus' be on my guard.
On his guard, waiting for Cliff, Sammy fell asleep.
On the face of it, Sammy's undertaking had been a pretty wild one. The Xytians had been a telepathic race. The very nature of their literature showed this clearly. What was written down, for the most part, was what minds were liable to forget, what one mind couldn't easily pass to another mind, what was needed to supplement mental communication.
Humans weren't a telepathic race. It had been shown that they weren't telepathically blind, deaf and dumb, that was all.
But Sammy didn't care how fantastic his plan was. It was far more realistic, certainly, than waiting hopefully for someone to come and rescue him. And he still dreamed of rescue.
Soon he began to realize that his efforts weren't so fantastic after all. What was personality, what was personal magnetism, but Power? Wasn't it possible that even if a human conscious mind couldn't reach out and touch another human conscious mind, it might be able to reach a human unconscious? Wasn't there plenty of evidence in human relations that it could?
And the Xytians had not merely used telepathy, but also studied it, developed it, catalogued it. There were exercises for Xytian children. Exercises in extending the consciousness. Exercises in remembering-seeing-projection. Exercises in thought-direction.
One day Sammy found he could control the little animals which had been his staple diet for three years. After that he hated eating them. It seemed inhuman to bring them to him to be killed and make them stand while he killed them. Yet when he could do that, did it make sense to go out and try to stun them with stones, as he'd been doing for years?
Power was a way of stabbing direct at the unconscious. All animals had an unconscious, and therefore all animals could be controlled by someone who had the Xytian Power.
It was doubtful whether Sammy, or anyone else, could have developed the faculty without such a stimulus. For Sammy, learning to operate Power, or not learning was a matter of life or death.
He learned. Or he thought he learned. How could he tell? The fact that he could control the Xytian creatures proved nothing beyond the fact that he had a stronger intellect than they, which was pretty obvious anyway. They could be the telepaths.
Anyway, he began broadcasting his commands. They should, if everything went according to plan, be going out by hyperspace. They should reach Earth, or more particularly, any Terran ship in space. They should slide direct into the unconscious minds of Terran spacemen, who should then seek them to their source, not knowing why they really did so, but inventing for their own satisfaction perfectly good reasons why they should . . .
The ship arrived four years and ten days after Sammy's ship was wrecked. It was a survey ship, and the members of the crew were all convinced that they had been ordered to survey this section of space.
For a long time after that, Sammy didn't attempt to use Power again. It could have been a coincidence that the survey ship came to Xyt. In due course he would know for sure. In any case, although the survey team examined and photographed the Xytian remains, Sammy cautiously refrained from showing them any Xytian literature. It naturally didn't occur to them that any could have survived.
Back on Earth, Sammy continued to be cautious for a while. But why should he work if people could be made to want to help him, support him, love him?
Any doubt that he possessed Power was soon at an end. He could do anything he wanted -- or make others do anything he wanted.
With certain exceptions. About one person in a hundred was somehow blocked to him. Power just didn't work with those rare individuals.
It didn't seem to matter. Sammy never found it vitally necessary to have any truck with these stubborn, intractable people -- invariably men and women who were resistant to hypnosis, too.
For nearly a year Earth paid him back for the loneliness he had suffered on Xyt. Earth reimbursed him willingly, gladly. People loved Sammy Talbot and didn't know why they loved him. It didn't matter -- they could, and did, invent plenty of reasons.
On the whole, Sammy wasn't too ambitious or too cruel. That was what saved him later. He merely took what he wanted, making others want to give. When he tired of anything or anyone, he always neatly rounded off the incident in a way which gave pain to no one.
He did some good, too. Sammy could touch the unconscious direct. And when people were miserable, or when people were insane, it was because of something wrong in the unconscious, something which Sammy could set right.
But he did take a lot . . .
The police must have done a good job. Of course, they had the evidence of those rare individuals whom Sammy couldn't touch. They even used a couple of them as assistants. All the same, it must have been quite a job, tracing everything back to Sammy and believing the incredible. It would have been impossible if Sammy had actually been able to read minds. But he couldn't. He could merely control other people's unconscious minds.
Another thing that helped the cops was the fact, unknown to Sammy, that when he used Power, encephalographs for miles around went mad. Indeed, before they took him in they had developed a small, simple detector which was nothing like as complicated as an encephalograph but which detected Power activity at a range of several miles.
