Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  Parr narrowed the gap between himself and his prey.

  And they turned a corner. Parr crossed, the street, drew still closer, in time to hear the girl say, laughing, “. . . slumming once before I go back.”

  The crowd thickened and Parr found himself sidestepping passers-by. He was almost near enough, and his hand was moist on the focus gun.

  The couple turned into a cellar night club. Parr swore to himself. Taking a nervous breath, he descended the steps. He nodded to the bouncer-doorman who was leaning idly against the wall.

  He stepped into the night club. He saw the man help the girl to a table.

  Parr brought out his hand. His eyes were suddenly hot and beady with excitement.

  On the far side of the room he saw the black lettered sign, “MEN.” He would, in crossing to it, pass directly by the Oholo’s table.

  As he began to move forward a woman stumbled unsteadily against him, knocking him off balance.

  “Whynacha watch where ye’re goin’, ya . . .” she began shrilly, but, with his left hand, he brushed her out of his way. She took a half step backwards, undecided.

  He turned to glare at her and under his gaze she looked away and tugged nervously at her dress.

  Parr walked swiftly toward the rest room, his every energy concentrated on his mind shield.

  As he passed the table, the girl shuffled uneasily on the chair.

  Without breaking stride, Parr fired the focus gun into the man’s back.

  He was clear of the tables when he heard, from behind, the initial surprised, “Oh!”

  He had one hand on the door marked “MEN” when he felt the confusion in his mind. Automatically, he pushed open the door. A puzzling realization that something was wrong . . .

  He turned left from the narrow corridor into the rest room proper.

  And he went down to his hands and knees on the filthy tile, writhing in agony.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE hurt, mostly, was in his brain, and he choked back a scream. He could not think. And then the outer edge of the shield began to crumble.

  He concentrated. Every muscle, bone, nerve. Veins stood out on his neck. He fought.

  He was dented by fire inside his head. Hot, lancing tongues of flame. He tried to shrink away. He whimpered, groveled. His hands fumbled uselessly.

  She was nearly inside of him now. It was almost over. Her thoughts were like fingers rending and tearing at quivering unprotected flesh.

  He struggled hopelessly, retreating under a mental assault of unendurable ferocity. His outer memory was ripped away, a section of his childhood vanished forever.

  And then there was desperation in the assault wave. He could feel her trying to shake off an attempt to breach her concentration. He stiffened, relaxed, arched his body, struggled with her.

  Her attack suddenly crumbled into a distracted muddle. Her concentration had been shattered.

  His mind was trembling jelly, creamed with throbbing pain. But he could resist now, and slowly he forced her out.

  “I’ll be back!” she lashed at him. And the hate in the thought was alive. “I’ll kill you for this!” Then her thoughts began slowly to fade away and her mind shield came down.

  Parr shook with every muscle.

  “Buddy. Buddy,” someone was spying, shaking his shoulder. “You sick, huh?”

  He struggled to his knee twisting his head back and forth, trying to regroup his memories. The sear places were vacant, empty, part of himself cut cleanly away. Immediate memories not yet stored and filed seemed to be floating free, unassociated—too widely spread to have been cut out, not too widely spread to have been mixed and shuffled. He was panting as he struggled with them, capturing them, tying them down, ordering them.

  Then he began to vomit.

  “You drink too much? Hey, buddy, you drink too much? I guess you drink too much, maybe?”

  UNDERSTANDING—half understanding—came with the words. He scrabbled up the wall until he was erect. His back pressed against the vertical tile for support. He turned and staggered from the stinking rest room, his hands forcing clumsily against the walls.

  In the short hallway he could hear voices.

  “And when he slumped over . . .”

  “She just sat there like she was thinking . . .”

  “You see the cop shake her?”

  “I thought she was gonna hit him with the ash tray.”

  “Well, they sure hauled her outta here!”

  Parr staggered back into the night club. Eyes turned to stare at him. His head spun in nausea. He began to move leadenly toward the exit.

