Mutant, page 14
Burkhalter’s guard slipped; he couldn’t have helped it. He had stood the man’s mental nearness as long as he could, though it was like breathing foul air. “Afraid of that?” he asked, and regretted the words instantly. The voices in his mind cried: Careful!
Selfridge flushed. “So you do it after all, eh? All that fine talk about you skinheads respecting people’s privacy—sure! No wonder you got the consulate! Reading minds—”
“Hold on,” Burkhalter said. “I’ve never read a non-Baldy’s mind in my life. That’s the truth.”
“Is it?” the trader sneered. “How the devil do I know if you’re lying?
But you can look inside my head and see if I’m telling the truth.
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What you Baldies need is to be taught your place, and for two coins I’d—”
Burkhalter’s mouth felt stiff. “I don’t duel,” he said, with an effort. “I won’t duel.”
“Yellow,” Selfridge said, and waited, his hand hovering over the misericordia’s hilt.
And there was the usual quandary. No telepath could possibly lose a duel with a non-Baldy, unless he wanted to commit suicide. But he dared not win, either. The Baldies baked their own humble pie; a minority that lives on sufferance must not reveal its superiority, or it won’t survive. One such incident might have breached the dyke the telepaths had painfully erected against the rising tide of intolerance.
For the dyke was too long. It embraced all of mankind. And it was impossible to watch every inch of that incredible levee of custom, orientation and propaganda, though the basic tenets were instilled in each Baldy from infancy. Some day the dyke would collapse, but each hour of postponement meant the gathering of a little more strength—
Duke Heath’s voice said, “A guy like you, Selfridge, would be better off dead.”
Sudden shock touched Burkhalter. He shifted his gaze to the priest-medic, remembering the subtle tension he had recently sensed under Heath’s deep calm, and wondering if this was the blowoff.
Then he caught the thought in Heath’s mind and relaxed, though warily.
Beside the Baldy was Ralph Selfridge, a smaller, slighter edition of Fred. He was smiling rather sheepishly.
Fred Selfridge showed his teeth. “Listen, Heath,” he snapped.
“Don’t try to stand on your position. You haven’t got one. You’re a surrogate. No skinhead can be a real priest or a medic.”
“Sure they can,” Heath said. “But they don’t.” His round, youthful face twisted into a scowl. “Listen to me—”
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“I’m not listening to—”
“Shut up!”
Selfridge gasped in surprise. He was caught flat-footed, undecided whether to use his misericordia or his fists, and while he hesitated, Heath went on angrily.
“I said you’d be better off dead and I meant it! This kid brother of yours thinks you’re such a hotshot he imitates everything you do.
Now look at him! If the epidemic hits Sequoia, he won’t have enough resistance to work up antibodies, and the young idiot won’t let me give him preventive shots. I suppose he thinks he can live on whiskey like you!”
Fred Selfridge frowned at Heath, stared at his younger brother, and looked back at the priest-medic. He shook his head, trying to clear it.
“Leave Ralph alone. He’s all right.”
“Well, start saving for his funeral expenses,” Heath said callously.
“As a surrogate medic, I’ll make a prognosis right now— rigor mortis.”
Selfridge licked his lips. “Wait a minute. The kid isn’t sick, is he?”
“There’s an epidemic down toward Columbia Crossing,” Heath said.
“One of the new virus mutations. If it hits us here, there’ll be trouble.
It’s a bit like tetanus, but avertin’s no good. Once the nerve centers are hit, nothing can be done. Preventive shots will help a lot, especially when a man’s got the susceptible blood-type—as Ralph has.”
Burkhalter caught a command from Heath’s mind.
“You could use some shots yourself, Fred,” the priest-medic went on. “Still, your blood type is B, isn’t it? And you’re tough enough to throw off an infection. This virus is something new, a mutation of the old flu bug—”
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He went on. Across the street someone called Burkhalter’s name and the consul slipped away, unnoticed except for a parting glare from Selfridge.
