“The wrong company. Anywhere on Earth a latent telepath is surrounded by tens of thousands of minds. In space he has three. And he can’t get away from any of them for a single hour, for a full month.”
“How do you know all this, Jay? Books? You damn sure don’t have anyone to experiment on.”
Polly’s eyes sparkled as she followed the debate. The lobes of Hood’s ears were turning red. Polly’s raven hair swung wide, and when it uncovered her right ear for an instant, she was almost certainly wearing a tiny, almost invisible hearing aid.
So she did have a secret. And, finally, Matt thought he knew what it was.
Three hundred years ago the Planck had come to Mount Lookitthat with six crew members to guard fifty passengers in suspended animation. The story was in an the history tapes, of how the circular flying wing had dipped into the atmosphere and flown for hours above impenetrable mists which the instruments showed to be poisonous and deadly hot. And then a great mass had come over the horizon, a vertical flat-topped mountain forty miles high and hundreds of miles long. It was like a new continent rearing over the impalpable white sea. The crew had gaped, wordless, until Captain Parlette had said, “Lookitthat!”
Unwritten, but thoroughly known, was the story of the landing. The passengers had been wakened one at a time to find themselves living in an instant dictatorship. Those who fought the idea, and they were few, died. When the Arthur Clarke came down forty years later, the pattern was repeated. The situation had not changed but for population growth, not in the last three hundred years.
From the beginning there had been a revolutionary group. Its name had changed several times, and Matt had no idea what it was now. He had never known a revolutionary. He had no particular desire to be one. They accomplished nothing, except to fill the Hospital’s organ banks. How could they, when the crew controlled every weapon and every watt of power on Mount Lookitthat?
If this was a nest of rebels, then they had worked out a good cover. Many of the merrymakers had no hearing aids, and these seemed to be the ones who didn’t know anyone here. Like Matt himself. In the midst of a reasonably genuine open-house brawl, certain people listened to voices only they could hear.
Matt let his imagination play. They’d have an escape hatch somewhere—those of the inner circle—and if the police showed, they would use it during a perfectly genuine panic. Matt and his brethren of the outer circle would be expendable.
“But why should all of these occult powers be connected to mind-reading? Does that make sense to you, Jay?”
“Certainly. Don’t you see that telepathy is a survival trait? When human beings evolved psi powers, they must have evolved telepathy first. All the others came later, because they’re less likely to get you out of a bad situation…”
Matt dismissed the idea of leaving. Safer? Sure. But here he had, for a time, escaped from his persnickety mining worms and their venal crewish growers and the multiple, other problems that made his life what it was. And his curiosity bump itched madly. He wanted to know how they thought, how they worked, how they protected themselves, what they had in mind. He wanted to know—
He wanted to know Polly Tournquist. Now more than ever. She was small and lovely and delicate looking, an every man who had ever looked at her must have wanted to protect her. What was such a girl doing throwing her life away? Really, that was all she was doing. Sooner or later the organ banks would run short of healthy livers or live skin or lengths of large intestine at a time when there was a dearth of crime on the Plateau. Then Implementation would throw a raid, and Polly would be stripped down to her component parts.
Matt had a sudden urge to talk her out of it, get her to leave here with him and move to another part of the Plateau. Would they be able to hide out in a region so limited?
Possibly not, but—
But she didn’t even know he’d guessed. If she found out, he could die for his knowledge. He’d have to put a fail-safe on his mouth.
It spoiled things. If Matt could have played the observer, the man who watched and said nothing…But he wasn’t an observer. He was involved now. He knew Jay and liked him, he’d liked Laney Mattson and Harry Kane at sight, and he could have fallen in love with Polly Tournquist. These people were putting their lives on the line. And his too! And he could do nothing about it.
The middle-aged man with the brush cut was still at it. “Jay,” he said with a poor imitation of patience, “you’re trying to tell us that Earth had psi powers under good control when the founding fathers left. Well, what have they done since? They’ve made all kinds of progress m biological engineering. Their ships improve constantly. Now the ramrobots go home all by themselves. But what have they done about psi powers? Nothing. Just nothing. And why?”
“Because—”
“Because it’s all superstition. Witchcraft. Myths.”
Oh, shut up, Matt thought. It was all cover for what was really going on, and he wasn’t a part of that. He dropped back out of the circle, hoping nobody would notice him—except Polly. Nobody did. He eased toward the bar for a refill.
Harry Kane was gone, replaced by a kid somewhat younger than Matt, one who wouldn’t last another half hour if he kept sampling his own wares. When Matt tasted his drink, it was mostly vodka. And when he turned around, there was Polly, laughing at his puckered face.
The half-dozen suspects were deeply asleep along one wall of the patrol wagon. A white-garbed Implementation medic looked up as Jesus Pietro entered. “Oh, there you are, sir. I think these three must be deadheads. The others had mechanisms in their ears.”