  There was a police officer in his path.

  The officer reached out to stop him, and he tried to shake the hand away from his shoulder. He tried to think, to reactivate his trained responses, knowing that he would have trouble with this man.

  He muttered wordlessly.

  The officer looked grim.

  “Not drunk,” Parr gasped. “Sick.” The officer was incredulous.

  Parr shook his head, and an explanation appeared from the basic psychology of the natives: a coded scrap, death-fear.

  “It . . . it . . . was horrible . . . seeing him like that.”

  The officer hesitated.

  “One minute he was alive, the next minute . . .”

  “Yeah. Yeah. You better get a cab, buddy.”

  “Fresh air. I’ll be all right, with fresh air.”

  Suddenly sympathetic, the officer helped him up the stairs.

  Once outside the wave of sickness began to recede. Parr waited unsteadily while the officer signaled for a cab.

  As he got in the cab he whispered, “Drive.”

  The driver looked suspiciously at his fare, but the policeman said, “He’s sick, that’s all. He’s just sick.”

  The driver grunted, meshed gears.

  “Where to, Mister?”

  “Just drive,” Parr said tonelessly, rolling down the window until he felt air hitting his face. He lay back against the seat cushions.

  BALLOON-like, memories floated, rose, fell. He struggled with them. Drifting away, his hotel’s name. Before he lost it, he bent forward, muttered it at the driver.

  The Oholo—a female, he knew now—suddenly whispered in his mind from a distance: “You killed the wrong one, didn’t you?” He struggled with his mind shield in terror, finally got it set against her. He shivered.

  At the hotel, he stumbled from the cab, started in.

  “Hey, Mister, what about me?”

  “Eh?”

  “Money, Mister. Come on, pay up!”

  He fumbled at his wallet, found a bill, handed it over.

  In his room at last, he peeled off his suit, his underclothes.

  He lay prone on the coverlette.

  After hours, or what seemed hours, his mind was stable enough for hate.

  He lay in the darkness hating her. Even above the instinctive fear he hated her.

  He tossed in fever thinking of after the invasion when she would be captured. The last of the sickness ebbed away. His thoughts adjusted, found more and more stability.

  Slowly he drifted toward sleep which would heal up the confusions. As he hovered in the dark of near sleep, he felt a wash of mental assault from too far away to be effective. Her thoughts tapped at his shield and Ye dissolved it partly to let a little defiance flash out.

  “I’ll get you!” she answered coldly.

  And after that, he slept, healing.

  HE awoke, automatically assessing the damage. It was less than he had expected. Sleep had resolved it into tiny confused compartments.

  And he knew how hard it would be to keep up his shield for four weeks. There was fatigue on it already.

  Then, too, there was the pressure.

  A gentle insistent pressure. As if to say, “I’m here.” He remembered how strong Lauri’s mind was and he knew that she would be able to hold the pressure longer than he could hold the shield. Once, in training he had shielded for near
ly thirteen days—but now, under the sapping of his energy by physical activity, by the multiple administrative problems, by the pressure itself . . .

  He shook his head savagely.

  He looked at his suit across; the edge of the bed. He shuddered with the memory of his sickness and reached for the phone to order new clothing.

  And the pressure. He was going to have to learn to get used to it.

  Later, he reported to the Ship, his voice fumbling and hesitant.

  The answer crackled back. “She’s alerted the others, you idiot! We picked up her message. There’s four more of them down there.”

  Parr tried to think of an excuse, knowing how pointless it would be even to offer one.

  “You should have used your head,” the Ship continued. “What made you think the Oholo was necessarily male?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I just said.”

  “You know what happened on Zelta when an advanceman was careless? You want that to happen here?”

  On Zelta? He knew it should be familiar to him. He cursed inwardly, reaching for other memories, to see how many he had lost . . . A sentence, unbidden, flashed across his mind: “Never sell an Oholo short.” It was what someone had told him once. “They think differently than you do.” How, he pondered confusedly, could they expect him to think like an Oholo?