A slim, red-haired girl was waiting under a tree at the corner.
Burkhalter grimaced inwardly as he saw he could not avoid her. He was never quite able to control the turmoil of feeling which the very sight or thought of Barbara Pell stirred up within him. He met her bright narrow eyes, full of pinpoints of light. He saw her round slimness that looked so soft and would, he thought, be as hard to the touch as her mind was hard to the thought’s touch. Her bright red wig, almost too luxuriant, spilled heavy curls down about the square, alert face to move like red Medusa-locks upon her shoulders when she turned her head. Curiously, she had a redhead’s typical face, high-cheekboned, dangerously alive. There is a quality of the red-haired that goes deeper than the hair, for Barbara Pell had, of course, been born as hairless as any Baldy.
“You’re a fool,” she said softly as he came up beside her. “Why don’t you get rid of Selfridge?”
Burkhalter shook his head. “No. And don’t you try anything.”
“I tipped you off that he was in the tavern. And I got here before anybody else, except Heath. If we could work together—”
“We can’t.”
“Dozens of times we’ve saved you traitors,” the woman said bitterly.
“Will you wait until the humans stamp out your lives—”
Burkhalter walked past her and turned toward the pathway that climbed the steep ascent leading out of Sequoia. He was vividly aware of Barbara Pell looking after him. He could see her as clearly as if he had eyes in the back of his head, her bright, dangerous face, her beautiful body, her bright, beautiful, insane thoughts—
For behind all their hatefulness, the paranoids’ vision was as beautiful and tempting as the beauty of Barbara Pell. Perilously tempting. A free world, where Baldies could walk and live and think in safety, no longer bending the scope of their minds into artificial,
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cramping limits as once men bent their backs in subservience to their masters. A bent back is a humiliating thing, but even a serf’s mind is free to range. To cramp the mind is to cramp the soul, and no humiliation could surpass the humiliation of that.
But there was no such world as the paranoids dreamed of. The price would be too high. What shall it profit a man, thought Burkhalter wryly, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
The words might first have been spoken in this connection and no other, so perfectly did they apply to it. The price must be murder, and whoever paid that price would automatically sully the world he bought with it until, if he were a normal creature, he could never enjoy what he had paid so high to earn. Burkhalter called up a bit of verse into his mind and savored again the bitter melancholy of the poet who wrote it, perhaps more completely than the poet himself ever dreamed.
I see the country, far away,
Where I shall never stand.
The heart goes where no footstep may, Into the promised land.
Barbara Pell’s mind shot after him an angry, evil shaft of scorn and hatred. “You’re a fool, you’re all fools, you don’t deserve telepathy if you degrade it. If you’d only join us in—” The thought ceased to be articulate and ran suddenly, gloatingly red with spilled blood, reeking saltily of it, as if her whole mind bathed deliciously in the blood of all humans.
Burkhalter jerked his thoughts away from contact with hers, sickened. It isn’t the end of free living they want any more, he told himself in sudden realization—it’s the means they’re lusting after now. They’ve lost sight of a free world. All they want is killing.
“Fool, fool, fool!” Barbara Pell’s thoughts screamed after him. “Wait and see! Wait until—one times two is two, two times two is four, three times two—”
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Burkhalter thought grimly, “They’re up to something,” and sent his mind probing gingerly past the sudden artificial barrier with which she had sought to blank out a thought even she realized was indiscreet. She fought the probing viciously. He sensed only vague, bloody visions stirring behind the barrier. Then she laughed without a sound and hurled a clear, terrible, paranoid thought at him, a picture of sickening clarity that all but splashed in his face with its overrunning redness.
He drew his mind back with swiftness that was pure reflex. As safe to touch fire as thoughts like hers. It was one way any paranoid could shut out the inquisitive thoughts of a non-paranoid when need arose. And of course, normally no Baldy would dream of probing uninvited into another mind. Burkhalter shuddered.
They were up to something, certainly. He must pass the episode on to those whose business it was to know about the paranoids.
