Pstalemate

by Lester Del Rey

  That day the telepathic awareness of violence began to increase, even while he was awake. But toward evening he was learning to suppress most of the strength of the emotions by refusing to feel them, much as he could suppress his awareness of boring conversation by mentally closing his ears to it. It gave him his first hope, indicating that he might eventually come to terms with even the violence-polluted mental environment of Manhattan. But it didn't always work.

  How could a man walk past a building in which a young father and mother were beating an infant brutally? Harry had known from the news that such things happened and had wondered why they were not immediately reported. Now he knew how hopeless it was; he had no evidence, nor any way to get into the place in time to collect such evidence. Or what could he do about the subtler violence of a mother destroying a girl's love for a man with vicious lies because she also wanted him?

  He found to his surprise that the course of wisdom was not to travel in the better neighborhoods, but rather to pick the poorer sections. Somehow, there seemed to be an apathy to the violence he found in poverty that made its impact easier to screen from his thoughts.

  When Sid's call came, it confirmed the reality of precognition. König had practically fallen on Sid's shoulders and wept for joy. The man had been searching for him, afraid some other company had already negotiated. Now the option was signed with money due shortly, and it was almost certain that a formal contract would be ready when the engine passed a few simple tests that Harry knew it could take easily. And Sid had a salary as a consultant. Well, at least Sid was happy.

  Harry tried to share the pleasure, but it wasn't what it should have been. He finally climbed into his car and headed out to the shop. Things tended to be rather bad on the highway; apparently, there was something about driving that brought out the brute in most people. But it was at least an inner violence, with little chance for its outward expression. Once at the shop, the level dropped to a bearable background, probably because there were fewer people around and they were further from him, weakening the signals.

  He spent the day and night working on various ideas that might yield some kind of screen against whatever it was that served as mental radiation. It was strictly hunt-and-try tinkering, since he had no body of facts and useful theories against which to design. Neither conductors nor nonconductors seemed to help. He collected a small amount of semiconductor material and tried that, but either it was not enough or the stuff was useless—probably useless, he decided.

  Putting assorted frequencies and wave forms into a loop around his head worked no better. He hadn't really expected to be able to heterodyne or interfere with thoughts, but the idea had been used enough in science fiction stories to make him try it; sometimes the writers hit on a good idea by accident.

  He was tempted to stay away from New York, since that offered some relief. But Ellen had promised to get in touch with him, and her only chance to find him was at his apartment He finally piled into the Citröen and headed back.

  He found a partial answer in his apartment that evening. It came in a bottle marked as a product of Scotland. Alcohol seemed to cut the level of thought down almost directly in proportion to the amount he drank. By the time he was too polluted to take his shoes off before he went to bed, he was as dead to anything psychic or psionic as he'd been during the halcyon days before Lawson hypnotized him.

  He paid for it the next day, however. The hangover was bad enough, but the nerve irritation that was left from the alcohol made every message his mind picked up stab through him with at least double the normal intensity.

  He took care of that with the hair of the dog, but this time he controlled it, keeping himself to a mild state of inebriation that didn't seriously interfere with his thinking but still cut the impulses down enough so that he could control his reaction to most of them.

  Maybe man's ancient craving for alcohol had a reason no one had suspected. All men might have faint traces of telepathic power; there was some evidence in the way mobs reacted with positive feedback, doing things that no individual in the crowd would have condoned. If so, humanity must be awash in a sea of all the ugliness that had been thought of since time began. And those slightly more sensitive must have found the anodyne of alcohol irresistible. Harry wasn't too fond of the theory, but he filed it away for future thought.

  He knew that in his own case he was going to have to cut back on drinking shortly. It was a temporary stopgap, at best. The only real solution must come from developing a tolerance to the things that impinged on his mind. And in that, he thought, there was some evidence that he was making progress. A little girl crying over the puppy that had been run over wasn't nearly as bad as it would have been a couple of days before.

  It was battle reaction, of course. Men had long experience in learning to live with extreme violence. It was perhaps an ugly adjustment, but one that had been necessary for the survival of the race. Now its ancient strength was working on him. Maybe a man lost something when he overcame his early fear and horror of all painful things; but without the change in values, life would be too horrible to face.

  At the end of the week he tried getting along without alcohol. It wasn't pleasant, but he found it possible. And for a time, things began to look up again, except for the fact that Ellen hadn't called.

  Now a new phenomenon began, as if there were no end to the tricks his evolving mind could conjure up. He began to have vague bits and snatches of memory about the time before he was ten.

  His father remained a formless and faceless person to him, but he seemed to remember talking over some great distance with the man. It wasn't like a telephone conversation, but warmer, more personal. Then there were bits and scenes that apparently involved some little girl he had played with—something about a canceled birthday party, a doll that fell in a creek, and a walk with a very old man who might have been his grandfather. He would have welcomed this beginning of an end to the block to his memories, except that some of the recall was ugly.

  His mother remained a void in his memory. But there were sounds of horrible things said in a female voice and replies from what could only be his father. Sometimes those were tired and unhappy, sometimes as ugly as the woman's words. He could never recapture much, it seemed; but he could "hear" his own name a few times, and it wasn't pleasant.

