Pstalemate

by Lester Del Rey

  Through the light, the presence came. It was a voice without sound, a voice that was light itself. It came to him, was all around him. He could hear the light now, calling him, and he bowed within himself and waited.

  The answer to the problem—some problem that must have bothered him—was so simple, so clean. It was an answer to every problem. He could see the paths of the atoms within the light, and the voice of the light was explaining everything, telling him the problems of the atoms and the solutions. And it was wonderful to know that the same marvelous formula fitted all his own problems.

  He sank into the light, let himself be a part of it, a great awareness filling him as he filled it. He bent and twisted, casting out the dross of his being, convulsed with the need to be free. Then he was light, adrift.. . adrift...

  "Harry!" The sound was harsh and insistent. He raised unwilling hands to cover his ears, but the call came through. "Harry! Please, Harry!"

  His heavy body pressed against something, and dull, unpleasant light fell onto his eyes. He started to protest, then sat up abruptly as he made out the hazy shape of Ellen's face near him.

  "Paper!" he gasped, the urgency so strong that it cut through his mental fog and forced his lips to shape the words. "Paper and pencil! Quick!"

  She frowned and moved away while he concentrated on holding the answer until he could write it down safely. It had seemed so sure, so simple. But now it was beginning to fade beyond his recall, the details going away from him as he tried to shape them into words. By the time she returned, only the feeling remained. He stared at the pen and the note pad blankly, fighting to retain even the ghost of certainty. But nothing would come of the answer. It was like a dream he had once had in which he was speaking brilliant Latin—to awake to his quiz on Caesar with no new knowledge of the language.

  Then, the real world impinged on him, suddenly ugly in its twisted solidity. He was on a bed in the master bedroom, and Ellen was beside him, her face taut with worry. The sun was shining with lackluster rays through the blinds, indicating that it was already late afternoon.

  "I'm all right," he assured her, though he was unsure of how true the statement was. He raised a hand to rest on her thigh, forcing his reluctant muscles to squeeze reassuringly. She was holding a cup of coffee for him, trying to help him drink it. But now he was able to sit up and take it from her hand. It seemed curiously tasteless, but he finished it.

  "Was it—horrible?"

  He shook his head carefully, unwilling to meet her mind directly yet. "No. No, damn it, it seemed wonderful. And I convinced myself that I had the answer. How'd I get here, Ellen? What happened?"

  The first part of her answer was close to his own memory. But then the time element diverged, and details became different.

  "You started making cooing sounds, Harry. You got down like a baby and crawled on your hands and knees to the shoe. When you finally picked it up, you just sat and held it, looking at it for what seemed like half an hour. Your mind was so—so infantile—that I couldn't follow it most of the time. And then somehow you pushed me away from you; it was as if a blanket of snow covered your thoughts and I couldn't get through to you at all. It was awful! You had a look on your face as if you were shining inside yourself. You sat there the longest time, frozen like a statue. Then you started to shake and were sick all over yourself. I think you passed out. I didn't know what to do, except to clean you up and drag you in here. After I got you onto the bed, you seemed to be sleeping, so I decided to let you rest."

  From her mind, he caught some impression of her struggles to move him and change his clothes. He couldn't remember being sick; but his shirt was fresh, and the sour taste in his mouth confirmed her story. He sat up, forcing himself to move his lethargic feet to the floor, intending to take her in his arms and comfort her. But it was too much effort.

  "You did wake me, though," he pointed out. He stood up, expecting something like the sick dizziness of a bad hangover, but there was no such reaction. His limbs were steady enough despite the feeling that they were moving through thick gelatin.

  She nodded unhappily. "You lay there for hours and hours, until I began to get scared. Anyhow, Harry, I've got dinner all ready."

  The last thing he wanted was food. But he nodded as he headed for the bathroom. His head felt thick, and his coordination seemed to be off; the light was dull to his eyes, tinged with an unpleasant yellow. Good thing he'd taken on Sid's electric bill and paid the water charges, he thought dully as he ran cold water into the tub. The chill of immersion was less of a shock to his body than usual, but the result was enough to make him feel slightly more human.

  Dinner was on the table when he reached the alcove off the kitchen, and the room now looked clean and more homelike than be had ever seen it. He made a conscious effort to smile approvingly at Ellen, determined to act in a reasonably normal way. But the food was only a nuisance to be disposed of as quickly as possible, though he had no feeling of queasiness or nausea.

  He had known in theory that the drugs produced few physical aftereffects, but he had failed to accept the fact.

  There was a feeling of psychological hangover that made him keep expecting the outward signs of illness.

  He seemed to be disconnected from his body, and his mind was numbed. Yet the overhanging sense of imminent disaster was not reduced; it lay like a dark cloud over all his consciousness, intruding into every effort of thought. The knowledge that the solution he had imagined was no more than a drug fantasy of sensation without sense had destroyed his ability to hold the threat away from himself. Now all his attempts at hope seemed futile.

  "There's ice cream for desert," Ellen suggested. "Or pie—but it isn't very good, I'm afraid."

