“Karl?”
He looked at her, realizing that he had let his attention wander. He didn’t know what had finally happened to the frightened man. He didn’t care.
“What did you do?” she asked. “I could feel myself getting caught up in something else. Then for a while it was gone.”
He told her what he had learned, and what he had guessed. “So at least now I know how to help you,” he finished. “That gives you a better chance.”
“I thought Doro would tell you how to help me.”
“No, I think half Doro’s pleasure comes from watching us, running us through mazes like rats and seeing how well we figure things out.”
“Sure,” she said. “What are a few rat lives?” She took a deep breath. “And, speaking of lives, Karl, don’t help me unless I’m about to lose mine. Let me try to get through this on my own.”
“I’ll do whatever seems necessary as you progress,” he said. “You’re going to have to trust my judgment. I’ve been through this already.”
“Yeah, you’ve been through it,” she said. He saw her hands tighten into fists as something clutched at her mind before she could finish. But she managed to get a few more words out. “And you went through it on your own. Alone.”
She struggled all evening, all night, and well into the next morning. During her few lucid moments he tried to show her how to interpose her own mind shield between herself and the world outside, how to control her ability and regain the mental peace that she had not known for months. That was what he had had to learn to bring his own transition to an end. If she didn’t want his protection, perhaps he could at least show her how to protect herself.
But she did not seem to be able to learn.
She was growing weaker and wearier. Dangerously weary. She seemed ready to sink into oblivion with the unfortunate people whose thoughts possessed her. She had passed out a few times, earlier. Now, though, he was afraid to let her go again. She was too weak. He was afraid she might never regain consciousness.
He lay beside her on the bed listening to her ragged breathing, knowing that she was with a fifteen-year-old boy somewhere in Los Angeles. The boy was being methodically beaten to death by three older boys—members of a rival gang.
Just watching the things she had to live through was sickening. Why couldn’t she pick up the simple shielding technique?
She started to get up from the bed. Her self-control was all but gone. She was moving as the boy moved miles away. He was trying to get up from the ground. He didn’t know what he was doing. Neither did she.
Karl caught her and held her down, thankful, not for the first time that night, that she was small. He managed to catch her hands before she could slash him again with her nails. The blood was hardly dry on his face where she had scratched him before. He held her, pinning her with his weight, waiting for it to end.
Then, abruptly, he was tired of waiting. He opened his mind to the experience and took the finish of the beating himself.
When it was over, he stayed with her, ready to take anything else that might sweep her away. Even now she was stubborn enough not to want him there, but he no longer cared what she wanted. He brushed aside her wordless protests and tried to show her again how to erect shielding of her own. Again he failed. She still couldn’t do it.
But after a while, she seemed to be doing something.
Staying with her mentally, Karl opened his eyes and moved away from her body. Something was happening that he did not understand. She had not been able to learn from him, but she was using him somehow. She had ceased to protest his mental presence. In fact, her attention seemed to be on something else entirely. Her body was relaxed. Her thoughts were her own, but they were not coherent. He could make no sense of them. He sensed other people with her mentally, but he could not reach them even clearly enough to identify them.
“What are you doing?” he asked aloud. He didn’t like having to ask.
She didn’t seem to hear him.
I asked what you were doing! He gave her his annoyance with the thought.
Mary noticed him then, and somehow drew him closer to her. He seemed to see her arms reaching out, her hands grasping him, though her body did not move. Suddenly suspicious, he tried to break contact with her. Before he could complete the attempt, his universe exploded.
Mary
I couldn’t have said what I was doing. I knew Karl was still with me. His mental voice was still reaching me. I didn’t mean to grab him the way I did. I didn’t realize until afterward that I had done it. And even then, it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. It was what I had done to the others.
Others, yes. Five of them. They seemed to be far away from me, perhaps scattered around the country. Actives like Karl, like me. People I had noticed during the last minutes of my transition. People who had noticed me at the same time. Their thoughts told me what they were, but I became aware of them—“saw” them—as bright points of light, like stars. They formed a shifting pattern of light and color. I had brought them together somehow. Now I was holding them together—and they didn’t want to be held.
Their pattern went through kaleidoscopic changes in design as they tried to break free of me. They were bright, darting fragments of fear and surprise, like insects beating themselves against glass. Then they were long strands of fire, stretching away from me, but somehow never stretching quite far enough to escape. They were writhing, shapeless things, merging into each other, breaking apart, rolling together again as a tidal wave of light, as a single clawing hand.
I was their target. They tore at me desperately with the hand they had formed. I didn’t feel it. All I could feel was their emotions. Desperation, anger, fear, hatred. … They tore at me harmlessly, tore at each other in their confusion. Finally they wore themselves out.
They rested grouped around me, relaxed. They were threads of fire again, each thread touching me, linked with me. I was comfortable with them that way. I didn’t understand how or why I was holding them, but I didn’t mind doing it. It felt right. I didn’t want them frightened or angry or hating me. I wanted them the way they were now, at ease, comfortable with me.