After that, Sammy was hooked.
While he was drugged, a police surgeon inserted a tiny instrument in a cavity in his skull. From then on Sammy could be scrambled at any time, at a distance up to a hundred miles.
And so Sammy, with his magnificent Power, was a helpless as Gulliver. There were people, admittedly rare people, whom he couldn't affect. There was a Power detector. And he could be scrambled without even being caught.
For a while Sammy became a secret-secret-secret agent working for the government. But the Power which only Sammy Talbot had was so awful, so dangerous, that it was decided he couldn't be allowed to keep it. After the way he carried out his assignments, who would feel safe with him unscrambled?
But there justice stepped in, good old kindly, fatuous, bumbling human justice. Sammy couldn't be sentenced without a trial. So he had a trial -- a secret trial, but not a rigged one.
The court ruled that Sammy had not done anything bad enough to be scrambled for it.
So Sammy was sent to Cronfeld, almost a free man, with Cliff Burns to watch over him. Cliff was not, unfortunately, one of the rare individuals immune to Sammy. None of these, as it happened, could be compelled to go to Cronfeld. Cliff could.
That Sammy should be exiled to Cronfeld wasn't quite what justice had intended. It certainly wasn't what the kindly, humane court which wouldn't give permission for scrambling had intended.
It was a police decision and it wasn't stupid. It wasn't nearly as stupid as it looked.
Neither Sammy nor Cliff knew the points which had been considered by Cliff's chief when the situation was set up. They were:
1. Sammy would probably use Power and be scrambled.
If that didn't happen,
2. Cliff would probably scramble Sammy anyway, claiming
he had used Power. Or
3. Cliff would murder Sammy in the hope of gaining his
freedom. That would be a pity, of course; but it would
certainly be the end of an awkward moral, legal and
sociological problem.
4. In any case, every human being who left Cronfeld would
be screened at medium and long range to make sure he
couldn't possibly be Sammy Talbot.
Although Cliff didn't entirely believe in Sammy's allegedly superhuman abilities, he reviewed what he had heard of them as he approached the hut, just in case.
It was known that Sammy wasn't a telepath. That was pretty obvious anyway -- you couldn't very well drug a telepath and take him prisoner.
So all Cliff had to do was make sure that he got Sammy before Sammy could do anything. Cliff couldn't use a gun, unfortunately; the miners had no guns. It would have to be a knife -- a knife like any miner's knife. Not in the heart, for men lived and used their brains after being stabbed in the heart. It would have to be in the brain. If Sammy's heart went on beating, it wouldn't matter. He couldn't do any superhuman tricks with his heart.
Chiotza and Sammy had fought only a few hours ago. And Susie hadn't stayed with Sammy at the hostel -- there was no reason why Sammy would lie about that. When Sammy was found dead behind Chiotza's house, what would everybody think?
Well, what did it matter what they thought? Nobody cared much about the death of a miner after a drinking session. Cliff Burns, if anybody cared to check, would have an alibi. Besides, Cliff was Sammy's friend; everybody knew that. Most of all, would anybody from the Garden be crazy enough to venture into the Jungle at night?
Cliff exulted. Once Sammy was dead, he was safe, and he knew it. The Cronfeld police, who never meddled much with killings in the Jungle, would probably never even consider him as a suspect. He would marry Shirley and go and live on a decent world. And Cliff wouldn't have anything to fear from his chief, who would have the Cronfeld police's report on Sammy's death.
Cliff exulted in his cleverness, but he wasn't quite clever enough to realize that what he was doing now had been planned long ago, on Earth.
He moved forward silently and pushed open the door of the hut. In the gloom he could make out Sammy, sitting down against the wall, asleep, naked.
The poor drunken sot. He wanted to be killed.
Cliff swung his knife in a short arc terminating at Sammy's right eye.
Warned by a sense that had nothing to do with Power, Sammy opened both eyes. He hadn't time to move, hadn't even time to think.
Cliff pulled his hand back and savagely hacked his own throat, almost severing his head from his shoulders. He pitched on the floor a fraction of a second after a stream of his own gushing blood.
Sammy got up unsteadily. He was suddenly completely sober. He knew instantly what this meant. He had always known what it would mean when he used Power again.
In that moment Sammy became a different person, very different from the weak, drunken, hopeless braggart he had been as a Cronfeld miner. Suddenly he was more like the desperate but patient man who had deciphered the Xytian manuscripts.
