A thin feeling of a multitude of other minds was a faint wash under his thoughts. Fear, anger, hate—such emotions were bubbles breaking sharply on the dark surface. There was an ugliness to humanity, but greater experience had taught him to sense and admire the potential for development and greatness and to discount the animal that still lay in the racial background. Then a clear, clean thought touched his mind.
It came from a boy who had just begun to realize his mutant powers and had found a girl recently with the same ability. So far there was no precognition of madness; that would almost certainly come later. Now the flame of the boy's mind burned cleanly and with a strange sweetness that seemed almost the perfect development of the human potential Harry cherished.
He leaned forward to pour another coffee, considering the nature of his kind again. His experience was limited to a rather small number, and most of them had been old enough to have grasped the evil of what seemed to be their inevitable destiny. What were the mutants really like initially?
Surprisingly, he found that screening out normal thoughts and opening himself only to the thoughts of other mutants was much easier than he could have expected from the uncertain theories he had formed. If thoughts were radiated on some strange spectrum of frequencies, then the mutants used a different polarization or band, though there was an overlap between that and the normal frequency range. When he groped for their thoughts, they stood out easily from the great background of the rest of humanity. His reach was still limited, but it was great enough now to take in most of the five boroughs of the city.
The number of such minds he could sense was only a tiny fraction of the population, but it was higher than he had expected. There were many with only a trace of the power, as if even the third generation had not fully stabilized the mutation. Most of them were young.
Harry realized the reason for that youthfulness bitterly. Death or the blow of insanity lay just beyond the border of youth, waiting to destroy or burn out the abilities in shocking horror. Even a quick sampling showed him no reason to doubt the pessimism engendered by his months of investigation. There was not even a single mind he could reach that had passed into maturity without the shadow of madness; he could find none that had gone beyond that madness to a cure.
Neither was there even one other that was aware of an Alien Entity. Many had some cloudy horror in the future, but all could be explained easily as a part of their own mad fantasies. Again, Harry was forced to decide that he was at least currently alone in risking his future mind to some kind of demoniac possession.
Once or twice, he sensed a faint response, as if the other mind felt his probing, and he drew himself back quickly. But in most cases, the others seemed to have weaker power than his, and he could keep from transmitting to them.
A thumping headache made him stop finally. His brain felt as if he had been stretching it through some rough knothole. He found aspirin and took it with another cup of coffee, considering what he had learned.
There had been evil out there—but far less than he had feared. A very few of the mutant minds were perverted, mostly from the second generation; there was a texture that identified each generation of evolution among them. One of these had been only a slightly lesser evil than Ziggy, but that mind had already gone far into helplessness. In fact, so far as Harry could tell, there had been no really dangerous menace from any of the mutants until they had begun degenerating into psychoses of various types. Even then, they usually suffered from persecution beliefs and were dangerous only to those immediately and intimately connected with them.
Harry's ethical question was answered, at least generally. The mutation represented no basic danger to humanity from wild powers; rather, it seemed that the natural empathy of the mutants led them forward in the great climb upward from the dark animal background of mankind. The few precocious children who had enough power to be detected had been singularly free from the rest of humanity.
If that could be preserved ...
Harry sighed, feeling the old pressure of problems that must be solved and for which there were no solutions. The only sure way to produce stability in the mutants would be to bring up the children without the twists of the conflict with normal society. But that would require a first generation of stable adults to lead them, which could only be produced by stable leadership during their childhood years!
It was hard enough for normal children to grow into maturity, even now. Yet they had the experience of thousands of generations of adults to guide them, and they were surrounded all their lives by those who had already made the change.
He felt Ellen's mind reaching for him. She had partially wakened and groped for him, to find his side of the bed empty. Now she was seeking him.
He sent a reassuring message and rinsed his cup and the pot, then turned toward the bedroom. She had already moved in her sleep, making room for him. He slipped in carefully, turning toward her and placing an arm lightly over her, while he felt her thoughts slide down toward the relaxation of deeper sleep.
To his surprise, his own mind seemed to begin relaxing almost at once. After all the coffee and strain, he had expected to lie awake for hours. But as he caught her sleep rhythms in his mind, his own patterns quieted and fell into sync with hers.
There was another pattern imposed on his mind when he fought his way up from sleep three hours later. He was gasping for breath, and tears were streaming from his eyes, while his heart leaped frantically. Then he caught control and forced his own mind to take over.
"Harry! Oh, Harry, not yet!" It was Ellen's scared cry from beside him.
He mastered himself and shook his head. "It isn't my madness," he assured her, opening his mind enough to convince her.
It had been a woman mutant's mind that he had not even contacted before. And it had forced itself on him during its first realization that the long-expected madness was falling on it—a moment of rational clarity more dreadful than the aberrations of the past few days. It was the final end of the hope that had persisted, despite all precognition, that somehow it could never happen to her.
