Pstalemate

by Lester Del Rey

  They had assured him that be was a complete null in telepathy, and he had accepted the fact. Palermo and Bronson were too eager for more freaks at that time to lie to him. He'd let them stick to their magic while he exercised his own talent in investments and handling money, as well as protected them from all legal troubles. In his own way, damn it, he'd been as good as they were—so good they could never have gotten by without him.

  Yet they hadn't fooled him. Under their outward friendship, they'd never considered him their equal. They'd sneered at him, even when they were murdering themselves, going nuts, and handing their poor kids over to him after their failures. They had power, and he had none. Much good it had done them!

  Phil Bronson had been the worst, acting as if his medical ethics made him superior to a man whose legal code then was as rigid as the ethics of any doctor. He'd seemed changed since they let him out, of course; he couldn't pull ethics anymore, not with his practice. But Grimes had no desire to be fooled again; he'd told Bronson-now-Lawson off when the man came to take back his guardianship. And he'd made it stick.

  Only Palermo had been different. Grimes grimaced bitterly. The thought of the end of that friendship was still too painful for him to dwell on.

  And the kids—damn it, he'd tried. No man could have done more, or gotten less thanks for it. The taint had been too deep. Maybe Martha had been right. She'd called it a taint, and she should have known.

  He shifted on the chair without moving his eyes from the ball. His sigh echoed hollowly in the room. All right, damn it, he'd still make a fool of himself, probably, if they'd let him. If the kids had enough sense to come to him honestly—but they never would. They had power, too. Much good it would do them, either!

  He started to get up, disgusted with his thoughts this evening. Then he shrugged faintly, aware that the hour was not quite up. He dropped back, raising his glance to the ball.

  Hesitantly, the little sphere trembled, seemed to shake, and rolled off the rod to bounce on the bottom of the jar!

  Grimes felt the sweat spring out on his face. His arms clamped onto the chair as if held by steel bands, and his leg muscles ached as he tensed them. There seemed to be a great hollow in the center of his head that grew and swelled, absorbing all bis thoughts. It burst, leaving a greater void behind.

  The little ball had come to rest. Now suddenly it stirred again. It lifted half an inch. It lifted again. This time it moved smoothly upward. It hovered over the rod, then settled precisely into place.

  Grimes let out his breath explosively. His heart was racing, and bis head felt as if it were on fire. His shaking hand on his temple was either too cold or he was running a slight fever. He tore his eyes away, then looked back. The ball still rested on the rod.

  Damned fool! Of course; it had never moved, it was simply where it had always been. He had imagined the whole thing!

  The traces on the monitors denied that. There were wavers and peaks in the inked lines now. And when he turned on the video tape playback, the screen showed the ball falling, bouncing, and finally reversing itself to settle to rest exactly as he'd seen it happen.

  He sighed very softly this time, before beginning a slow circuit of the room. He destroyed the ruled tapes and erased the recording on the video machine. One by one, he turned off the lights and the monitors, until the room was dead and dark. He found the door and went out, leaving it unlocked behind him, to take the elevator back to his suite.

  There was still half a cup of tea. He drank the cold liquid gratefully, before turning to the telephone. There was a long wait after he dialed, but he finally heard a sleepy voice answering his call.

  "Hello, Phil," he said quietly. "Charley Grimes here. I think we'd better get together as soon as you can get here. It looks as if the kids are getting into some kind of trouble."

  XIV. ESCAPE

  Dave Hillery was bubbling with good humor this time, though he had probably not been aroused so early in years. Dawn was his usual bedtime. He handed the packet of drugs to Harry without comment. Any disapproval he felt was buried under his enthusiasm for the real-life game of cops and robbers he seemed to think they were playing. It brought out the adolescent romanticism that probably was responsible for the increasing sales of his badly written books. Harry had told him that no real police were involved, but he preferred not to believe it.

  He almost tiptoed as he led them down the stairs of the old building. The door into the cellar squeaked and howled in protest, and he glanced stealthily around. They went down rickety steps and across piles of garbage to what was left of an outside entrance. There was a narrow alley that Harry had never seen. A battered old Peugeot was standing there, with barely enough room for the doors to open against the tenement walls on either side.

  Dave went to the end of the alley and came back, nodding. "All clear, kids. Good luck, Harry!" He shook his head as Harry started to thank him. "No time, boy! Get going!"

  He darted back into the cellar, still almost on tiptoe, as Ellen got into the driver's seat of the old car Dave had managed to purchase from some friend. She smiled faintly, her depression lifting for the moment. She knew as well as Harry that the one man who had tailed them here was still sitting in his car and keeping only a casual eye on the parked Citroën. He'd followed them so long and with so little reason that he probably hadn't even noticed the large suitcase Harry had been carrying.

  There was little traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel at that hour, except for a few trucks, and no sign that anyone was following them. The car was no longer handsome, but the engine purred happily. Ellen drove steadily, raising the speed to seventy as they reached the turnpike. But her brief amusement had quickly faded. She was doing what Harry had decided must be done, but her disapproval was a sick weight inside her. Yet she had been forced to agree that there was no other path still open. The doom of madness was a threat that might strike at any hour now.