I realized that there was something really proprietary about my feelings toward them. As though I was supposed to have charge over them and they were supposed to accept me. But I also realized that I had no idea how dangerous it might be for me to hold a group of experienced active telepaths on mental leashes. Not that it would have mattered if I had known, though, since I couldn’t find a way to let them go. At least they were peaceful now. And I was so tired. I drifted off to sleep.
It was light out when Karl woke me by sitting up in bed and pulling the blankets off me. Late morning. Ten o’clock by the clock on my night table. It was a strange awakening for me. My head didn’t hurt. For the first time in months, I didn’t have even a slight headache. I didn’t realize until I moved, though, that several other parts of my body hurt like hell. I had strained muscles, bruises, scratches—most of them self-inflicted, I guess. At least, none of them were very serious; they were just going to leave me sore for a while.
I moved, gasped, then groaned and kept still. Karl looked down at me without saying anything. I could see a set of deep, ugly scratches down the left side of his face, and I knew I had put them there. I reached up to touch his face, ignoring the way my arm and shoulder muscles protested. “Hey, I’m sorry. I hope that’s all I did.”
“It isn’t.”
“Oh, boy. What else?”
“This.” He did something—tugged at the mental strand of himself that still connected him to me. That brought me fully awake. I had forgotten about my captives, my pattern. Karl’s sudden tug was startling, but it didn’t hurt me, or him. And I noticed that it didn’t seem to bother the five others. Karl could tug only his own strand. The other strands remained relaxed. I knew what Karl wanted. I spoke to him softly.
“I’d let you go if I knew how. This isn’t something I did on purpose.”
<
br /> “You’re shielded against me,” he said. “Open and let me see if there’s anything I can do.”
I hadn’t realized I was shielded at all. He had tried so hard to teach me to form my own shield, and I hadn’t been able to do it. Apparently I had finally picked up the technique without even realizing it—picked it up when I couldn’t stand any more of the mental garbage I was getting.
So now I had a shield. I examined it curiously. It was a mental wall, a mental globe with me inside. Nothing was reaching me through it except the strands of the pattern. I wondered how I was supposed to open it for him. As I wondered, it began to disintegrate.
It surprised me, scared me. I wanted it back.
And it was back.
Well, that wasn’t hard to understand. The shield kept me secure as long as I wanted it to. And there were degrees of security.
I began the disintegration process again, felt the shield grow thinner. I let it become a kind of screen—something I could receive other people’s thoughts through. I experimented until I could hold it just heavy enough to keep out the kind of mental noise I had been picking up before and during my transition. It kept out the noise, but it didn’t keep me in. I could reach out and sense whatever there was to be sensed. I swept my perception through the house experimentally.
I sensed Vivian still asleep in Doro’s bed. And, in another way, I sensed Doro beside her. Actually, I only sensed a human shape beside her—a body. I was aware of it in the way I was aware of the lamp on the night table beside it. I could read Vivian’s thoughts with no effort at all. But somehow, without realizing it, I had drawn back from trying to read the mind of that other body. Now, cautiously, I started to reach into Doro’s mind. It was like stepping off a cliff.
I jerked back instantly, thickening my screen to a shield and struggling to regain my balance. As fast as I had moved to draw away, I had the feeling I had almost fallen. Safe as I knew I was in my own bed, I had the feeling that I had just come very near death.
“You see?” said Karl as I lay gasping. “I told you you’d find out why actives don’t read his mind. Now open again.”
“But what was it? What happened?”
“You almost committed suicide.”
I stared at him.
“Telepaths are the people he kills most easily,” he said. “Normally he can only kill the person physically nearest to him. But he can kill telepaths no matter where they are. Or, rather, he can if they help him by trying to read his mind. It’s like begging him to take you.”
“And you let me do it?”
“I could hardly have stopped you.”
“You could have warned me! You were watching me, reading me. I could feel you with me. You knew what I was going to do before I did it.”
“Your own senses warned you. You chose to ignore them.”
He was colder than he had been on the day I met him. He was sitting there beside me in bed acting like I was his enemy. “Karl, what’s the matter with you? You just worked your ass off trying to save my life. Now, for heaven’s sake, you’d let me blunder to my death without saying a word.”
He took a deep breath. “Just open again. I won’t hurt you. But I’ve got to find a way out of whatever it is you’ve caught me in.”
I opened. Obviously, he wasn’t going to act human again until I did. I felt him reach into my mind, watched him review my memories—all those that had anything to do with the patterns. There wasn’t much.
So, in a couple of seconds he knew how little I knew. He had already found out he couldn’t break away from the pattern. Now he knew for sure that I couldn’t let him go either. He knew there wasn’t even a way for him to force me to let him go. I wondered why he thought he’d have to force me—why he thought I wouldn’t have let him go if I could have. He answered my thought aloud.
“I just didn’t believe anyone could create and maintain a trap like that without knowing what they were doing,” he said. “You’re holding six powerful people captive. How can you do that by accident or instinct or whatever?”