  He shook his head, but accepted the coffee she poured him. Then he glanced up as she turned on the kitchen light and went to draw the blinds over the window. Apparently, his time sense was still somewhat distorted; before the blind was fully drawn, he saw that the shadows under the trees were already bluish with evening dusk. Ellen stared out for a moment, then covered the window hastily.

  She had been quiet throughout the meal, and he'd assumed it was due to her acceptance of his mood. But now he studied her for the first time since his awakening, aware that the silence was more than a response to him. Her lips were compressed, her face set into a mask stripped of all expression.

  He touched her mind tentatively. There was a veil over her thoughts, made up mostly of minor things, such as the dark stain on the sink, the need to scrub the floor, and the food that had been left to spoil in the freezer. He slipped through those surface thoughts briefly, then drew back. Even the quick contact had shown him that she was gathered into a tight knot, deliberately screening him out from her real self.

  He could have penetrated to the core of her mind, but habits of mutual respect kept him from doing so. She sensed his withdrawal and smiled faintly at him, but made no effort to open herself to his deeper inspection.

  "Are you all right?" he asked, aware that the question was hardly appropriate. She'd been through too much in watching his aberrant behavior to be anything approaching her normal self. She had sworn she could take it and had done so—but at a price to herself that he could only partially realize.

  She nodded, meeting his eyes briefly. "I guess so. Why don't you lie down and rest while I do the dishes?"

  "I've wasted too much time," he told her. "I'd better get ready to try again."

  She frowned at his answer, started to protest, and then shrugged tautly. "I wish you'd wait until tomorrow," she said simply.

  There was so little hope of winning him over in her voice that he hesitated, almost ready to agree with her wish. But the feeling somewhere in his mind that the time was short—too short, much too short—was now too strong to be denied. He reached out to catch her hand in his in a mute apology. She did not return the pressure, and he got up, feeling a guilt that was almost evenly divided between his awareness of the further strain he must impose on her
and the time he had wasted. As he left, he heard her begin to clear the table and run water into the sink. The normality of such actions was a relief to him.

  The battery clock in the living room caught his attention, and he lifted it from its hook on the wall. He carried it with him into the smaller bedroom and placed it where he could see it easily from the chair where he would sit.

  Its ticking suddenly sounded louder, beating out a steady message: "Sick... quick... sick... quick... sick ..."

  He tried forcing it from his conscious attention, then found a pillow to place under it to muffle the noise.

  He closed the blinds and switched on the overhead light, grimacing as he saw the damp spot on the rug where he must have been sick. The room was ugly in its emptiness, and the padding on the window ledges now appeared ridiculous. His previous preparations had all been a waste of effort, as he should have realized from his reading. The drug trips might have some similarity to certain forms of madness, but they seldom produced acts of violence or deliberate self-damage. His precautions had been caused either by emotional prejudice or an unconscious desire to delay the experience.

  Now the fear he had felt was gone. There had been nothing horrible about the aberrations induced by the drugs. He felt no reluctance to return to the feelings he had known.

  He swore to himself at the anticipation in his mind. Damn it, there should have been horror in that trip. The whole object of his experience had been to force the ugliness of simulated madness on himself, not to experience gratifying delusions. The less he had to fear from the experience, the more completely it had failed. In the long run, the average user might find the greatest danger from the Siren seduction of illusory powers that blurred reality and ruined the judgment needed to cope with life. But there was nothing long-range about his problems. To him, the real risk lay in delay when the only good trip was a bad one!

  Something jolted against his mind, too fleeting for more than a lightning impression. Horror, fear... But the impression had been human, with nothing alien about it.

  His stomach knotted, while his mind raced within itself, seeking the madness that might already be beginning. Then he relaxed slightly, realizing that the source had been external. It had been madness, but not within his mind.

  He sent a probe toward Ellen in another lurch of fear. But her thoughts were as he'd last found them—knotted into some inner concentration that was unwilling to accept his intrusion. He felt the swish of hot water over a dish in her hand, however, and let himself relax again. She was finishing the dishes, following a routine that was familiar and right for her.

  Then he nodded to himself, remembering that Sid's house lay only a few miles from a state mental institution. The impression must have been from one of the patients there—perhaps even a mutant, since the jolt had been so sudden and so strong.

  He let his awareness bury the impression by sliding down a side trail of thought. Once he'd believed that all madness must be like that which he had felt by precognition. But reading and the mental impact of aberrant minds had taught him that the truth was far different.

  Only the mutants seemed to break suddenly into insanity. That was the wrong word, a legal term only, but there seemed to be no better term. Call it insanity, then. Among the normal, nonmutant human beings, madness usually came gradually. There was no moment of shock to them; long before they could be recognized as insane by society, their thoughts had moved far away from at least some aspects of reality. Their frustrations and fears distorted their thinking slowly at first, and their psychoses often took years to mature enough to affect their outward behavior. There were some recognized patterns to it. Even schizophrenia, which often was a reaction of younger people to the stress of making the adjustment from adolescent to adult thinking, had recognizable advance symptoms.

  Bud Coleman had discovered that the mutants differed in the suddenness of the onset of their madness and had tried to devise a theory to account for it, but his notes showed only a final lack of an explanation. It might be a key fact, but it was one that he had never been able to use.