  By the time they shifted to the Garden State Parkway some of the pressure from exterior mutant thoughts began to lift from Harry's mind. Distance was no certain protection, but most of the intruding signals faded back into a vague undercurrent that didn't bother him after a few more miles. He had Ellen stop while they switched places. It was a relief to feel secure enough to drive again without the danger of some violent emotion obtruding at the wrong moment.

  Probably they could have moved openly out to Sid Greenwald's deserted house. But Harry was tired of being followed, and he wanted no more petty annoyances interrupting what had to be done. He hadn't even informed Sid of the move, though that hardly mattered; Sid was doing well in his marriage and his new job under König, and the work on the prototype car left him no time to return to America. Dave had insisted on not knowing their destination, of course, so no one should be able to trace them.

  They stopped at a supermarket to stock up on the provisions that Ellen had listed, then drove on to the house. It lay back down a short dirt road in sad repair, completely surrounded by trees. At the rear was an old Army munitions dump, and the nearest neighbor was cut off by a tangle of trees and underbrush. Sid had never been close to any neighbors socially, and there was a good chance that no one would ever notice that the house was again occupied.

  Ellen gasped when she followed him in, Harry had grown used to it, but his view through her eyes made him realize what a mess it was. Sid had been a sloppy housekeeper at best, and the place had been abandoned to dirt, cobwebs, and dankness for months.

  He was grateful that he'd kept the utility bills paid now. He started the basement dehumidifier and turned on the furnace long enough to take the chill out of the house. When he came back up, she was dressed in rough clothes, already puttering with cleaning equipment. He muttered some vague apology she disregarded. But they both realized that the condition of the house might be a good thing. The work would distract her and keep her attention somewhat away from what she feared. Anything that would prevent her maintaining too close contact with him was something of a blessing. />
  He let his guard relax completely, testing for the presence of any mutant minds nearby. Apparently, he was in better luck than he had dared hope. The only traces he found were from families far enough away to offer little disturbance. By now he was gaining a small measure of automatic control; he might have been able to handle a few intruding thoughts. But the absence of such pressure was the first favorable omen he had found.

  He began clearing out the tiny back room in which he had often slept when visiting Sid. There was a decent rug on the floor. He went about tacking padding over the sharp corners of the windowsills, and he unscrewed the doorknob, removing both its danger and the possibility of opening the door from inside the room. Finally he dragged an overstuffed chair from the living room and placed it on the center of the rug. Satisfied with the safety precautions, he began opening the packet of drugs that Dave had obtained for him. Everything was clearly labeled in Dave's scrawl, to his relief.

  "No!" Ellen's face was pale under a smudge of dirt as she stared at him from the doorway. She started toward him, then caught herself. Her desire to accept his guidance fought briefly with her urge to protect him. Protection won, masked by a small cunning that was totally unlike her. "Lunch will be ready in just a few minutes, Harry. Wait until you've eaten."

  "No," he told her flatly. His own mind was fighting with itself, and he had no time to argue. They'd discussed the fact that the drugs might work better on an empty stomach, and she knew the time limits as well as he did.

  He'd given in to her once already, wasting a day in attempting the only alternative she could suggest. He'd tried sharing minds with her more completely than ever before, forcing his mind down into the horror of the madness she had foreseen for herself. If he could have removed the pressure of the fear of madness that was so much the cause of the insanity itself, she could then have worked on him.

  The effort had failed miserably. Their fear had come together, each mind causing a positive feedback reaction that only fanned the flame of fear until it was unbearable. Then she had barely touched his full memory of the Alien Entity and had exploded apart from him in horror. It had been hours before they could link thoughts at all again.

  The only good that seemed to have come of it was a tiny shred of possible knowledge. From small indications of difference in their precognition patterns, he felt sure that her attack was to come some indeterminate time before his own sense of horror. That factor, together with her persistent belief that his power was greater than hers, had persuaded her that he must be the one who would take the risk of his plan.

  Her eyes pleaded with him a moment more, while her mind threshed about and then surrendered hopelessly. Her shoulders slumped, but her face took on sudden new strength. She threw the mop aside and darted back to find a light chair she could set on the floor facing his.

  "Then you won't lock me out," she told him. "I'll sit here."

  "Seeing it all may be a lot harder than going through it, Ellen. Suppose you can't take it?"

  Her face was a mask of resolution. "I'll take it!"

  He accepted her presence and tried not to think about it. There were a great many other things he chose not to consider, and her decision was only one more slight difficulty. He began his preparations, reviewing all the decisions he had made.

  This was at best like a man in a dark cellar trying to shoot a black cat that probably wasn't there, while armed with an unsafe pistol loaded with buckshot—and without knowledge of which end of the gun to point away from himself.

  He had only the ghost of a theory based on no real evidence—or perhaps it was only a hope that there still was hope. He had started with a wish-dream that there was some way of immunizing the mind against insanity. The body could be made immune to many diseases by small doses of some milder form of the same disease. Why not the mind?