Barbara Pell’s mind was not, in any case, likely to yield much information on secret plans. She was an executioner, not a planner.
He withdrew his thoughts from her, fastidiously, shaking off the contamination as a cat shakes water from its feet.
He climbed the steep slope that led out of Sequoia to his home, deliberately shutting his mind from all things behind him. Fifteen minutes’ walk brought him to the rustic log-and-plastic house built near the shadow of the West Canadian Forest. This was his consulate, and only the cabin of the Selfridge brothers lay farther out in the wilderness that stretched north to the Beaufort Sea that mingles with the Arctic Ocean.
By his desk a glowing red light indicated a message in the terminal of the penumatic that stretched for six miles into the forest. He read it carefully. A delegation of Hedgehounds would arrive soon, representatives from three tribal groups. Well—
He checked supplies, televised the general store, and sat down behind his desk to wait. Heath would be along soon. Meanwhile he closed his eyes and concentrated on the fresh smell of pine that blew through the open windows. But the fresh, clean scent was sullied by vagrant thought currents that tainted the air.
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Burkhalter shivered.
II
Sequoia lay near the border of old Canada, now an immense wilderness that the forest had largely reclaimed. Cellulose by-products were its industry, and there was an immense psychiatric hospital, which accounted for the high percentage of Baldies in the village. Otherwise Sequoia was distinguished from the hundreds of thousands of other towns that dotted America by the recent establishment of a diplomatic station there, the consulate that would be a means of official contact with the wandering tribes that retreated into the forests as civilization encroached. It was a valley town, bordered by steep slopes, with their enormous conifers and the white-water cataracts racing down from snowy summits. Not far westward, beyond the Strait of Georgia and Vancouver Island, lay the Pacific. But there were few highways; transport was aerial. And communication was chiefly by teleradio.
Four hundred people, more or less, lived in Sequoia, a tight little semi-independent settlement, bartering its specialized products for shrimps and pompano from Lafitte; books from Modoc; beryllium-steel daggers and motor-plows from American Gun; clothing from Dempsey and Gee Eye. The Boston textile mills were gone with Boston; that smoking, gray desolation had not changed since the year of the Blowup. But there was still plenty of room in America, no matter how much the population might increase; war had thinned the population. And as technology advanced so did improvements in reclamation of arid and unfertile land, and the hardier strains of the kudzu plant had already opened vast new tracts for farming. But agriculture was not the only industry. The towns specialized, never expanding into cities, but sending out spores that would grow into new villages—or, rather, reaching out like raspberry canes, to take root whenever they touched earth.
Burkhalter was deliberately not thinking of the red-haired woman when Duke Heath came in. The priest-medic caught the strained, negative mental picture, and nodded.
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“Barbara Pell,” he said. “I saw her.” Both men blurred the surface of their minds. That couldn’t mask their thoughts, but if any other brain began probing, there would be an instant’s warning, during which they could take precautions. Necessarily, however, the conversation stayed oral rather than telepathic.
“They can smell trouble coming,” Burkhalter said. They’ve been infiltrating Sequoia lately, haven’t they?”
“Yes. The minute you copped this consulate, they started to come in.” Heath nibbled his knuckles. “In forty years the paranoids have built up quite an organization.”
“Sixty years,” Burkhalter said. “My grandfather saw it coming back in ’82. There was a paranoid in Modoc—a lone wolf at the time, but it was one of the first symptoms. And since then—”
“Well, they’ve grown qualitatively, not quantitatively. There are more true Baldies now than paranoids. Psychologically they’re handicapped. They hate to intermarry with non-Baldies. Whereas we do, and the dominant strain goes on—spreads out.”
“For a while,” Burkhalter said.
Heath frowned. “There’s no epidemic at Columbia Crossing. I had to get Selfridge off your neck somehow, and he’s got a strongly paternal instinct toward his brother. That did it—but not permanently. With that so-and-so, the part equals the whole. You got the consulate; he had a nice little racket gypping the Hedgehounds; he hates you—so he jumps on your most vulnerable point. Also, he rationalizes. He tells himself that if you didn’t have the unfair advantage of being a Baldy, you’d never have landed the consulate.”
