Pstalemate

by Lester Del Rey

  He nodded, letting the memories of his childhood creep up slowly from the blocked area where the barrier had finally broken. Most of them were still incomplete. But Martha Bronson had been a lovely woman—as cold and lovely as an ancient statue. And Harry's father had been a handsome man. He was still attractive enough, though the face that the world knew now as Dr. Philip Lawson was far more furrowed than Harry remembered it.

  "So that is the end of their roads," Harry said harshly.

  For his mother, madness that was a horrid blaze to equal all the icy reserve that had been her sanity. And for her, even madness had not blotted out all of her psi ability but had left shreds of it to point up the decay of her soul and to make her aware of the ugliness of her fate.

  And for his father, as he now recognized the man...

  Philip Bronson had been perhaps the most gifted surgeon of his time, aided by the extrasensory abilities that he had used with the most scrupulous ethics for the aid of those who needed his skills. Now, as Philip Lawson, he was cured of his madness—and of all that had been great within himself.

  Harry remembered the doctor's house with its glaring neon sign and the man's pitiful cynicism about his own unethical practice, his need to denigrate himself in order to avoid a rejection of his invitation by the son he no longer dared to admit was his.

  Those were the two alternates for most of those with the mutant gifts they had never sought and could not put aside. And for himself and Ellen, after two more months ...

  XI. HATE

  Back in the living quarters, Gordon could hear Kim putting the youngest boy to bed, and his face lighted briefly at the familiar sounds. Then he sobered again, to go on with his slow pacing across the floor of the room he had turned into an office. Almost idly, he noticed that his hip was hurting worse tonight. Mostly now, he didn't notice it; after the bullet had shattered the joint, ending his career on the force, the doctors had done a great job rebuilding it. Maybe it was the weather.

  He knew better, however. And he knew it wasn't the day spent out in the worst slums of Newark. That had reminded him a little too much of the shack in which he'd been born, before his mother managed to move up North to Harlem, but those weren't all bad memories. A kid can enjoy almost anything, particularly when his friends are no better off. There hadn't been television then to tell them how the other folks lived.

  Maybe he should drop this damned case. His suspicions were beginning to make him goofy. But young Bronson was a good man to work for, and he paid promptly and without kicks. It was steady money—steady work for almost a month now—and he'd need that for the lean periods.

  Kim came in with fresh glasses for the tiny bar in the office, and he smiled again for her benefit. She was the only good thing that had come out of that mess in Korea to which they'd sent him by a trick, just when he'd finally been promised the law school scholarship. That had ended his first set of dreams. It was too late for more schooling when he'd come back with Kim and a young son—and they'd tried to make a stink about that, until his colonel fixed it for him. So there bad been fourteen years with New York's finest, before the bullet from the young punk got him.

  He heard the sound of steps outside the door he'd had installed to his office and headed for it before the buzzer sounded. "Keep your nose clean," he told himself. It had always been his motto, and now was no time to forget it. What lay behind Bronson's job was none of his business. Maybe he couldn't help getting some hints, but he didn't have to work at figuring it out.

  "Sorry to keep you so late," Bronson apologized as he entered.

  "You're paying for it," Gordon told him, grinning quietly in the automatic response. But it came hard this time. "Everything's on my desk, so you might as well sit there. Unless you want to take the papers with you?"

  He knew the answer to that, of course. Bronson would want him around while the reports were studied. Sometimes there were side bits that came up only in discussion which seemed important to the client. He watched the man slip behind the desk and forced himself onto the couch at the side of the room, putting himself out of Bronson's direct line of sight—as if that made any difference.

  Then he couldn't sit still. "How about a drink?"

  Bronson nodded absently, and Gordon moved over to the bar, dragging out freshly cleaned glasses and the ice bucket Kim had filled. Bourbon or scotch?

  "Scotch and water will be fine," Bronson answered.