You couldn't have a gift like that, keep it bottled up inside you and live a normal, useful life. Having Power and not using it was like sitting down for the last time, refusing to use your perfectly good legs ever again. You became a weeping, moaning, whining, self-pitying wreck of a man when you didn't do what you could do.
But now they would get him and he'd be scrambled. There was no doubt about that. Already, somewhere, a tiny Power detector, a tiny Sammy Talbot detector, had jumped and made a permanent record. The suspended sentence on Sammy Talbot was now automatically confirmed, three years later.
Sammy left Cliff's body where it lay and padded through the incessant rain like a pale ghost. It was about two o'clock in the morning. He probably had eight hours, until ten. Perhaps less, certainly no longer.
At the hostel he went first to the strongbox in the cellar. He didn't count the money he took from it. He didn't have to. Poker was a lucrative profession among miners who played boldly, aggressively, but not skillfully. There was nearly twenty thousand dollars in his hands.
Cautiously, making sure he wasn't seen, he went back to his room. Susie was still asleep, which was just as well.
First he did the superficial things. Susie could be pretty, and since nothing Sammy did would make any difference now, Susie might as well be pretty.
The human brain can control far more than it believes it can control. Sammy couldn't make Susie look much different now, but he could make her look quite a bit different in a few weeks' time.
He changed the pattern of Susie's physical supply lines. The changes he made were small, apparently insignificant, hardly worth bothering about. Yet, as a result of them, Susie's slightly bulbous nose would gradually slim away until it was small and straight. Her slightly heavy chin would become lean and smooth. Her skin would become clearer, all over her body, and she would lose a little fat around her hips.
More important than these things was the change he made in Susie's physical balance. People are recognized by their friends more by the set of their heads, the way they walk, the way they sit in a chair, the way they hold themselves, than by their facial features. A good figure depends less on shape than on bearing.
Susie had started with good teeth and a passable figure. Sammy made her a pretty girl with a figure a showgirl could be proud of. At least, that was what she would be in perhaps three weeks. Even now her walk, her bearing would be so different that nobody who didn't look closely at her face would recognize Susie. And in three weeks she wouldn't even resemble Susie.
Strangely enough, what Sammy did next was easier for him. He stimulated areas in Susie's brain which had previously been dormant. He sent carefully calculated charges of mental impulses along the channels she normally did use. He stimulated tag-ends of talent and potential which had never before been touched.
He couldn't make Susie a genius even if he wanted to, and he didn't. Geniuses with too much emotion never made much out of life. And Susie had a lot of emotion in her, good, generous emotion. Sammy didn't want to destroy the best of Susie.
She opened her eyes when he was done, and even Sammy was startled at the immediate change. For now they were fine, intelligent eyes. She was changed.
Rapidly, he told her about Cliff, explained everything. She understood all he said at once, believed it at once. When you actually experience a miracle, you don't have to waste time marveling at it.
"But you, Sammy," she said urgently. "What's going to happen to you?"
"I'll be scrambled," he said simply.
Even in her horror there was some relief. "They won't burn you for killing Cliff?"
Sammy smiled. "I didn't kill Cliff."
"But you just said -- "
"The police have a machine which traces and establishes nerve patterns, Susie. When Cliff is found, the knife will still be in his hand. The cops will check his arm and find he cut his own throat."
"But you made him . . . I see. Your gift, this Power isn't in the book, is that it? They won't be able to charge you with a crime that doesn't exist?"
He nodded. "Anyway, I don't think they will. They'll scramble me and let it go at that. Probably at ten o'clock tomorrow. A daily check is made on the detector then."
"Sammy, isn't there any way you can escape? Couldn't you -- "
"for days or weeks, perhaps. But there are men and women here, as well as on Earth, who are immune to me, Susie. I'd lose out in the end -- inevitably. And I might have more to face than scrambling."
"Sammy, I love you. You know that. And you've made me into a girl you could love. Together, we -- "
"We haven't time to talk about that, Susie. What's your favorite name? You can't be Susie any more."
"What do you mean?"
"Susie, I haven't time to argue. What's your favorite girl's name?"
"I once read a book. The heroine was called Amanda Randolph. I thought that was a lovely name."
"Fine, Miss Randolph -- or may I call you Amanda? Now put your clothes on. We're going somewhere."
I Can Do Anything Page 3