Pstalemate

by Lester Del Rey

  Reluctantly, he opened his own perceptions, searching for what he must do. The ugliness and all the fears and angers of a lifetime, the rages and hatreds, spread through him. All his unknown hopes were hopeless now, he saw. There was no way to find any rationality to use within her against the unreason of her madness. No mental suasion would suffice. What passed for thoughts within her brain could no longer respond or be bent to the normal ways. Only a drastic psychic surgery and excision could offer her salvation.

  The distortion of her mind began fighting him. He had never appreciated before how strong that mind was. Now he felt the full power of her desperation turned against his intrusion. Her mind seemed to claw its way down to the bedrock of her animal cells and there stand fast to repel him. He could not operate within it, could not absorb what lay around his awareness. She thrust him out.

  He must have been screaming, since his throat was a raging sore and his lungs were gasping for breath in a harsh rasping. He had taken too much. He could never perform the acts he must do.

  It had to be done. But ethically, morally, humanly—it was impossible. No man could treat a living mind in such a way. Only a subhuman sadist would deliberately disfigure even the body of another person.

  No! The highest ethics and sensitivity of his surgeon father had demanded that he cut relentlessly until the last trace of malignancy was removed. Yet without anesthesia... patient's consent... trained skill and knowledge... But who had greater skill in this?

  Every value and absolute within him was in turmoil, deadlocked in a private Armageddon. Right was wrong, and wrong was right. He felt his mind lurch and shift...

  And something moved into his awareness. It was a thing of distorted values, ruthless strangeness—alien! It was his Alien Entity, claiming him now when his mind was divided and he had no will to waste in fighting it.

  He held onto himself, determined not to be thrust aside again. But there was no counterthrust of pressure, no attempt to force him out of control. This was the most subtle of invasions. The alien values slipped among his contending judgments, making links where no connections should be. The presence was muting the full force he had felt once before, and it was becoming less alien to him—or he to it. All he could feel surely was the power within it, a determined might that his own mind found wanting within itself. It could take him, use him, own him...

  Ellen moaned, and he looked down at her again. He shuddered, feeling the persuasion of the determination, the alien sureness of the mind within his mind. Then he sighed. Nothing really mattered now except his desperate need to save Ellen. To that end, no price was too great. Let her find salvation and he would accept the evil thereof!

  He screamed a silent bargain toward his Alien Entity and opened himself in full acceptance.

  There was no longer war within him. He was a narrow self, driven into a single purpose. He no longer had a name or a body; he could feel and know nothing but the darkness he must meet and the purpose he must achieve.

  There was still opposition to his entry into Ellen's mind, but it began to fail almost at once before the drive of his determination. His mind tightened ruthlessly, driving her back, until there were no barriers to his invasion.

  He found the depths of horror and took them for his own. Her childish, forsaken aloneness became his, and his mind wailed and gibbered with abandonment, with desertion, with its total outcast state. He took each pain until he throbbed with agony. He swallowed the angers until rage burned like a nova in him. He found the hatred and all the foul poisons bestowed by a thousand generations, and he made a feast of them for his memories.

  From some unthinking distance, a disturbance reached him faintly, distracting him briefly. There was a sound of pounding. A wind blew across him, chilling his sweating body, and things seemed to claw at him, trying to tear him away. He tightened his arms and thrust aside exterior perception or illusion,

  He had no word for the thing that must be done. The symbols for such nouns and verbs did not exist. But the force within him now did not falter as it broke and twisted synaptic links, burned memory banks, and began altering and restructuring the mind that had been all he had ever dared love fully. Nothing was now alien to the alien mind he had become. Had precognition warned him fully of this, he would have escaped willingly into madness. But he went on now, coldly, relentlessly, until the work was done.

  Then his consciousness of self slipped out of his grasp. His ego was gone, and he blanked out into a writhing void of chaos within himself.

  Awareness returned slowly, with a sense that much time had passed. He held his consciousness to a low, dim level. But there was light against his eyes, forcing him to open them. He saw that it came from a raised window, through which a gentle breeze was blowing. It was cool against his skin, and there was a scent of growing things.

  Behind him, there was the sound of someone stirring. He started to turn, feeling his muscles ache with soreness. A hand touched his forehead.

  "It's eleven o'clock, son—in the forenoon. You've been asleep for ten hours," a voice said quietly. "How do you feel?"

  He stretched slowly, groaning as he did so. His body ached at every joint, but the worst pain seemed to center on his diaphragm. He saw that he was lying on a couch in Greenwald's living room. A man was sitting in a chair beside him, and he recognized the tired face as that of Dr. Philip Lawson.

  "I don't know, yet," he answered honestly. His throat was sore, and his voice sounded hoarse; but for some reason, his physical condition didn't seem to matter. He started to consider his mental state, but there was a veil across his thoughts, and he felt an uneasy reluctance to look behind it.

  "Feel up to walking out to the kitchen?"

  He nodded. His legs felt stiff but gained in sureness as he began to use them. He took the chair Lawson drew out for him, then looked up quickly as Grimes placed a steaming cup of coffee before him.