  The only trouble was that Gordon hadn't asked it aloud. He'd shouted it in his mind, but no sound had passed his lips.

  So now he knew. Now all his guesses were confirmed.

  He finished making the drink by muscular habit. His own drink was simpler; he left it neat. And he was pleased that his hand steadied enough to put Bronson's glass down before the man without making a noise. His hip was killing him now, but he got back to the couch and sank onto it without letting the groan pass his lips.

  Mind readers! A bunch of crazy mind readers! A damned bunch of honky mind readers!

  He tried to clip the word out of his thoughts, but it stuck there. Sure, he knew it didn't mean anything. It was just corrupted Swahili, where the word had meant simply white.

  "You let me hear you say that word one more time, I gonna tan you white as snow." His tired mother's voice echoed in his mind, and there was the stench of garbage from the street, the drip of water down the scrofulous wall where the plumbing above leaked, the tap-tapping of the collector's hard, unworn heels down the ancient hall. Honky!

  Now they got them this mind-reading trick. Who got it? Honkies got it, that who. We not good enough for that. Ain't no honky gonna give a thing like that to no nigger.

  Gordon drained half his glass, and the sharp bite of the bourbon cut through his self-mockery for a moment. But it couldn't still the thoughts; it could barely kill the ancient street language.

  Mutations, of course. He'd read about such things; he could guess from his investigations that it had to be the answer. White mutations. There would be no mind-reading genes from his black ancestry and none from Kim's ancient heredity. Harry Bronson and his white wife could have a dozen kids, and they could all read minds. But little Timmy in his bed and Buzz and Trina—there was no magic for them. They didn't have honky parents to give them the inside track from the day they were born. Let one of them put a bullet through a white man's hip and see how lenient the judge would be!

  He grunted in self-disgust and downed the rest of his liquor. Damn it, the punk had been white, but he'd been trying to shoot Gordon's partner, who was also white; it was only the drug-deprived shakes that had sent the bullet into black flesh. And the white men at the draft board who'd fouled up his student deferment hadn't even known he was black.

  He'd had too many white friends and too many good experiences with white men to hate them. He'd gotten over all that nonsense before Korea was done. He'd sworn to his mother on her deathbed that he didn't hate anyone, and he'd meant it. He'd lived it, too.

  Bronson threw aside a paper in a disgusted manner and glanced up to where Gordon was sitting. He muttered something, too low to be heard.

  And Gordon found himself on his feet, starting to nod his head in the old gesture. "Yes, sir, boss," he felt his lips shaping silently. Yes, boss; you right, boss; thank you, boss.

  And even up here in the North, when he was already twelve: "I catch you scowl like that again at white folks, I lick you down to bones, you hear me? You better hear me good. 'Cause I don't bring me up no sassy kids, not here nor nowhere! White folks speak to you, you smile and you act polite." Twelve? Other memories came back from the time when he was in the last year of high school, coming home with one of his few white teammates. "Don't you ever 'man' nobody! Ever! Don't make no difference, they call you 'boy.' Don't make no difference you don't mean nothing, all in fun, all that stuff. You don't 'man' him, you hear?"

  And now they were in his mind. Couldn't even "man" them there anymore. Sure, looked like they might flip after a while, but meantimes they had
him by the balls for certain. And someday, when they got the bugs ironed out of the mutation, they'd have an edge nobody could beat. Equal rights then for sure—equal for all honkies!

  He hobbled to the window, fighting the scream that was building up inside him. Out there, the light was out; it was almost black on the street—black and dirty and bare. His street—his one way street to nowhere.

  Gordon bent forward, swaying with what was in his guts too deep to let out. And from somewhere, there was an arm around his shoulder and a white hand was gripping him and holding him.

  He turned slowly, burying his head against Bronson's white shoulder, beating his black hands against his thighs, sick with hate for the hate that he thought he'd lost half a lifetime before.