  “I can’t think like an Oholo,” he said tonelessly.

  “You could . . . Never mind.”

  “I could? Listen, how can they be thinking, to leave a flank like this unprotected? Why didn’t they take this planet into protective custody long ago? How can you think like that? They aren’t logical. How could I know they’d let a woman . . .”

  “Parr!” the Ship ordered sharply.

  Parr gulped. “Sorry.”

  “Insubordination on your record.”

  Parr clicked off the comset.

  Damn! he thought angrily.

  There was still the annoying pressure on his mind. “Damn you!” he thought without lowering his shield. “Damn you!” he thought again, dissolving enough of the shield to let the thought escape.

  She did not answer.

  There was a knock at the door.

  A man with his suit.

  IT was almost ten o’clock when Parr arrived at the warehouse. The windows were alive with sunshine, and through them he could see the freshly cleaned interior.

  The men with the furniture were waiting, the driver angry at the delay, his assistant indifferent. Already there was a line of job applicants who shifted uneasily, eyes turned curiously upon Parr as he crossed and unlocked the warehouse doors.

  Parr, one hand resting on the knob, said to the delivery man, “Bring the stuff inside.”

  The driver growled and picked up a clip board from the seat. “I gotta bill here, doc. You wanna pay before I haul the stuff out?” He held out the clip board, jerking it savagely for Parr’s attention.

  Parr glanced at the sum. He reached for his wallet. One by one he removed the bills and handed them over to the driver. When he had met the amount there were only two bills remaining.

  “Now take them inside.”

  “Okay, doc.”

  Parr went immediately to the roof. The shed had been knocked down as he had ordered, and the chute had been installed.

  The two packages were lying at the top of the chute. The bundle of money and the sample, dummy parcel—both night deposited from the Ship. He picked them up.

  Walking down the stairs, he peeled away the wrapper from one bundle, exposing green sheaves of currency. Back on the ground floor he put the stacks of bills on the newly arrived desk, and the dummy parcel in the drawer. He took one of the chairs, carried it to the desk and sat down.

  He looked toward the door.

  “You, there! At the head of the line! Come here.” He was careful of his accent, realizing the necessity of impressing the waiting workers. He was pleased to find the accent near perfect.

  The woman, frail and elderly came forward hesitantly. “My name is Anne, sir.”

  “All right,” he said, reaching for a bill from the top sheaf. “I forgot to bring a pen and paper. Take this and go get some. You may keep the change, and there’ll be another bill when you get back.”

  Her eyes widened. “Yes, sir.” She held out a wrinkled hand.

  He did not need to glance toward the door again, to know that an initial and important impression had been established.

  After she had gone, Parr leaned back in the chair and said to the other applicants, “You may come in now.”

  They shuffled inside.

  PARR watched them settle into chairs. As he did so, he was aware of her, Lauri, holding the pressure steady on his mind, and memories of last night came back. Concentrating away from them he tried to analyze his feelings toward the natives. He found a mixture of contempt and indifference.

  “I’m going to say this only once,” he announced crisply. “I will expect you to inform any late comers. When I have finished I will interview each of you.”

  He balanced his hands before him on the rim of the desk, holding them steady. He looked around at the waiting faces. He let his mind relax, and the speech—it had been graven on his brain in the Ship—came bubbling to the surface. He searched forward along it, and he found it to be complete, untouched by his contact with the Oholo. He wrinkled his forehead and began, seeking to give the impression that each word was being carefully considered.

  “I intend to hire some of you to help me sort and load packages of promotional literature. Those hired will be paid five dollars an hour.” They shuffled unbelievingly. “Yeah, but when, Mister?”

  Parr’s mind dipped for information. “Whenever you wish to. At the beginning of every day. Will that be satisfactory?”