  There was nothing in any of the literature from the honest psychiatrists he could respect to support his wild ideas. But he had been unable to put them aside. Drugs could create temporary psychoses at least somewhat related to the real tiling, and—usually—the user recovered fairly quickly from the effects. In fact, some cases of schizophrenia seemed to be related to the presence of certain chemical substances in the brain.

  The bad trip he had caught in another mind once had not been the same as the horror he had felt through precognition. But there were enough similarities to encourage his speculation. If he could induce small attacks of the horror from which he could recover, he would at least be acting on his brain in a manner somewhat like a doctor's treatment against rabies by a series of small injections of weakened virus.

  Ellen had been interested in it as a purely theoretical discussion. She had even suggested a possibility of her own. They knew nothing of the origin or the duration of the foreseen madness for certain. It was at least possible that the horror was itself only a particularly bad trip, and that the drug spasms of the mind were all that was needed to fulfill the precognition. Whether such a temporary seizure would be severe enough to ruin the extrasensory abilities was uncertain, but it seemed less dangerous than the effects of the real madness they feared.

  She had retreated from her idea when she saw in his mind that he was determined to try it. But her suggestion gave an added reason for the experiment, and he refused to abandon his plan.

  It was no solution to the problem of Alien possession. But he had abandoned that problem until the risk of the madness was past. His first duty was to Ellen. If he could protect himself until he could save her, he was willing to accept whatever further danger might lie in wait for him.

  He caught himself stalling while his thoughts reviewed familiar ground. For a second, he suspected that she was using her mind to guide him into the delay, but there was no sign in her thoughts. She was closed down about herself in desperate determination, simply accepting whatever he did. And her resolution made him ashamed of his delay.

  His concoction was as ridiculous a blend of ignorance and fool ideas as his basic plan. He had devised a mixture of drugs that should, he hoped, give him a wild trip with major hallucinations. Now that it was mixed, the only check on his ideas was to take it.

  There were three capsules. He swallowed them rapidly, holding his breath until they were down. He'd intended to smoke the hasheesh afterward, but he had overlooked a pipe; for want of a better idea, he'd simply included some of it with the other drugs. He had no idea of whether it would work that way—or whether it would work too well But it was down, and he could no longer hold back.

  The battery-powered clock in the living room was audible now in the silence of the house. It came faintly to his ears. Otherwise, nothing happened. He sat in the chair, forcing himself to relax as completely as he could. The ticking seemed to grow louder, but he realized that was only a trick of his attention to it. He squirmed about, wishing that he had brought the clock in here where he could see it. More time passed, and it seemed to him that he should have been getting some results; but there was no change he could detect.

  There was only the ticking of the clock, a faint sound of wind outside, and once a soft sigh from Ellen, who seemed not to have moved a muscle. He listened to the rhythm of the clock, wondering vaguely why Sid had purchased one that kept three-four time. It didn't keep that very well, either. It was speeding up. That was normally impossible, of course; it must be his own tension, affecting the clock and making it run faster. He hadn't known he had the power before. Telekinesis—the control of objects at a distance. Interesting.

  His feet felt far away, and he glanced down at them. They seemed to be no farther than ever, though they had a brighter shine than they should have had. But everything was like that. The colors were brilliant, more vivid than he had ever seen them. Must be the clear country air, letting in the full light of the sun.

  The part of his mind not staring at his shoes considered that, together with the knowledge that extreme vividness of colors was a standard reaction of hallucinogens. The drugs were working all right, and
he was tripping! It was a good feeling, and the knowledge that it was all a drug trip didn't matter; the colors remained wonderful.

  Now he detected action from his right shoe. The laces had begun to move, keeping time to the loud bolero of the clock. One lace was a minute hand, the other end was the second hand, jittering around and around in a circle. The tongue of the shoe darted between them, curling up at the end and trying to stop them.

  He didn't like the action of the tongue. He tried to kick the shoe off. After a moment, he discovered he must unlace it first. He hesitated, hating to interrupt the laces. But they had stopped moving. He pulled on one. This time the shoe came off, doing a slow barrel roll in the air. It landed a few feet away and began to crawl toward him. It crawled and crawled, but the carpet was rolling back, letting it get no nearer. He could feel his chair pitching as the carpet rolled under it.

  He began to cry then, sorry for the shoe that could not get back. He put out a hand, and his arm stretched and stretched. And then he was somehow on the floor, holding the shoe. There was so much of it, and all of it was shoe. He had never really seen a shoe before, and he stared at it, entranced. It was the essence of all Shoe-ness. He turned it slowly in his hands, admiring the brilliance of the soul of the shoe. His perception went into the shoe and through it, until he could feel the shoe throughout his entire being. And slowly a marvelous awareness came to him. It was his shoe, and he could wear it! He started to put it on.

  Then the light came. It was whiteness, it was brilliance, it was softness and sharpness. Everything was alive in marvelous white light. The light was everywhere, within the walls and through the walls and beyond the walls. It was infinite, and he could see every marvelous part of it. His vision stretched and stretched, and everything was light around him.