Terror knotted Mackenzie’s bowels. He put it down. A Catamount didn’t stampede, even from somebody who could turn him inside out with a look. He could do nothing about the wretchedness that followed, though. If they clobber me, so much the better. I won’t lie awake nights wondering how Laura is.
The adepts were almost to the steps. Mackenzie trod forth. He swept his revolver in an arc. “Halt!” His voice sounded tiny in the stillness that brooded over the town.
They jarred to a stop and stood there in a group. He saw them enforce a catlike relaxation, and their faces became blank visors. None spoke. Finally Mackenzie was unable to keep silent.
“This place is hereby occupied under the laws of war,” he said. “Go back to your quarters.”
“What have you done with our leader?” asked a tall man. His voice was even but deeply resonant.
“Read my mind and find out,” Mackenzie gibed. No, you’re being childish. “He’s okay, long’s he keeps his nose clean. You too. Beat it.”
“We do not wish to pervert psionics to violence,” said the tall man. “Please do not force us.”
“Your chief sent for you before we’d done anything,” Mackenzie retorted. “Looks like violence was what he had in mind. On your way.”
The Espers exchanged glances. The tall man nodded. His companions walked slowly off. “I would like to see Philosopher Gaines,” the tall man said.
“You will pretty soon.”
“Am I to understand that he is being held a prisoner?”
“Understand what you like.” The other Espers were rounding the corner of the building. “I don’t want to shoot. Go on back before I have to.” -
“An impasse of sorts,” the tall man said. “Neither of us wishes to injure one whom he considers defenseless. Allow me to conduct you off these grounds.”
Mackenzie wet his lips. Weather had chapped them rough. “If you can put a hex on me, go ahead,” he challenged. “Otherwise scram.”
“Well, I shall not hinder you from rejoining your men. It seems the easiest way of getting you to leave. But I most solemnly warn that any armed force which tries to enter will be annihilated.”
Guess I had better go get the boys, at that. Phil can’t mount guard on those guys forever.
The tall man went over to the hitching post. “Which of these horses is yours?” he asked blandly.
Almighty eager to get rid of me, isn’t he—Holy hellfire! There must be a rear door!
Mackenzie spun on his heel. The Esper shouted. Mackenzie dashed back through the entry chamber. His boots threw echoes at him. No, not to the left, there’s only the office that way. Right . . . around this comer—
A long hall stretched before him. A stairway curved from the middle. The other Espers were already on it.
“Halt!” Mackenzie called. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
The two men in the lead sped onward. The rest turned and headed down again, toward him.
He fired with care, to disable rather than kill. The hall reverberated with the explosions. One after another they dropped, a bullet in leg or hip or shoulder. With such small targets, Mackenzie missed some shots. As the tall man, the last of them, closed in from behind, the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
Mackenzie drew his saber and gave him the flat of it alongside the head. The Esper lurched. Mackenzie got past and bounded up the stair. It wound like something in a nightmare. He thought his heart was going to go to pieces.
At the end, an iron door opened on a landing. One man was fumbling with the lock. The other blue-robe attacked.
Mackenzie stuck his sword between the Esper’s legs. As his opponent stumbled, the colonel threw a left hook to the jaw. The man sagged against the wall. Mackenzie grabbed the robe of the other and hurled him to the floor. “Get out,” he rattled.
They pulled themselves together and glared at him. He thrust air with his blade. “From now on I aim to kill,” he said.
“Get help, Dave,” said the one who had been opening the door. “I’ll watch him.” The other went unevenly down the stairs. The first man stood out of saber reach. “Do you want to be destroyed?” he asked.
Mackenzie turned the knob at his back, but the door was still locked. “I don’t think you can do it,” he said. “Not without what’s here.”
The Esper struggled for self-control. They waited through minutes that stretched. Then a noise began below. The Esper pointed, “We have nothing but agricultural implements,” he said, “but you have only that blade. Will you surrender?” Mackenzie spat on the floor. The Esper went on down. Presently the attackers came into view. There might be a hundred, judging from the hubbub behind them, but because of the curve Mackenzie could see no more than ten or fifteen—burly fieldhands, their robes tucked high and sharp tools aloft. The landing was too wide for defense. He advanced to the stairway, where they could only come at him two at a time.-
A couple of sawtoothed hay knives led the assault. Mackenzie parried one blow and chopped. His edge went into meat and struck bone. Blood ran out, impossibly red, even in the dim light here. The man fell to all fours with a shriek. Mackenzie dodged a cut from the companion. Metal clashed on metal. The weapons locked. Mackenzie’s arm was forced back. He looked into a broad suntanned face. The side of his hand smote the young man’s larynx. The Esper fell against the one behind and they went down together. It took a while to clear the tangle and resume action.
A pitchfork thrust for the colonel’s belly. He managed to grab it with his left hand, divert the tines, and chop at the fingers on the shaft. A scythe gashed his right side. He saw his own blood but wasn’t aware of pain. A flesh wound, no more. He swept his saber back and forth. The forefront retreated from its whistling menace. But God, my knees are like rubber, I can’t hold out another five minutes.
A bugle sounded. There was a spatter of gunfire. The mob on the staircase congealed. Someone screamed.