  The listeners twisted uncomfortably, embarrassed by their doubt. “Now you’re talkin’,” the original critic said.

  Parr cleared his throat heavily for effect. “The work day may be as long as fourteen hours, depending on the circumstances.”

  No questions, now.

  “The literature will come already packaged and labeled. It will be delivered to the roof by helicopter, and your job will be to sort it aid transfer it to trucks.” He looked them over. “I will need you for approximately three weeks.”

  The pressure was still on his mind, not demanding, merely present. He writhed at it inwardly. Outwardly he was calm, his voice undistuned.

  “Hey, Mister,” another of them said. “I’d like to get somethin’ straight right now. You ain’t havin’ us to handle no explosives or somethin’ dangerous like that, are you?” It was an objection Parr had been prepared for. Scarcely thinking, he bent to the drawer and picked up the dummy parcel. He put it on the desk top.

  “There is no danger. You will need no special instructions save to handle as you would normal mail. I have a sample package here.” He bent over and stripped off a section of wrapping paper to permit them to see a stack of printed material.

  HE rippled the dummy sheets with his thumb. “The nature of the advertising is secret for the moment, but,” he lied, “this is what it looks like.” He returned the bundle to the desk. “It’s just paper.” That was true, and he smiled faintly as he imagined the amount of disorganization mere paper would be able to accomplish. For an instant, the uncertain emotion returned as he thought of the invasion fleet, rushing communicationless through hyper-space for its rendezvous with Earth.

  “There is, of course, a reason for the high wages,” he said, the words coming automatically. “We want to hit the market before—ah—” and the phrase and the hesitation were memorized, calculated for effect, “a competitor.”

  He pursed his lips speculatively. “Naturally we want to avoid publicity. Anyone violating this requirement will be dismissed immediately.”

  He seemed to study the faces individually, looking for spies from the rival company.

  “I will probably not require you for more than a few hours the first several days. In
that event, you will receive pay for a full eight hour day.”

  He stopped talking, and the applicants’ faces were excited.

  “As soon as the woman returns with the paper, I will begin the interviews. Those of you whom I hire will receive a fifty dollar bonus before you leave the building.”

  When she returned, Parr interviewed. His questions were perfunctory. By noon, he had enough workers, and he had one of them hang out a penciled sign reading: “Jobs Filled.” After that, he closed the doors and assembled them before him.

  “If you’ll form a line, I’ll give you your bonuses. Give me your names to check against my list. You will sign a sheet of paper here in receipt. I’ve hired enough people to take care of any of you who do not choose to come back tomorrow, so there will be no further vacancies and no chance to collect a second bonus . . . Report for work at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. At that time, I’ll have someone here to fill out the necessary government employment forms for each of you.”

  Sitting at his desk, he began to count out the bills into neat little stacks. After each applicant had signed, he pushed a stack toward him.

  After that he spent the afternoon making further arrangements with truckers and locating a woman to handle the employment records of his workers. He even had time to purchase some extra clothing and buy a few personal articles.

  As night fell, while he lay comfortably naked on his hotel bed, he felt the pressure on his mind begin to fluctuate subtly.

  CHAPTER V

  THE Oholo, Lauri. Strong minded, yes. But untrained.

  And realizing this, Parr smiled, for it testified to the certainty of his superiority, a superiority he should have recognized from the beginning. He was dealing with an amateur, an Oholo who had never received even the most elementary instruction in individual tactics.

  What she was doing now was glaringly obvious to a professional: cruising the town in an attempt to locate him. But in contacting his shield by focusing the pressure, directionally, she failed to realize that the space variations would not only tell her of his location but also inform him of her movements.

  Cautiously Parr began the defensive procedure. Step by step he engaged the pressure with his mind, rather than letting it rest on his shield. Then he began to counteract the distance pulsations—strengthening, weakening, presenting a continual pressure against her questing thoughts, compensating for her movements.