Through that despair, he could recognize the same foolish hope in himself. For three months he had known with absolute certainty that dark madness must cut him off from the future, yet always there had been a basic hope that it must not be, could not be—nothing like that could happen to him!
He thrust the thoughts from him and turned to comforting Ellen. She was not deceived by the change in his thoughts, but sensed his desires for her; as usual, she tried to follow his wishes, willing herself to accept the sleep rhythms he was trying to impose on her brain. In a few minutes it worked. She lay sleeping again, though vagrant flashes of thoughts indicated that the trouble was only postponed. He slipped from the bed and dressed quietly, to return to the kitchen table. He didn't want coffee this time, but habit sent him through the motions of making it. He sat, toying with the cup and considering this new development
He had brought it on himself this time, he realized. In forcing himself to seek other mutant minds from the general flood of thoughts, he had extended his talents one more step—as the ache in his brain should have warned him, since similar headaches had accompanied the other advances. He could still keep out all but the faintest awareness of normal minds, even without conscious control, but the stronger flood of mutant thoughts was now separated and would continue to plague him until his mind learned slowly to blank it down with the other thoughts. He was aswim again in a constantly intruding sea of outside thoughts and impressions.
Even as he sat considering the new situation, the thoughts poured into his awareness. There was an orphan girl in the Bronx wondering how she could explain the slip that had revealed her knowledge of her foster-father's embezzling. A young father in Brooklyn was trying to find some way of explaining to his son why other children in the school must never know of what he could do. A couple across the river in New Jersey were almost calmly planning how they would choose death before their madness rende
red them helpless. A surgeon in one of the great hospitals was sitting up through the night seeking some means to convince his fellows that the symptoms he had read in a patient's mind were real.
And in Delaware, Bud Coleman suddenly screamed!
Harry cut that off before the whole picture came to him. The distance should have made reception of it impossible, but some random matching had brought the flash into his mind too strongly for any error in recognition. Mercifully, there was no repetition, nor any other evidence of longdistance telepathy. He could not have taken more than a brief moment of such frantic, unalloyed rapture.
Harry considered and rejected the use of the mind-dulling effects of alcohol. There was too little time left for him to waste any of it in besotted maundering; better the fight to preserve his own thoughts through the turmoil of other impressions than to deaden himself again. At least he had one advantage; at this time, most people were sleeping. He had less to contend with during the first and most difficult hours of learning to handle it
He was sweating it out slowly, drawing on what little he knew of how he had developed a screen against normal thoughts. He began suppressing all outside influences, even the awareness of Ellen. And little by little, he seemed to gain some control. By the time dawn was lighting the kitchen window faintly he felt he had achieved progress.
Then he permitted himself to relax and let the cramped muscles that had accompanied his mental struggle flex and loosen.
The thoughts came flooding back, now in greater number as those who had been sleeping began to waken and resume their daytime worries. He could almost blank them out by effort—but it took most of his ability to do so, leaving him little energy to think about anything else.
He heated the coffee he had been unconsciously wanting for the last hour, and the familiar sound of Ellen getting up and going to the bathroom registered on his mind. The old patterns of daily life were oddly comforting. For a moment, things seemed almost normal. The unwelcome external thoughts were still registering, but they were now buried under the familiar patterns of his own thinking.
Then abruptly, just as he was sitting down to his coffee, there was another presence in his mind.
This was no demoniac possession. There was no horror of an Alien Entity, no fear. It was a calling to him that he knew he could reject. But he felt no need to thrust it away.
There was a great wave of something utterly strange that drew his whole psyche to it and dismissed all other intrusions as if they had been erased from existence. Harry felt a sense of incredible distances and tremendous chasms that separated the background of the presence from anything he had ever known. It seemed to be faint and unsteady, yet with an aura of immense certainty and power behind it.
There were no words, no pictures. Whatever it was must be so utterly nonhuman that no direct concepts could bridge the differences between them. Yet there was a sense of supporting warmth behind it and a friendliness that no lack of conceptual symbol could conceal. There was loneliness, too—a vast, compelling surge of desire for contact that seemed to cry out across the gulfs between.
It lingered in his mind for a few seconds and then began to sigh away, carrying with it a disappointment free of all resentment and leaving an implied promise to return again—to try and keep trying—but after the passage of some time that Harry could only translate from his emotional response into long years.
Ellen was standing in the door, staring at him, and he turned to her quickly. "Did you hear it?"
"No." She shook her head, gazing at him in perplexity. "I caught something in your mind, but it was..." She stopped, and he felt her total lack of understanding.
The flood of external thoughts had returned, demanding his conscious control to suppress them. Now he let himself receive them, searching for any other awareness of the signal. There was none. No other mind seemed to have been touched. Yet he was absolutely sure that the presence had been no aberration of his own mind. Even in total insanity, he could have conceived of nothing like it.