Hoofs banged across the ground floor. A voice rasped: “Hold everything, there! Drop those weapons and come on down. First man tries anything gets shot.”
Mackenzie leaned on his saber and fought for air. He hardly noticed the Espers melt away.
When he felt a little better, he went to one of the small windows and looked out. Horsemen were in the plaza. Not yet in sight, but nearing, he heard infantry.
Speyer arrived, followed by a sergeant of engineers and several privates. The major hurried to Mackenzie. “You okay, Jimbo? You been hurt!”
“A scratch,” Mackenzie said. He was getting back his strength, though no sense of victory accompanied it, only the knowledge of aloneness. The injury began to sting. “Not worth a fuss. Look.”
“Yes, I suppose you’ll live. Okay, men, get that door open.” The engineers took forth their tools and assailed the lock with a vigor that must spring half from fear. “How’d you guys show up so soon?” Mackenzie asked.
“I thought there’d be trouble,” Speyer said, “so when I heard shots I jumped through the window and ran around to my horse. That was just before those clodhoppers attacked you; I saw them gathering as I rode out. Our cavalry got in almost at once, of course, and the dogfaces weren’t far behind.”
“Any resistance?”
“No, not after we fired a few rounds in the air.” Speyer glanced outside. “We’re in full possession now.”
Mackenzie regarded the door. “Well,” he said, “I feel better about our having pulled guns on them in the office. Looks like their adepts really depend on plain old weapons, huh? And Esper communities aren’t supposed to have arms. Their charters say so . . . That was a damn good guess of yours, Phil. How’d you do it?”
“I sort of wondered why the chief had to send a runner to fetch guys that claim to be telepaths. There we go!”
The lock jingled apart. The sergeant opened the door. Mackenzie and Speyer went into the great room under the dome.
They walked around for a long time, wordless, among shapes of metal and less identifiable substances. Nothing was f
amiliar. Mackenzie paused at last before a helix which projected from a transparent cube. Formless darknesses swirled within the box, sparked as if with tiny stars.
“I figured maybe the Espers had found a cache of old-time stuff, from just before the Hellbombs,” he said in a muffled voice. “Ultra-secret weapons that never got a chance to be used. But this doesn’t look like it. Think so?”
“No,” Speyer said. “It doesn’t look to me as if these things were made by human beings at all.”
“But do, you not understand? They occupied a settlement! That proves to the world that Espers are not invulnerable. And to complete the catastrophe, they seized its arsenal.”
“Have no fears about that. No untrained person can activate those instruments. The circuits are locked except in the presence of certain encephalic rhythms which result from conditioning. That same conditioning makes it impossible for the so-called adepts to reveal any of their knowledge to the uninitiated, no matter what may be done to them.”
“Yes, I know that much. But it is not what I had in mind. What frightens me is the fact that the revelation will spread. Everyone will know the Esper adepts do not plumb unknown depths of the psyche after all, but merely have access to an advanced physical science. Not only will this lift rebel spirits, but worse, it will cause many, perhaps most of the Order’s members to break away in disillusionment.”
“Not at once. News travels slowly under present conditions. Also, Mwyr, you underestimate the ability of the human mind to ignore data which conflict with cherished beliefs.”
“But—”
“Well, let us assume the worst. Let us suppose that faith is lost and the Order disintegrates. That will be a serious setback to the plan, but not a fatal one. Psionics was merely one bit of folklore we found potent enough to serve as the motivator of a new orientation toward life. There are others, for example the widespread belief in magic among the less educated classes. We can begin again on a different basis, if we must. The exact form of the creed is not important. It is only scaffolding for the real structure: a communal, anti-materialistic social group, to which more and more people will turn for sheer lack of anything else, as the coming empire breaks up. In the end, the new culture can and will discard whatever superstitions gave it the initial impetus ”
“A hundred-year setback, at least.”
“True. It would be much more difficult to introduce a radical alien element now, when the autochthonous society has developed strong institutions of its own, than it was in the past. I merely wish to reassure you that the task is not impossible. I do not actually propose to let matters go that far. The Espers can be salvaged.”
“How?”
“We must intervene directly.”
“Has that been computed as being unavoidable?”
“Yes. The matrix yields an unambiguous answer. I do not like it any better than you. But direct action occurs oftener than we tell neophytes in the schools. The most elegant procedure would of course be to establish such initial conditions in a society that its evolution along desired lines becomes automatic. Furthermore, that would let us close our minds to the distressing fact of our own blood guilt. Unfortunately, the Great Science does not extend down to the details of day-to-day practicality.
“In the present instance, we shall help to smash the reactionaries. The government will then proceed so harshly against its conquered opponents that many of those who accept the story about what was found at St. Helena will not live to spread the tale. The rest . . . well, they will be discredited by their own defeat. Admittedly, the story will linger for lifetimes, whispered here and there. But what of that? Those who believe in the Way will, as a rule, simply be strengthened in their faith, by the very process of denying such ugly rumors. As more and more persons, common citizens as well as Espers, reject materialism, the legend will seem more and more fantastic. It will seem obvious that certain ancients invented the tale to account for a fact that they in their ignorance were unable to comprehend.”