  "You'll feel better with some of this under your belt, Henry," the lawyer said, his old face twisted into something like a smile. "I made it myself."

  It tasted that way, but it was strong and hot. Harry swallowed it with a nod of thanks. "What's going on?"

  "Read the answer for yourself," Lawson suggested, gesturing toward his forehead. There was a drawn look on his face. Grimes stiffened, then quickly moved back to the stove where he was making a pot of tea.

  Harry stretched out his mind, reaching only for surface thoughts, as he'd learned to do with those lacking mutant powers. But Lawson had once been a mutant; his mind was open, with an amazingly well-organized picture of events.

  "You can still read me?" The thought was low but intense.

  Harry nodded assent. He was surprised to remember that there should have been a loss of ability from the strain he had undergone. The surface facts stood out clearly, ending with the two men rushing through the night and breaking into the house to find him as rigid as a statue with Ellen clutched in his arms.

  "Ellen?" he asked sharply.

  Lawson's hand pressed him back to the chair. "Easy, son. She's sleeping now, under sedation, and I don't think we should disturb her. When she regained consciousness, she seemed a little afraid of you, so we had to move her to the bedroom. She acted confused, though her responses were fairly rational. I think she'll be all right."

  "She's a child again!" Grimes protested.

  Lawson smiled slightly at the lawyer, assuming his professional manner. "Naturally. Normal reaction to deep psychological trauma, Charley. She should recover with time and rest. Anyhow, Harry could help her."

  Grimes frowned, but did not argue. He picked up his cup of tea and left them, heading for the bedroom to watch over Ellen.

  A child! Harry considered it uncertainly. That might mean she was the child she would have been if the madness of her parents had never happened and if all the ugliness had remained undiscovered. Or it might mean so much of her was missing that she could never be more. He could determine which—but his mind refused to probe, somehow sure t
hat he must wait.

  Lawson sat quietly as Harry poured two more cups of the muddy coffee for them. He spooned out sugar carefully, staring at the cup. Then he shrugged and raised his eyes, while every line in his face deepened.

  "Harry could help her," he repeated. "He would. But will you? Last night I gave you a special sedative. Oh, you needed it, but I needed its side effects more, after reading all those notes you left behind. I needed to learn whether you were my son, a madman, or an alien monster. I still don't know. The drug didn't work on you."

  He lifted his eyes again, as if driven to meet something he was reluctant to find.

  "Harry, who are you?"

  The veil that had lain across Harry's mind dropped, letting him remember everything. The reality of what he was flooded through him. It was too much to grasp at once, but he accepted it, adjusted to it, and became it. Some of it was what he had grown into over many years, and some was only unfulfilled growth-promise. It was a hopelessly tangled web of shifting values, ever in flux, but always himself.

  He scanned it in a single burst of comprehension. Then he began moving out, closing himself down, saving himself for later thought and adjustment. Deliberately this time, he regressed until he was no more than his father could accept or than his previous social patterns could handle.

  He met Lawson's anxious eyes and managed a familiar smile. "No philosopher ever found the answer to that question. But I'm Harry Bronson—reasonably sane, with no outside monster in my head."

  "You're trying to convince me that every fact of precognition can be wrong? Harry, it won't wash. I remember enough to know better!"

  "No. Every fact was correct." Harry smiled again. "Only the interpretation was wrong. But didn't you once tell me that false interpretation of true symptoms was the greatest risk in medicine?"

  Now some of the tension left Lawson's face. He sat back in his chair, beginning to relax as he reached for a pipe and tobacco. "In everything, son. Men can check their data, and they usually manage to agree pretty well on the facts. But they keep filling battlegrounds, prisons, asylums, and cemeteries because of the interpretations they make. Yes, I'll buy that. Misinterpretation is the most deadly of human sins. Umm. What about the madness?"

  "The shock and terror of that were real—but it was Ellen's madness, with my mind so completely linked to hers that I couldn't tell the difference. I should have guessed, however; no two human minds could go mad in exactly the same way, as we seemed to do."

  "And your demon—the Alien Entity you experienced?"

  Harry grimaced wryly, remembering his horror but no longer able to understand it. He should have guessed that, too; his pondering on maturity and his changes during childhood through regression should have given him the answer. "That was real—and alien, I suppose. But it was no monster from outside myself. It was only the foreshadowing of what is—or will be—myself."

  He sighed, seeing the lack of understanding in Lawson's mind. In his present, closed-down state, it was something he also found difficult to understand fully. But he tried to shape his thoughts and explain in ways the other man could accept.

  To a child, living in an eternal now of desire and outside restraints, nothing could be more alien than the values and behavior of adults. Why should a man do a lot of hard things he didn't like just to keep some girl happy, or let her run his life when he was stronger than she was? Why should he risk war, work, and traffic—and then be scared to climb a simple old tree on a dare? Why wouldn't he eat green apples when he drank stuff that tasted bad and always made him sick? Why put money in somebody else's bank when he wanted a lot of things he could buy with it?