“It was unfair.”
“We had to do it,” Heath said. “Non-Baldies mustn’t find out what we’re building up among the Hedgehounds. Some day the woods folk may be our only safety. If a non-Baldy had got the consulate—”
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“I’m working in the dark,” Burkhalter said. “All I know is that I’ve got to do what the Mutes tell me.”
“I don’t know any more than you do. The paranoids have their Power—that secret band of communication we can’t tap—and only the Mutes have a method of fighting that weapon. Don’t forget that, while we can’t read a Mute’s mind, the paranoids can’t either. If you knew their secrets, your mind would be an open book—any telepath could read it.”
Burkhalter didn’t answer. Heath sighed and watched pine needles glittering in the sunlight outside the windows.
“It’s not easy for me either,” he said. “To be a surrogate. No non-Baldy has to be a priest as well as a medic. But I have to. The doctors up at the hospital feel more strongly about it than I do. They know how many psychotic cases have been cured because we can read minds. Meanwhile—” He shrugged.
Burkhalter was staring northward. “A new land is what we need,” he said.
“We need a new world. Some day we’ll get it.”
A shadow fell across the door. Both men turned. A small figure was standing there, a fat little man with close-curling hair and mild blue eyes. The misericordia at his belt seemed incongruous, as though those pudgy fingers would fumble ludicrously with the hilt.
No Baldy will purposely read a nontelepath’s mind, but there is an instinctive recognition between Baldies. So Burkhalter and Heath knew instantly that the stranger was a telepath—and then, on the heels of that thought, came sudden, startled recognition of the emptiness where thought should be. It was like stepping on clear ice and finding it clear water instead. Only a few men could guard their minds completely thus. They were the Mutes.
“Hello,” said the stranger, coming in and perching himself on the desk’s edge. “I see you know me. We’ll stay oral, if you don’t mind.
I can read your thoughts, but you can’t read mine.” He grinned. “No use wondering why, Burkhalter. If you knew, the paranoids would
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find out too. Now. My name’s Ben Hobson.” He paused. “Trouble, eh? Well, we’ll kick that around later. First let me get this off my chest.”
Burkhalter sent a swift glance at Heath. “There are paranoids in town. Don’t tell me too much, unless—”
“Don’t worry. I won’t,” Hobson chuckled. “What do you know about the Hedgehounds?”
“Descendants of the nomad tribes that didn’t join the villages after the Blowup. Gypsies. Woods folk. Friendly enough.”
“That’s right,” Hobson said. “Now what I’m telling you is common knowledge, even among the paranoids. You should know it. We’ve spotted a few cells among the Hedgehounds—Baldies. It started by accident, forty years ago, when a Baldy named Linc Cody was adopted by Hedgehounds and reared without knowing his heritage.
Later he found out. He’s still living with the Hedgehounds, and so are his sons.”
“Cody?” Burkhalter said slowly. “I’ve heard stories of the Cody—”
“Psychological propaganda. The Hedgehounds are barbarians. But we want ‘em friendly and we want to clear the way, for joining them, if that ever becomes necessary. Twenty years ago we started building up a figurehead in the forests, a living symbol who’d be overtly a shaman and really a delegate for us. We used mumbo-jumbo. Linc Cody dressed up in a trick suit, we gave him gadgets, and the Hedgehounds finally developed the legend of the Cody—a sort of benevolent woods spirit who acts as supernatural monitor.
They like him, they obey him, and they’re afraid of him. Especially since he can appear in four places at the same time.”
“Eh?” Burkhalter said.
“Cody had three sons,” Hobson smiled. “It’s one of them you’ll see today. Your friend Selfridge has fixed up a little plot. You’re due to be murdered by one of the Hedgehound chiefs when that delegation gets here. I can’t interfere personally, but the Cody will.