“I see . . .”
“You are not happy here, are you, Mwyr?”
“I cannot quite say. Everything is so distorted.”
“Be glad you were not sent to one of the really alien planets.”
“I might almost prefer that. There would be a hostile environment to think about. One could forget how far it is to home.”
“Three years’ travel.”
“You say that so glibly. As if three shipboard years were not equal to fifty in cosmic time. As if we could expect a relief vessel daily, not once in a century. And . . . as if the region that our ships have explored amounts to one chip out of this one galaxy!”
“That region will grow until someday it engulfs the galaxy.”
“Yes, yes, yes. I know. Why do you think I chose to become a psychodynamician? Why am I here, learning how to meddle with the destiny of a world where I do not belong? “To create the union of sentient beings, each member species a step toward life’s mastery of the universe I Brave slogan! But in practice, it seems, only a chosen few races are to be allowed the freedom of that universe.”
“Not so, Mwyr. Consider these ones with whom we are, as you say, meddling, consider what use they made of nuclear energy when they had it. At the rate they are going, they will have it again within a century or two. Not long after that they will be building spaceships. Even granted that time lag attenuates the effects of interstellar contact, those effects are cumulative. So do you wish such a band of carnivores turned loose on the galaxy?
“And, let them become inwardly civilized first; then we shall see if they can be trusted. If not, they will at least be happy on their own planet, in a mode of life designed for them by the Great Science. Remember, they have an immemorial aspiration toward peace on earth; but that is something they will never achieve by themselves. I do not pretend to be a very good person, Mwyr. Yet this work that we are doing makes me feel not altogether useless in the cosmos.”
Promotion was fast that year, casualties being so high. Captain Thomas Danielis was raised to major for his conspicuous part in putting down the revolt of the Los Angeles citymen. Soon after occurred the Battle of Maricopa, when the loyalists failed bloodily to break the stranglehold of the Sierran rebels on the San Joaquin Valley, and he was brevetted lieutenant colonel. The army was ordered northward and moved warily under the coast ranges, half expecting attack from the east. But the Brodskyites seemed too busy consolidating their latest gains. The trouble came from guerrillas and the hedgehog resistance of bossman Stations. After one particularly stiff clash, they stopped near Pinnacles for a breather.
Danielis made his way through camp, where tents stood in tight rows between the guns and men lay about dozing, talking, gambling, staring at the blank blue sky. The air was hot, pungent with cookfire smoke, horses, mules, dung, sweat, boot oil; the green of the hills that lifted around the site was dulling toward summer brown. He was idle until time for the conference the general had called, but restlessness drove him. By now I’m a father, he thought, and I’ve never seen my kid.
At that, I’m lucky, he reminded himself. I’ve got my life and limbs. He remembered Jacobsen dying in his arms at Maricopa. You wouldn’t have thought the human body could hold so much blood. Though maybe one was no longer human, when the pain was so great that one could do nothing but shriek until the darkness came.
And I used to think war was glamorous. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, terror, mutilation, death, and forever the sameness, boredom grinding you down to an ox . . . . I’ve had it. I’m going into business after the war. Economic integration, as the bossman system breaks up, yes, there’ll be a lot of ways for a man to get ahead, but decently, without a weapon in his hand—Danielis realized he was repeating thoughts that were months old. What the hell else was there to think about, though?
The large tent where prisoners were interrogated lay near his path. A couple of privates were conducting a man inside. The fellow was blond, burly, and sullen. He wore a sergeant’s stripe
s, but otherwise his only item of uniform was the badge of Warden Echevarry, bossman in this part of the coastal mountains. A lumberjack in peacetime, Danielis guessed from the look of him; a soldier in a private army whenever the interests of Echevarry were threatened; captured in yesterday’s engagement.
On impulse, Danielis followed. He got into the tent as Captain Lambert, chubby behind a portable desk, finished the preliminaries, and blinked in the sudden gloom.
“Oh.” The intelligence officer started to rise. “Yes, sir?”
“At ease,” Danielis said. “Just thought I’d listen in.”
“Well, I’ll try to put on a good show for you.” Lambert reseated himself and looked at the prisoner, who stood with hunched shoulders and widespread legs between his guards. “Now, sergeant, we’d like to know a few things.”
“I don’t have to say nothing except name, rank, and home town,” the man growled. “You got those.”
“Um-m-m, that’s questionable. You aren’t a foreign soldier, you’re in rebellion against the government of your own country.”
“The hell I am! I’m an Echevarry man.”
“So what?”
“So my Judge is whoever Echevarry says. He says Brodsky. That makes you the rebel.”
“The law’s been changed.”
“Your mucking Fallon got no right to change any laws. Especially part of the Constitution. I’m no hillrunner, Captain. I went to school some. And every year our Warden reads his people the Constitution.”
“Times have changed since it was drawn,” Lambert said. His tone sharpened. “But I’m not going to argue with you. How many riflemen and how many archers in your company?” Silence.
“We can make things a lot easier for you,” Lambert said. “I’m not asking you to do anything treasonable. All I want is to confirm some information I’ve already got.”
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