  XII. ALIEN

  The afternoon session of the symposium on chemical psychopathology was starting, and some of the crowd of learned men were beginning to move toward the lecture room or away on business of their own. Harry found no one left whom he'd hoped to meet. He looked at his watch, sighed in the habit he had begun developing, and headed for the bar.

  Time, he thought bitterly. It was a constant weight on his thoughts now. The months had dwindled down, leaving only a few days ahead for the impossible task. How many days was uncertain, but the number was too small. For some reason, neither he nor Ellen could pinpoint the exact date of the final break into madness; it was as if the whole subject left a vagueness around itself through which no sharp insight could be had. But the date was horribly close.

  He found Dr. Hirsch nursing a sixth katinka and exuding importance together with an odor of apricot brandy. The psychiatrist looked up vaguely as Harry approached. The man who had undertaken the treatment of a shocked and amnesiac boy had proved to be only a bore, not the terror that memory painted him. He had been almost pathetically pleased at being remembered when he received Harry's note. Now he had served his purpose in introducing his former patient to the other psychologists and psychiatrists attending, and he was entitled to a polite leave-taking, even if he was too foggy to appreciate it.

  "Ah." Hirsch tapped his second finger five times against the table, then nodded. "Ah, yes. Bronson. Learn anything? Not that you could, with all those—ah, chemists—taking up the whole morning. No sensitivity there, my boy. All technical jargon and formulas. Can't put the human mind into a test tube or paper progress reports, I always say." He switched to his index finger and tapped out another five strokes. "Ah, umm. Did I give you a copy of that article I did on your case?"

  Harry reassured him, made his thanks, and got away as quickly as he could. The lecture room was half full as he passed it, though few seemed to be listening to the talk on serotonin precursors. There was a new table covered with brochures from the drug firms, but Bob Gordon had already collected everything pertinent the day before and would be tracing any leads in them through experts.

  Ellen joined him in the lobby, her mind nestling comfortably against his as he took her arm. Automatically, they searched each other's thoughts for anything that might have been useful, then gave up together. She had circulated around among the lesser men while he had used his introductions to stay close to the inner group who were considered important by their fellows. But the morning's work had been another waste of time.

  It had been a forlorn hope at best, once their first quick scan of the meeting had proved that no mutant was among them. Statistically, there should have been at least one man trained in psychology who was either a mutant or sufficiently empathetic to understand and offer help in the solution of their problem. It was another case of looking for expert assistance, once they recognized their own limitations as amateurs.

  In this matter, however, there seemed to be no experts. The men attending the conference were singularly blank to empathy and totally lacking in any extrasensory talents. Apparently their very lack of such abilities to understand their fellow human beings had led them to the futile, formal study of some branch of psychology. And if any of them had treated patients who were mutants, their minds contained no sign that they had recognized any difference from standard psychoses. Certainly there was no hint of any curative techniques beyond palliation that must fail or shock treatments that were too drastic to permit the mutated powers to survive.

  All roads seemed to end in blind alleys. Gordon's shock of discovery had been disturbing but had proved to be fortunate in the long run; once the initial hostility had been drained, his deeper understanding of what was wanted had greatly expedited their work together. Yet the results had been only an increase in the number of proven failures. Coleman's list had been expanded, and still there was no evidence of any cured case. Even the reports of the mystics and cultists had been examined, with a few additions to the number of real mutants, but without other progress. Those who had enough talent to be considered mutants either died young—sometimes suspiciously—or ended in the maze of insanity. There seemed to be no exceptions.

  In a way, perhaps, that had one good side result. There were none left to become prey to any Alien Entity, so he had gradually accepted the idea that no possession had yet been completed. But that was cold comfort. It might be a sign of incipient paranoia for him to assume that he was either the first or the only one facing such a threat, but it seemed to fit what facts he had. Other mutants had felt some grotesque danger from which their minds must flee, but their fears had come in the form of devils, humans, and fantasies that bore no relation to the alienness he had faced briefly.

