Pstalemate

by Lester Del Rey

  He growled at the coffee that seemed to take forever and began making toast in the broiler. He was in no mood to fiddle with eggs this morning.

  Whatever happened, he wasn't going to go crawling back to Grimes to eat humble pie! Anyhow, it might do no good. The old man had read a lot into Harry's inadvertent recognition of the caller's identity before he should have known it. That habit had to be broken!

  Funny. Grimes hadn't questioned Harry's ability to make it work. Just what had gone on in that "colony," if it had ever existed? What did Grimes really know and think?

  "Indolent young freak." said Grimes' voice suddenly in his head. It was a voice of anger, but there was a feeling of many other emotions—despair, loneliness, and a curious yearning hunger. "I'll see him in hell. And her! Oh, damn them, damn the whole lot of freaks!"

  The voice either cut off or Harry cut it off. He wanted no more. Such bitterness should never be passed to another.

  So he had both precognition and telepathy! He mulled it over and accepted it. There was no doubt in his mind. The abilities apparently worked by fits and starts, however. He wasn't in control of them. And that was bad. It was like a man discovering electricity without understanding. He might use the sparks to start a needed fire, or he might electrocute himself because he didn't know how to regulate the voltage and amperage. Maybe the possession and fear symbols in his mind were subconscious warnings of ignorance and real danger.

  Of course, hypnotism might be a control. His first total success had come after Lawson worked him over. But if that was the answer, he had no intention of using it.

  Question: What had happened to other people with the abilities? There must have been others to account for the number of stories of psi experiences. It seemed to be somewhat hereditary, like a mutation or group of mutations that must have been building up for several generations. In that case, others must have had anything from faint touches to more ability than he had, probably. What had become of them?

  Well, if Grimes' account was true, it had ruined some of them. Something about it seemed to have driven them mad. Also, if the one who'd sent him the note had such powers, the tears he'd felt and the hopeless desperation in her cry would indicate they hadn't done her any good.

  Still, for a mutation to survive, it had to offer benefits. He couldn't think of any great value to telepathy, aside from satisfying a sick curiosity, but precognition should have advantages. Why had nobody who discovered those advantages ever made a public announcement or gone to some place like Duke University to prove them conclusively?

  His next cup of coffee served him better. He came to the conclusion that such abilities had to deal with information—and that brought them into the field covered by information theory. He'd never paid much attention to that, aside from a cursory study of Claude Shannon's brilliant initial work. It was time he got a little theory to make sense of his few facts.

  Dave Hillery answered the phone and had no trouble identifying the mathematician Harry had heard arguing about telepathy at the last Primates meeting. "Sure, Bud Coleman. Wait a minute. By coincidence, he's right here, trying to convince Tina the zodiac is all askew. I'll put him on."

  Coleman's voice was pleasantly amused. "Sure I remember you, dear boy. Carnot's rightful place in the history of thermodynamics. You were half drunk but arguing splendidly. And wasn't there something about you in the Voice?"

  "Yeah," Harry admitted. "That's what started me wondering how psi would fit into information handling. Doesn't it require an impossible bandwidth, or some such?"

  Coleman seemed delighted, but he wanted to discuss it all in person. "Put on some lunch, dear boy, and I'll be right up. I've about proved to Tina that the zodiac isn't the same one the Chaldeans knew. Now she needs time to restore the faith and all that."

  Coleman was a tall, thin man with a blond mustache and an enormous appetite. He seemed to listen without either slowing his eating or stopping his incessant monologue.

  He waved the bandwidth argument aside at once. "Sounds good when I talk to engineers, but not necessary, you know."

  True, a signal carrying five thousand bits of information a second required a five kiloherz bandwidth, like that on normal AM radio. That was obviously enough to carry such things as the subvocalized words in another person's mind. But if the signal was to be radiated from the nerve fibers in the brain, it had to be at frequencies in billions of cycles a second—so there would be millions of channels available.