  Most of the details were still locked away, and there was no order to what came through. It was as if a few cells in his memory were suddenly discharging accumulated loads, each a tiny segment of memory complete with sound and partial sight—a replay, rather than a normal memory.

  Then one bit came through more completely. It was a memory he had seemed to carry with him through his amnesia, though he'd never been sure it was real until now.

  He was standing on something—stairs, a rock, or a ladder. And all around him were flame and the greedy sound of fire. Smoke was in his nose, and he was gagging. And over it all came the sound of a woman's voice, alternately ordering him down and crying defiance at something horrible and fearsome but unseen.

  Henry!

  The picture was gone as suddenly as it had come; but his forehead was beaded with cold sweat, and his saliva seemed to pile up thin and bitter in his mouth. He barely made the bathroom in time to be sick convulsively. Even when his stomach was empty, it went on heaving and straining. He collapsed on the floor beside the toilet, letting his forehead rest on the cool tiles there, too weak to move. When a measure of strength returned, it was only to trigger his stomach into more convulsions. He sprawled out again, helpless.

  He was vaguely aware that the telephone had been ringing for some time, off and on. With an unclear hope that it might be Ellen, he managed to prop himself up and reach for the instrument beside the tub.

  "Mr. Bronson!" It was the voice of the woman who must have sent him the note on the clipping—the voice that had been a faint and desperate cry of despair. "Can I help you? I'm downstairs in your building, but your door is locked."

  "Get do
orman to use passkey," he mumbled. "Tell him—Joe sent you!"

  It was a code he'd let a few of his friends have when they wanted to use his apartment for a meeting during his college days. He hoped the right doorman was on duty.

  Then he heard steps in the hall, and he was being lifted from the floor and carried to the bed in the husky arms of the doorman. He brushed off the suggestion of a doctor. "Just drunk, sick hangover," he managed. And it seemed to satisfy the man. He knew it couldn't fool the woman, but he didn't care.

  She was a queer, birdlike little thing, about thirty years old, with lines on her face no young woman should have. She refused to give her name or talk much, though she stayed through the night nursing him. There wasn't much need for words. There was a flow of something without words from her—a flow in which some hidden anguish was almost concealed by compassion.

  She left in the morning, but not before he could ask the one question that was most important "Do you ever get used to it, miss?"

  "For a time," she told him. "And I guess, if you're lucky, you can become resigned. I think my sister did. She was always stronger than I am."

  He caught her hand as she reached for her cloak. "I'd like to see you again—under better conditions. Where?"

  "You can't," she answered. "Tomorrow—I won't be here. You know how I know that. But it's all right They won't get me. I just—won't be here. Good-bye, Mr. Bronson."

  She kissed him on the forehead then, very softly, and vanished down the hall. And he lay numb with the fleeting glimpse of the certainty in her mind. Tomorrow she would be dead. She was almost happy about it.

  There were no more memory incidents during the day. He nursed himself carefully, wondering from time to time at the rest of the picture that lay buried somewhere in his head, horrible enough so that even a small part had sickened him. No wonder he'd blocked the whole off in amnesia. He'd keep it in that limbo, if he could, rather than face what must be lurking back there.

  Even the precognition and telepathy functions seemed to have been dulled by his reaction to the memory. Either that, or he was getting used to things. He found he could relax now; the shrieks and horrors of other minds touched him at times, but somehow more distant and less personal.

  They stayed at that more distant level during the following week. He wasn't sure whether it was that his mind was growing calloused or that something had come to him from the thoughts of the suffering girl. He didn't yet understand enough about telepathy to know whether it was possible, though she seemed to have imposed some kind of conditioning on him that made him avoid the obituaries. She hadn't wanted him to know her fate fully. He never learned.

  She had found the price of her gifts. And whatever it had meant to her, the evil thereof had proved too great

  He was sitting down to breakfast when his own revelation came. He was holding a cup of coffee to his lips, and he barely controlled himself to let the hot liquid spill onto the floor, rather than over his lap. Then he sat frozen in shock.

  It came with the total, absolute certainty that was a part of true precognition.

  It was the horror he had felt weakly behind the suffering and decision of the girl. It was the thing he had sensed in the mind of the woman who had screamed futile defiance while he stood in the flames of his childhood memory. It was a menace that had touched him faintly in his dreams and been blanked away by his waking mind. Now it loomed as appalling reality, a threat against all the future.

  Madness came first. He was going to descend into raging lunacy, as his mother and father had done. There had been no car accident, he knew certainly now. There had been something much worse, in which his own death had been insanely plotted. Now the dark and raging perversions of a mind turning against itself played through him. Beyond that lay only a dark hiatus through which precognition seemed unable to tell him more.

  There had been a feeling of further developments, however, and he strained against the barrier, driven by an involuntary need to know. Abruptly, the darkness ahead seemed to clear briefly.