“I don’t know.”
He withdrew from my thoughts in disgust. “You also have some very Dorolike ideas,” he said. “I don’t know how the others feel about it, Mary, but you don’t own me.”
It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about. Then I remembered. My proprietary feelings. “Are you going to blame me for thoughts I had while I was in transition?” I asked. “You know I was out of my head.”
“You were when you first started to think that way. But you aren’t now, and you’re still thinking that way.”
That was true. I couldn’t help the feeling of Tightness that I had about the pattern—about the people of the pattern being my people. I felt it even more strongly than I had felt Doro’s mental keep-out sign. But that didn’t matter. I sighed. “Look, Karl, no matter what I feel, you find me a way to break this thing, free you and the others, and I’ll co-operate in any way I can.”
He had gotten up. He was standing by the bed watching me with what looked like hatred. “You’d better,” he said quietly. He turned and left the room.
PART TWO
Chapter Four
Seth Dana
There was water. That was the important thing. There was a well covered by a tall, silver-colored tank. And beside it there was an electric pump housed in a small wooden shed. The electricity was shut off, but the power poles were all sturdily upright, and the wire that had been run in from the main road looked all right. Seth decided to have the electricity turned on as soon as possible. Otherwise he and Clay would either have to haul water from town or get it from some of the nearer houses.
Seth looked over at Clay, saw that his brother was examining the pump. Clay looked calm, relaxed. That alone made Seth’s decision to buy him this desert property worthwhile. There were few neighbors, and those widely scattered. The nearest town was twenty miles away. Adamsville. And it wasn’t much of a town. About twelve hundred dull, peaceful people. Clay had been reasonably comfortable even while they were passing through it. Seth wiped the sweat from his forehead and stepped into the shadow cast by the well’s tank. Just morning and it was hot already.
“Pump look all right, Clay?”
“Looks fine. Just waiting for some electricity.”
“How about you?” He knew exactly how Clay was, but he wanted to hear his brother say it aloud.
“I’m all right too.” Clay shook his head. “Man, I better be. If I can’t make it out here, I can’t make it anywhere. I’m not picking up anything now.”
“You will, sooner or later,” said Seth. “But probably not much. Not even as much as if you were in Adamsville.”
Clay nodded, wiped his brow, and went to look at the shack that had served to house the land’s former occupant. An old man had lived there pretty much as a hermit. He had built the shack just as, several years before, he had built a real house—a home for his wife and children. A home that they had lived in for only a few days when the wind blew down the power lines and they had to resort to candles. One of the children had invented a game to play with the candles. In the resulting fire, the man had lost his wife, his two sons, and most of his sanity. He had lived on the property as a recluse until his death, a few months back. Seth had bought the property from his surviving daughter, now an adult. He had bought it in the hope that his latent brother might finally find peace there.
Clay shouldn’t have been a latent. He was thirty, a year older than Seth, and he should have gone through transition at least a decade before. Even Doro had expected him to. Doro was father to both of them. He had actually worn one body long enough to father two children on the same woman with it. Their mother had been annoyed. She liked variety.
Well, she had variety in Clay and Seth. One son was not only a failure but a helpless failure. Clay was abnormally sensitive even for a latent. But as a latent, he had no control. Without Seth he would be insane or dead by now. Doro had suggested privately to Seth that a qu
ick, easy death might be kindest. Seth had been able to listen to such talk calmly only because he had been through his own agonizing latent period before his transition. He knew what Clay would have to put up with for the rest of his life. And he knew Doro was doing something he had never done before. He was allowing Seth to make an important decision.
“No,” Seth had said. “I’ll take care of him.” And he had done it. He had been nineteen then to Clay’s twenty. Clay had not cared much for the idea of being taken care of by anyone, least of all his younger brother. But pain had dulled his pride.
They had traveled around the country together, content with no one place for long. Sometimes Seth worked—when he wanted to. Sometimes he stole. Often he shielded his brother and accepted punishment in his stead. Clay never asked it. He saved what was left of his pride by not asking. He was too unstable to work. He got jobs, but inevitably he lost them. Some violent event caught his mind and afterward he had to lie, tell people he was an epileptic. Employers seemed to accept his explanation, but afterward they found reason to fire him. Seth could have stopped them, could have seen to it that they considered Clay their most valuable employee. But Clay didn’t want it that way. “What’s the point?” he had said more than once. “I can’t do the work. The hell with it.”
Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.
So now a lonely piece of land. A so-called ranch in the middle of the Arizona desert. Clay could have a few animals, a garden, whatever he wanted. Whatever he could take care of in view of the fact that he would be incapacitated part of the time. He would be receiving money from some income property Seth had insisted on stealing for him in Phoenix, but in more personal ways he would be self-sufficient. He would be able to bear his own pain—now that there would be less of it. He would be able to make his land productive. He would be able to take care of himself. If he was to live at all, he would have to be able to do that.