  "No problem at all. But not on the spectrum we know." He grinned at Harry's frown. "Excellent pot roast, dear boy. Umm. Normal high-frequency signals can't get through the liquid cushion and bony surrounding of the brain. Besides, we've explored the whole electromagnetic spectrum, so we have to assume a different type of wave for this. No telling what the velocity of propagation would be, either. No reason why it should be limited to our old friend, the speed of light. Couldn't be infinite, of course —or it wouldn't have any frequency or be a wave form. But anything short of that. By the way, Harry, is there anything personal to all this?" "Why?"

  "Just curious. You wouldn't be the first, though. Roommate in college could read my mind. Often got him to bring me books or food that way. Never failed."

  "What happened to him?" Harry asked.

  "Went to Wall Street, made a killing, and then began brooding. Jumped out of a window one day." Coleman investigated the refrigerator, found some ham, and began making another sandwich. Then he glanced at Harry, and his face sobered. "Ob, dear, it was personal! I'm sorry, dear boy. But after all, that's only one example. What name am I thinking?"

  "Parsifal," Harry told him absently. Did every case have to end with some kind of insane disaster?

  "Very good, Harry. Parsifal it was. You tuned in perfectly."

  "All right, what about tuning? How can a man tune into any given individual out of all the millions out there?" Harry asked.

  "No problem. Probably doesn't tune in—just a figure of speech. Like FM radio, where a good receiver will pick up one signal and reject another on the same frequency if there's even one decibel difference—twenty percent, that is. Or like listening in a crowd. A microphone can't separate individuals, but you can hear one voice and shut out the others, even though half a dozen are all shouting. A conscious, organic discriminator might be able to handle things with no more than two channels—the same two for all people—like binaural hearing. You have precog, too? My friend did, sometimes. That used to puzzle me until I finally worked it out."

  He found the pickles and sat down contentedly, alternately munching on them and sipping his heavily sugared coffee. Harry shuddered and looked away.

  Coleman laughed. "Don't mind me. I'm told I have peculiar tastes, though sweet and sour dishes aren't that rare. Oh, yes. Precognition. There is no such thing." He waited for Harry's reaction, and his smile widened. "No, it's true. It's still just telepathy. I'll bet on that. Look, dear boy, we've got a new spectrum of information—we have to have. And since we're assuming that, we might as well go all the way and assume it doesn't act like the old electromagnetic one. It not only propagates in space, but in time—whatever that is. Means the strength of the signal will decrease with the cube of the distance instead of the square, but that doesn't matter. Sensitivity must be in picovolts. Anyhow, the one transmitter most closely attuned to your receiver is your own brain. So you can sometimes read your future mind. Takes care of both powers with one elegant solution. A bit of a paradox, of course. You do something because you did it because you do it... Well, closed loops in time are old stuff to science fiction."

  Harry nodded. "So you'd only precog things that stuck strongly in your future memory—things you were really interested in?"

  "Precisely. Very well put. Ah, beer! I thought I saw it back there. Mind? Of course, I don't believe some of these psychic accounts. Psychokinesis—you know, control of physical objects at a distance by the mind—doesn't figure. The brain would have to do the work, supply the energy. Even if it had
enough of that phosphate stuff, it would start putting out waste heat, with no handy sweat glands to cool off. The idiot trying to drive a nail or lift himself by mind power would jolly well soon run a fatal cranial fever."

  By the time Coleman suddenly decided it was time for him to leave, Harry's head was swimming and his ears seemed to be ringing.

  He had a body of theory now—most of it useless, from a functional viewpoint. Or maybe not—maybe understanding of the possibility of the powers took some of the shock away and at least decreased the chances of the mind losing its normal bearings and drifting into madness. Apparently, that was the major risk.