"What was it, Harry?" Ellen asked.
He shook his head, desperately trying to recall the feeling of the presence that was fading from his mind so quickly.
"Total sanity!" he told her. "Somewhere, somehow, some race has gained all our powers and has learned to stay sane—incredibly sane and healthy. My God, how long they must have been sane and in full control! Ellen, it can be done!"
Then the doubts returned to him. Somewhere, it had been done—once! Somewhere in the universe, there were not only Alien Entities who preyed on minds but also beings who had not failed. But the impression of loneliness had carried a bitter knowledge with it, implying that the achievement was unique. How many races around how many stars had found their way to extrasensory powers, only to be taken over or to fail as the pressures of their social heritage drove those with talents into madness? How many geniuses must have fought for the answer—and failed? He tried to brush his mind free and think again, to use the new knowledge that success was possible as a stepping-stone to the answer. But now the other mutant minds were busy throughout the city, brushing their thoughts against his, wearing away his ability to concentrate on any line of reasoning except the deliberate control needed to keep them out—a control that took so much effort that he had too little reserve for clear thinking.
The thought that had been building for hours came then, unexpectedly, though logically following his earlier acceptance. It was a hopeless chance, but...
Ellen gasped, dropping the glass of orange juice as she read his mind. "No, Harry! No, not that way!"
His own fears echoed her misery. But there was no other hope now.
XIII. POWER
The twenty-four-hour timer indicated that it was two o'clock in the morning as it turned on a heater under a small pot of water. A short time later the water began to boil and a buzzer sounded. Charles Grimes groaned and fumbled for the switch, then began forcing himself up. He soaked a tea bag in the water, waited a moment, and sipped the hot brew. As it took effect, he reached for his glasses and started dressing.
There had been a time when he hadn't needed the tea and when he had been instantly eager to begin his nightly trip. Now it was only a ritual through which he dragged his protesting body. Still, habits carried him to the waiting elevator, and his fingers shook only slightly as he turned a key in the slot below the row of buttons.
The private elevator dropped smoothly, the lights indicating the floors they passed. The last light went out, and the elevator sank one more level, where no other could come. The door opened, and Grimes trudged down a short hallway. He fumbled with another elaborate lock, stepped through, and sealed the heavy door behind him.
Fifteen years had passed since he first bought this building. The contractors who had dug this small subbasement room for him must have long since forgotten all the details. No one else had ever known, unless some damned freak had read his mind, despite his efforts never to think of this when one was around.
Fifteen years! He had never missed a night here, whether sick or well. He knew it was folly beyond belief, yet he had persisted and would continue to persist, probably until they buried him. He had nothing else. Not that he deserved better. Any man who gave his heart to a bunch of freaks and their kids deserved what he got.
He sank into a comfortable chair in one corner of the raw concrete walls of the room, resting his eyes on the only other visible feature. The floor was a massive slab of cement. In the center of it, resting on multiple layers of rubber and felt, was a low pedestal. A platform from an expensive record player topped that, beautifully sprung to absorb vibration. And on that sat a bell jar of glass, as highly evacuated as the best vacuum pumps could accomplish. It should be a good vacuum, he thought; getting the equipment in here had cost him enough once.
Inside the jar, a short rod of grounded copper stuck up, with a marble-sized ball of styrofoam resting at the top in a shallow depression. It was the lightest object possible. It rested there so secu
rely that no vibration had ever reached it to jar it from its position. Yet it could be toppled by the force of a grain of dust striking it, if any dust could have reached it.
No other equipment showed, and the room seemed otherwise bare. The beam of light that the ball cut off from an opposite electric eye came from a hole too small to notice, and the cameras and recording devices that monitored it were only small windows in the walls.
Grimes got up, groaning faintly as a twinge of sciatica hit him. By ritual, he went to the concealed doors and began checking the monitor tapes and recorders. Nothing showed there, though his routine tests showed that the machinery was functioning perfectly. That was as it should be.
Once he had thought that the ball wavered. He had gone up to his suite then in an ecstasy of achievement. But the next night, when a measure of sense returned, he had checked his monitors to find only unwavering straight lines from their pens. He had accepted the evidence, to realize that it was only his own mind that had wavered under his inner pressure. Since then, he had permitted no such wish-fallacies to disturb his mental efforts.
He sat down in the old chair again, resting his body against its cushions, letting his head relax back comfortably, and centering his eyes on the small white ball. He no longer needed a clock to check his hour of ritual.
He had gone through every phase of effort. He had tried total concentration, mind-controlling phrases from the mystics, and blank relaxation. Now he merely triggered the thought of his desire in his mind and let his head fill with whatever else might come into it.
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