  It was no longer his own self he felt, but an alien thing, an entity foreign to all he valued of himself! It was the ultimate evil—a demoniac possession, an alienness struggling to take him over, to dissolve his personality and shunt him aside, to use his body as its puppet. And he was helpless before it! Even now it seemed aware of him and was reaching through his telepathic channels for his mind. He felt motives and values so abnormal to his that he could not comprehend them, though everything in him rejected them savagely.

  He wanted to scream, but his mouth was paralyzed in horror. His mind wrenched back and away desperately. Then his connection with the alien entity vanished, though he knew it was somehow still aware of him and waiting.

  Three months, his mind told him with the certainty of precognition. He had barely three months before he must pay for his gifts with madness and with a loss of himself that was far worse than any conceivable dissolution of his personality in death or insanity!

  VII. DOORS

  Ellen Palermo hesitated outside the door to make sure the man was alone inside. She started to knock, then reached out for the knob. As she had known, the door was unlocked, and it opened quietly into the hotel room, now littered with the morning papers. John Cossino sat in the one comfortable chair with his back to her until the door closed. Then he swung around quickly.

  "I'm Ellen Palermo, Mr. Cossino," she told him. "And the position is not filled, and you owe at least something to my father's daughter."

  There was no surprise on his dark, urbane face. He merely nodded. "I guess I expected something like this, Ellen. And I was always Johnny to you in the old days. I left the door unlatched, you know."

  "I know, Johnny. And I guess I know it won't do any good. But I have to try."

  They billed his act as the best-known proof of "mental telepathy" and loaded the puffs with jargon from Rhine's work now. But it was still the same act she'd read about in the old clippings from her father's notebooks. Cossino had trained under her father during some of the last few years, when he'd been only a delivery boy and her father was the retired king of the mentalists. She'd been a child then, but she could remember.

  Now his wife was sick, probably dying slowly, and he had to find a replacement for the act before the next season began.

  "All right, Ellen. So I lied to you on the phone. Sure, the position is still open, though I've got a couple of kids who may make it." He sighed, reaching for a cigar and devoting his attention to that as he went on. "That's better than you could do, honey. Oh, I don't mean looks. You have figure enough, and onstage you could be gorgeous. But you haven't got a chance, though it breaks my heart to say it."

  Her voice came out tighter than she wanted. It didn't seem right to be begging from Johnny. "I still know the routine. Remember, I used to rehearse it with you for my father. And I've kept up—to keep his memory fresh, I guess. Try me out. Johnny."

  "All right." He stood up, gathering his stage presence about him as he moved to the far corner of the room. "Close your eyes, honey. Now. Can you tell me—now concentrate—what I hold in my hand?"

  "A wallet," she said. It was a simple test, though the code was buried in the two letters that keyed it. Nothing obvious in the Palermo system. "I see a wallet—a brown wallet."

  He went on, and she made the responses automatically, but with the pauses and doubts, the sudden certainties of the act still on tap. He called again, taking her off guard this time.

  "Pearls," she said.

  "Pearls, honey," he said. But his face was saddened, and he was shaking his head. "Pearls in my head. But the code didn't say it. There was no code that time. You were doing the real thing—the reason your mother never went into the act, the reason Nick Palermo had to break it up. You're reading minds, not codes. And that won't go."

  No, she knew, it would never do. Audiences sensed things. They liked being cleverly fooled, but if they ever saw a slip that made them think their minds really could be read, th
ey'd panic—and that would hurt the act and every other mentalist act. She'd had that explained long ago by her father. But she couldn't quite give up.

  "You wouldn't have turned me down once."

  He shook his head gently. "No, Ellen. And I'm just as grateful now. But I'm not a kid anymore; I know it wouldn't be kind." He sighed. "If you'd been like the rest of us..."

  "I didn't think you knew about our abilities, Johnny," she said.

  "I knew. I knew from the first few months. It never bothered me. To a green kid like me, what was the difference? Both acts were some kind of magic. Only one I could learn, one I couldn't. Fair enough." He took his seat again, staring at her with troubled eyes. "You used to be an honest kid, Ellen. I figure you wouldn't cheat me unless things were pretty bad. You tap city?"

  She shook her head. "No, I've still got a little money. I don't want a loan—just a job I can hold."

  In the end, she told him the story of her attempt to find her own security. The last job had been her second as a gypsy in a tearoom. And it hadn't worked out. The customers had been delighted at first. Then some got a bit worried—which meant they didn't return. Toward the end she'd even tried to play it safe, but somehow things kept turning up. So she'd been fired, and now the agency was wise and wouldn't send her out.

  "Besides," she had to add in her own defense, "Uncle Charley didn't help. Mrs. Weintraub got edgy when his spies came around asking her questions. She thought I must be some kind of Communist wanted by the FBI."

  Cossino mashed out a cigar. "Yeah, it never works out trying to fake a fake. And I guess old Grimes hasn't changed much. He used to hate everyone—except me. He kind of helped me get started, you know. So what do you do now, honey?"

  "Go back and eat crow. What else?"

  "Yeah, maybe that's best." He stood up, holding out his hand. Then he grabbed her and hugged her. "But, in God's love, keep in touch, honey. Don't forget Johnny again."

  She found a cab at the corner by chance and took it, giving the old address.