  It was an ugly thought, and one he didn't care to deal with at the moment. In the stories he'd read, all extrasensory powers were lovely wish-dream gifts, adding everything and subtracting nothing. The evil thereof was never mentioned. Life seldom worked that way, however. A man always paid for what he got. But if the price was eventual madness...

  The word held an amorphous horror for him. It meant the loss of identity to him—but somehow, it meant more, as if it were the key to childhood nightmares. He dropped the thought and turned to more hopeful ideas.

  He'd learned one thing, mostly by accident. Picking the name from Coleman's thoughts had been easy—because he'd done it casually, without straining. Now he realized everything had come that way. When he tried to force results, he simply developed a headache. The effort of concentrating somehow closed off the ability. The trick was to relax then, not to force it.

  And that was some measure of progress in learning. He checked his watch and looked up the time for Paris. It would be evening there, which was awkward in a way. But he was somehow sure it wouldn't matter.

  This time he was very careful not to strain for answers. He simply lifted the receiver and asked for the dining room of the Hôtel la République, giving its Paris number. It wasn't the hotel where Sid was staying. In fact, he couldn't be sure he'd ever heard of it, though he'd spent several months in Paris once. But he was no longer questioning his abilities.

  Fortunately, his French was fluent and his accent good enough to avoid giving offense that would lead to the runaround so quickly used against all non-French barbarians. M. Sidney Greenwald? Would he spell that, please? Ah, yes, the American. Indeed yes, M. Greenwald would be produced but immediately.

  The delay was slight. Obviously, there must be only one American, and no paging was necessary. Equally obviously, this was a place that catered only to those with enough money to expect the best of service. Sid must be flying high.

  "Harry!" Sid was out of breath, obviously a little intoxicated, and extremely puzzled. "How'd you find me? I didn't know myself I'd be here until an hour ago. What's up? Big trouble?"

  "Nothing we can't handle. Grimes has cut us off, but we'll manage," Harry told him. No use putting Sid in a state of uncertainty that would ruin his usefulness or creating puzzles that weren't necessary. He groped for a convenient lie. "Uncle Charles has had you under investigation, it seems. That's how I found out where you were. How are things with you personally?"

  Sid's voice sounded doubtful, vaguely apologetic. So he had been living it up on the expense account. "Pretty good, Harry. I'm getting married next week! Wait till you meet her. She's a trained engineer, she'll fit right into the business. But no nibbles on the motor."

  "I figured. That's why I called you, Sid. I want you to get back to England at once—be there tomorrow. And see König at the Manchester office."

  "I've already seen König. And I'm getting married—"

  "Tell Marie she can marry you in England," Harry suggested. It had been an unconscious slip, using her name, but a felicitous one. After that, Sid wouldn't question anything he said. "König's got a hot new engineer and a new investor. He's ripe now."

  "Well..." Sid began.

  A girl's voice broke in. "Sid will be in König's office tomorrow, Mr. Bronson. And I'd love to be married in England. Sid, you tell him."

  So Sid also had a new manager, Harry realized. And it sounded as if he'd picked a good one. He was chuckling when Sid assured him there'd be no further delay.

  "And Harry—about that money. Forget it. I—well, you know—but I've got a few thousand of my own we can use. Well, what I mean is, we're partners, right?"

  "Right, Sid. And kiss the bride for me."

  And that, Harry decided as he hung up, was what precognition was good for. He had no doubt in his mind but what König would take an option on the engine and pour in enough research money to get it into commercial production. In three days, Sid would be calling to confirm it

  He had the satisfaction of taking the last trust check and mailing it back to Grimes. Let the old man worry about that. It should at least shake his confidence in his ability to intimidate anyone else.

  Harry's power seemed to be taking a nap for the rest of the day, as if he'd used up whatever energy was involved. Even the phone gave no advance clue when Nettie called again. He stalled her off and went shopping; he'd planned to go anyhow, but Coleman's visit had made it imperative. Then he ate a leisurely dinner, watched a noisy TV spectacular on noise pollution, and refused to think about anything beyond the normal. It wasn't that hard; his mind felt drained and tired, as if some center there had been overtaxed. By the time he went to bed he was generally pleased with himself.