  The adolescent knew about responsibility—the responsibility of the alien-minded men running things, who must be evil since they refused the simple, obvious answers. But he couldn't understand why those adults laughed at him for driving thousands of miles in a car to help bury a broken auto engine and thus end pollution symbolically. The move from the certainties of adolescence to the complexity of adulthood was so difficult that many retreated to schizophrenia or acquired authority-figures who would take over the responsibilities they could not assume. Maybe a majority eventually learned to live with reality, but only a minority could accept the fact that even reality was neither fixed nor sure. Yet they had grown up in a world where a thousand generations had built an adult tradition and where every effort had been made to instill the desire for adulthood into their minds since infancy.

  There had been no examples to guide Harry's development, no body of adult mutant values to be studied and gradually accepted. He had never realized his lack of adulthood—since he was already a full adult by the standards of nonmutant society.

  Effectively, he had been a child, forced to face his mature self from the future. And the horror had not lain in the wrongness he saw in its values, but in the fact that it was himself—a self he could not accept and had to hide from his own awareness.

  "So there never was any real danger for you?" Lawson asked doubtfully. Then he shook his head. "No, that's unfair. Living through an accident doesn't prove there was no danger. But with precognition?"

  "Precognition doesn't settle the old problem of free will, any more than the normal rules of cause and effect," Harry told him. He could not explain away the seeming paradox, but he knew it was true. "The danger was real—too real!"

  The price of the gift was the gift itself, together with the good and the evil thereof. It was an ancient price, changed only in degree. Man had gained intelligence beyond any other animal. But his sufferings and burdens were as unique as his advantages and pleasures. The price of any increase in awareness was inherent in that awareness.

  It was little wonder the others had gone mad. The stresses of extrasensory sensitivity could only be handled by a new maturity—and that maturity was alien and horrible to all they had been taught. There was no acceptable answer to the problem. Both problem and answer fed back positively to increase stress and insure sudden, foreknown madness!

  He had barely survived, mostly by luck. The amnesiac block had let him cope with the normal adjustment to adulthood before the new problem had to be met, rather than facing both demands together. Even the drugs had helped, though his reasons for seeking them had been wrong; they had disturbed his fixed patterns enough to weaken his resistance to other ways of thought. Even then, his own needs could not have made him accept maturity; it had been the necessity of helping Ellen that had finally forced him to grow up.

  "I was lucky," he decided aloud.

  "No, not lucky. Strong!" There was satisfaction in Lawson's smile and a deep glow of pride in his mind. "We always thought you were the strongest one of us all, and we were right. Admit your strength, son, and be glad of it. We need you. We've waited a long time for you to lead us into our future!"

  Harry started to protest. Then he saw the hidden hunger in his father's mind and made no argument. "All right, maybe you're right, Dad. Unless I've simply postponed my madness and it's still waiting for me later."

  "Look ahead and see," Lawson suggested. "What else is precognition good for?"

  The test seemed obvious. There would be no true sense of safety until he could be sure. But he hesitated, unwilling to risk it. For the moment, there was no dark cloud over his mind, and the sensation of relief was precious. He turned

  Lawson's words over, considering. Maybe it wasn't precognition that had survival value, after all; it might be something he could only term postcognition—the ability to reach backward to assist, as his future self must have helped him in handling the twisted mind of Ziggy. Maybe

  • • •

  The future opened calmly to him. It came like a memory, with a partial sense of what had gone before and with sound and vision as clear as if he had been living through it. Yet there was no sense of identity in the sending; somehow, he was gently blocked from the thoughts of his future self.

  Lawson grunted sharply, then caught his breath in a harsh gasp of emotion. And Harry
was aware that his vision was being shared by his father. Subtle but enormous power was being used, opening the old channels of lost abilities for the moment. Then his own awareness sank fully into his precognition.

  Winter was over again, and the ice was gone; but the little creek was still too cold for swimming or wading. He lay on the young grass, sheltered from the fresh wind that was blowing beyond him. Across the little bridge lay an old stone house, mellow with years and associations. His eyes swept over it and across the enclosed grounds.

  A babble of childish speech reached his ears then, and he turned to look further down the creek toward a tiny beach. His three-year-old son was standing there, one foot held over the water and the other on the sand. The boy was facing his grandfather, trying to determine from the thoughts in Lawson's mind whether the threat of punishment had been serious. He reached forward with his foot, then splashed in happily, while Lawson ran toward him, swearing but laughing.

  Harry felt a slight surge within himself. Then the childish babble was cut off. Reluctantly but steadily, the boy's feet headed out of the chilly water and toward the shoes he had discarded. Harry settled back in the warm sun, gazing across the sweep of his acres. It was a restful place, a place to which a man might return in triumph or to seek relief from fatigue, a haven and a home.

  There was a sense of opening outward—and the presence was there. Again it came with the feeling of immeasurable distance and gulfs beyond imagination. It came on its never-ending lonely search, reaching softly toward him. It was totally alien, yet warm with friendliness beyond that which humanity had learned.

  For a second, it seemed to sweep past him. Then it was back, intense and aware with a sudden knowledge that he was there.

  There was no communication. No bridges existed yet to span the difference of thought or provide a key for conceptual exchange. There was only a meeting and entwining.