  Harry was sure that it was a case of positive feedback. The mind knew it was going insane, so it feared; the helpless fear led to insanity, and the insanity fed the fear! The brain was overloaded and went into oscillation, like an electronic oscillator with its output returned to its input. And like all uncontrolled positive feedback, the process was extremely fast. Of course, if there were some way to apply a negative feedback to balance it ...

  He had been over that hopeless problem too often. Now he shrugged it aside. His mind was still somewhat disturbed by the brief flash that it had received, but he forced it toward the more immediate needs that confronted him.

  He had tried a mixture of drugs, hoping that the combination would insure a wild response. In that, he had failed. This time it might be better to concentrate on a larger dose of a single drug. Since LSD seemed to have the worst record for producing bad trips, it would be the logical choice—if there could be any logic to the whole business.

  There were other factors that might work for him, too. He was only partially recovered from his first experience, and his tolerance to any bad effects might be reduced. Additionally, the vague depression he still felt could serve to stimulate darker responses; at least in the case of alcohol, the attitude of the user had an effect on the mood induced.

  He found the drugs where he had left them and selected what he hoped was the right dose. According to what he'd read, it was barely within normal limits. He took it in the bathroom, washing it down with water from a glass that tasted faintly of toothpaste. Then he moved back to the chair, to sit staring at the clock.

  Ellen came in quietly, drying her hands on a towel. She made no protest this time, but went woodenly to the chair facing him and sank onto it. Her knuckles were white as she twisted the towel over them. Her face was blank, but her eyes seemed to be dark pits under the harsh light from overhead.

  He tried to reach her mind, but it was cut off from him by a shield under tighter control than he had realized she could manage.

  "I'm not going. I couldn't go to bed and leave you like this," she told him flatly. Surprisingly, she'd been able to read his intent, even through the rigidly held impenetrability of her own thoughts. "Oh, Harry!"

  It was a hopeless, forlorn cry. And with it, her mind seemed to open for a split second, to send one compressed message of love and unity with him. Then her shield was tight again, blanking out her thoughts. There had been something behind her message that he had almost caught and that now nagged at him. He debated forcing his way past her resistance. But the idea was repugnant to him; besides, he was in no condition to try a test of powers now.

  There was no alteration in the ticking of the clock this time, nor any apparent change in the rate at which the hands moved. He let his head sink back, staring through half-closed eyes at Ellen and the clock behind her, curiously free from either fear or anticipation.

  The clock surrounded her slowly, without disturbing her. She was now only a heart among its petals, with the minute hand moving across her in a soft, slithering caress. He stared down from his height at her, bringing her closer to him each time she seemed to fade into the distance. It grew harder as she seemed intent on escaping into her clock creche. He frowned, forcing her back.

  He floated gently now, weaving slightly with the effort of controlling the pendulum-swing of the Ellen-clock toward him and away again. Then his control increased, and he held the distance firmly, squirm as she would to get away from his power.

  He reached for her mind, and her resistance was only a weak thing as the might of his power touched her. Her shield blew away in an inky cloud of little drops that spread outward. They seemed to soak up some of the light. The distant walls of the room were dimmer now, with dark splotches where the shield drops had struck.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the drops begin to move. He swung about from his height, but the movement stopped before he cou
ld fix it with his gaze. Now another drop began to wriggle free from the darkness of its tunnel in the wall.

  He hung quietly, letting his sight spread outward. Little by little, his vision broadened until he could see everything around him. Now he could even see the chair in which he had sat. There was a face staring up now—his own face, but younger and filled with an odd fear. Other faces were moving from the tunnels in the walls, and the three new ones were clock-encysted, like the staring white face of Ellen. There were lines between the four faces, dark lines of red that patterned them into a mandala that turned slowly about under him, weaving the lines, spinning and shrouding!

  He willed them away. They went slowly, still spinning. And now they were a trap of darkness that began blotting up the light in the great space around him, drawing it into the brown and red funnel that twirled and sucked below him.

  He rose above the trap, struggling with a resistance that sucked and climbed after him. But his powers were still too great. He broke free from the trap, rising endlessly into the void above him, until it was all around him. And as he broke free, he realized that it had all been a trick against him. The trap had never been for him, but rather for the light. Now it had been sucked away from him, and he floated in total darkness, unrelieved by stars or planets. There was no light, and his temptation to use his powers had led him beyond the universe, into the great darkness where no god had ever gone.

  He reached outward with his mind, thrusting past infinity. But it was hopeless. The void fled with his reach, its limits moving as fast as his mind.

  He was no longer floating effortlessly. He was falling. His body flashed downward, accelerating savagely to some fantastic pull. He could feel the void burning his face from the speed of his fall. Somewhere below him, blacker shapes of darkness sucked him downward, opening and closing, then opening again in anticipation of his fall.

  He drew in his breath for a desperate effort, but there was no air to breathe! Around him was only foul vacuum. The moisture of his eyes and the saliva of his mouth evaporated out into it in streams of dark-shrouded steam. Little things came to pursue the steam trails, following them down toward his eyes, while his chest slowly collapsed and his body drew upward through his gullet.