  He was less pleased when he woke up in the middle of the night with his mind filled with the thoughts of a teenage girl being raped by a gang of hoodlums. It faded slowly as consciousness returned, but the horror stayed on. And the worst part was that there wasn't anything he could do. He couldn't call the police; the girl hadn't known the location, but only that it was an old apartment somewhere.

  He spent two hours pacing up and down in his living room, trying to shake it off. Enough remained from the experience to sicken him, even then. And the fact that the girl was far from innocent and had provoked the assault didn't help, any more than her violent wish for a knife rather than for help.

  Harry had read enough about violence, but he'd been far more insulated from it than he thought. This bore no resemblance to what he'd seen on the television screen. Now he knew the reality of it. And he had a flash of precognition that warned him there would be more. This had been the blow that battered down the door his mind had locked over its telepathic powers. From now on, they would increase steadily.

  He still had no idea of how to control them. Apparently he could encourage the powers by relaxing, but once the flash of anything hit him, the most rigid concentration could not turn it off.

  There was supposed to be a censor against the mind's own subconscious thoughts, carefully cutting them off when they were too ugly for the conscious part of the mind. What he needed now was a censor against the thoughts of others. But he could find no evidence for it in himself, nor was there any reason why it should have evolved.

  It must have taken at least half a million years for man to separate himself from the brute within him, and he obviously still hadn't done a very good job of it. Say two thousand generations of humanity had passed while men developed the censor against the inner beast—and while those lacking the power were pushed back by its absence into lower and lower survival values. If the job was still only half done ...

  The chance for a quick development of a telepathic censor didn't look too bright. Unless the conscious-unconscious censor could take over the job...

  He spent most of the rest of the night reading through the books on psychology he'd always meant to look at. But they weren't very helpful. No two writers seemed to agree, and there were a number who regarded the whole Freudian concept of a censor or any separation between conscious and unconscious as nonsense.

  If he'd had to learn engineering from books as conflicting and vague as that, he'd still probably be thinking that a wheel should be triangular. The mind was the most important mechanism that man had to deal with, but the knowledge about it predated the phlogiston theory.

  Nothing the next night was
so bad, partly because he'd deliberately worn himself out physically to deaden his senses. But toward morning, vague feelings of distress and violence began to disturb him. He was just awakening when he found his mind linked to a man in the middle of a bad LSD trip.

  Harry had never been seduced by drugs. He liked reality generally too well to want to distort it, and he had too much respect for his mind to try inducing any measure of temporary insanity in it. But after even this secondhand experience, he found it impossible to understand how anyone could deliberately risk such a thing. It wasn't the first bad trip the man had had, either; there were memories of even worse experiences.

  Abruptly, Harry realized with complete certainty that he would take LSD—more than a single time and always with the intention of causing the most unpleasant reactions!

  "Like hell I will," he told himself. He wasn't the type to go that way.

  But he knew better. And he knew that he was going to have to accept the knowledge now or else give up all his new certainty in precognition. It either worked and he took it for granted, or he'd been a fool to base the whole business with Sid and König on it. He couldn't have it both ways.

  In the end, he accepted his flash of precognition, abhorrent as it was, with the reservation that there had to be some good reason for his future behavior. He couldn't precog the reason, but that didn't matter. There had been many things which he had considered horrible while still a child that now were among his pleasures—from eating snails to entertaining girls. Horrible risks then were now pleasant games—and some previous games now seemed dangerous and stupid. He decided that his older self must have more experience than he now had and that he must trust his more mature judgment.

  Something seemed to dart toward his mind then in a shocking blow of mockery and laughter. He lifted his hand as if warding off a blow, but it was gone almost instantly, leaving only a vague sense of alien wrongness behind.