  A tension in Ellen broke into his guarded thoughts. He had been lightly linked into her mind, letting her guide him along the street while his concealed thoughts moiled over his worries. They had long since found that one mind was enough to cope with such automatic things as moving along streets. Now he became aware that they were mixed into the crowds on Forty-second Street; her unease was somehow related to that. He started to probe gently, but she shook her head and motioned to the approaching bus.

  Normally, he would have insisted on a cab. Buses had always made him somewhat uncomfortable, though he knew that Ellen often took them when he didn't drive her around. He caught a slight insistence in her thoughts, together with some carefully veiled fear. With a shrug, he followed her to an empty seat toward the rear.

  By the time the bus turned up Eighth Avenue he was uncomfortably aware of the reason for her insistence. The seats had filled rapidly, and some riders were standing. But the seats behind and before him had remained vacant. When they finally filled, their occupants seemed curiously uncomfortable; the fat man ahead of him turned to stare back at Harry, seemingly puzzled at finding nothing objectionable. At the next stop, he hastily moved to another seat that had been vacated.

  Somehow during the long weeks, Harry's mind had developed an ability to shut out almost all of the thoughts around him. Now he lifted the screen slightly, then hastily slipped it back. The brief flash had been enough; there were no specific reasons, but around him were unease and uncertain feelings of hostility beyond the normal human resentment of all strangers. And as the bus began to empty, the nearby seats were again vacant.

  "Then I'm not getting psychotic?" Ellen asked. It was obvious that she had noticed the reactions around her for some time and had been afraid that it was a private obsession of her own, a prelude to madness.

  He sent a feeling of reassurance toward her, but he was more disturbed than he tried to seem.

  One of the standard psychoses was a feeling of being hated or resented by those around one. But suppose the reaction was justified by the facts? By the time a paranoid was detected there was a good chance that his conduct really had made people around him resent him. Was his belief still psychotic? And was there any solid evidence that the belief had come before the fact?

  Human animals resented those who did not conform to their ideas of proper humanity, as the construction workers had proved in their attacks on the so-called hippies of this city. It wasn't a matter of ideology, either, or they'd have had dozens of other targets; it was
a subtler matter of style and manner. And sometime recently, Ellen and he had apparently developed attitudes that set them apart, perhaps by developing a true bond between themselves that could not be shared by most of humanity. Now they were rejected. Soon, perhaps, they would be targets for open hostility.

  Was that one of the pressures on the mutants that made madness inevitable? Harry couldn't be sure. There was a simpler reason, anyhow. His reading had made it plain that there was one circumstance more certain to induce mental breakdown than any other: Given a problem that must be solved and no possible solution, almost all individuals were forced into madness. When the madness was itself the problem without solution...

  Ellen gasped, and her hand caught his, just as her mind closed down to a nearly impenetrable knot of disgust. But the brief flood of surprise had carried enough intelligence to him for him to rise with her and follow her as she made for the exit door.

  A wizened little man was just getting on the bus. Deepset slitted eyes were darting about. They spotted Ellen and came to rest, while a flood of terrorized speculation flashed through the distorted mind.

  Harry had already caught Ellen's knowledge that this was the twisted creature whose evil thoughts had bothered her in the library. The man had obviously recognized her, and his mind was broadcasting a message of hate and of suspicion that she was following him. He was starting toward her as the exit door finally began to open.

  Harry caught the beginning of a thought and turned quickly to meet the enraged eyes. Once, getting fully into Ellen's mind—even with her consent—had been difficult. Time and practice seemed to have improved his power. Now his mind met the barrier, broke through into the twisted mind, and husked it in one fleeting scan. He felt it try to strike back at him mentally, met the attack, and concentrated his own thoughts into a lightning riposte. Then he was stepping from the bus while the little man stopped and stumbled to a seat in abject fear.