The night outside was as black as always on moonless Mount Lookitthat. Jesus Pietro had left Millard Parlette standing before the glass wall of the organ banks, contemplating…whatever he might be contemplating. Eternal life? Not likely. Even Millard Parlette, one hundred and ninety years old, would die when his central nervous system wore out. You couldn’t transplant brains without transplanting memories. What had Parlette been thinking? His expression had been very odd.
Jesus Pietro took a suspect’s head in his hands and rolled it to look in the ears. The body rolled too, limply, passively. “I don’t see anything.”
“When we tried to remove the mechanism, it evaporated. So did the old woman’s. This girl still has hers.”
“Good.” He bent to look. Far down in the left ear, too deep for fingers to reach it, was something colored dead black with a rim of fleshy pink. He said, “Get a microphone.”
The man made a call. Jesus Pietro waited impatiently for someone to bring a mike. Someone eventually did. Jesus Pietro held it against the girl’s head and turned the sound up high.
Rustling noises came in an amplified crackle.
“Tape it on,” said Jesus Pietro. The medic stretched the girl on her side and taped the mike against her head. The thunder of rustling stopped, and the interior of the wagon was full of the deep drumbeat sound of her arteries.
“How long since anybody left the meeting?”
“That was these two, sir. About twenty minutes.”
The door in back opened to admit two men and two women, unconscious, on stretchers. One man had a hearing aid.
“Obviously they don’t have a signal to show they’re clear,” said Jesus Pietro. “Foolish.” Now, if he’d been running the Sons of Earth…
Come to think of it, he might send out decoys, expendable members. If the first few didn’t come back, he’d send out more, at random intervals, while the leaders escaped.
Escaped where? His men had found no exit routes; the sonics reported no tunnels underground.
It was seconds before Jesus Pietro noticed that the mike was speaking. The sounds were that low. Quickly he put his ear to the loudspeaker.
“Stay until you feel like leaving, then leave. Remember, this is an ordinary party, open-house style. However, those of you who have nothing important to say should’ve gone by midnight. Those who wish to speak to me should use the usual channels. Remember not to try to
remove the earpieces; they will disintegrate of themselves at six o’clock. Now enjoy yourselves!”
“What’s he say?” asked the medic.
“Nothing important. I wish I could be sure that was Kane.” Jesus Pietro nodded briefly at the medic and the two cops. “Keep it up,” he said, and stepped out into the night.
“Why’d you leave? It was just getting interesting.”
“No it wasn’t, and my glass was empty, and anyway I was hoping you’d follow.”
Polly laughed. “You must believe in miracles.”
“True. Why’d you leave?”
Embedded in wall-to-wall humanity, drowned in a waterfall of human voices, Polly and Matt nevertheless had a sort of privacy. Manners and lack of interest would prevent anyone from actually listening to them. Hence nobody could hear them; for how could anyone concentrate on two conversations at once? They might have been in a room by themselves, a room with yielding walls and unyielding elbows, a room as small and private as a phone booth.
“I think Jay’s bugs on psi powers,” said Polly. She had not answered his question, which was fine by Matt. He’d expected to escape unnoticed from Hood’s debate. He was lucky that way. But Polly coming to join him was new and different, and he enjoyed guessing at her motives.
“He talks like that all the time?”
“Yes. He thinks if we could only—” She stopped. Girl with a secret. “Forget Jay. Tell me about yourself.”
So he talked of mining worms and home life and the school in sector nine, Gamma Plateau; and he mentioned Uncle Matt, who had died for being a rebel, but she ignored the bait. And Polly talked about growing up a hundred miles away, near the Colony University; and she described her job at the Delta Retransmitting Power Station, but she never mentioned her hearing aid.
“You look like a girl with a secret,” Matt said. “I think it must be the smile.”
She moved closer to him, which was very close, and lowered her voice. “Can you keep a secret?”
Matt smiled with one side of his mouth to show that he knew what was coming. She said it anyway. “So can I.”
And that was that. But she didn’t move away. They smiled at each other from a distance of a couple of inches, nose to nose, momentarily content with a silence which, to an earlier man, would have sounded like the center of an air raid. She was lovely, Polly. Her face was a lure and a danger; her figure, small and lithe and woman shaped, rippled with a dancer’s grace beneath her loose green jumper. For the moment Matt looked silently into her eyes and felt very good. The moment passed, and they talked small talk.
The flow of the crowd carried them half across the room. Once they pushed back to the bar for refills, then let the crowd carry them again. In the continuous roar there was something hypnotic, something that might have explained why the crowded-room drinking bout was more than half a thousand years old; for monotonous background noise has long been used in hypnosis. Time ceased to exist. But there came a moment when Matt knew that he would ask Polly to go home with him, and she would accept.
He didn’t get the chance.
Something changed in Polly’s face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. The hearing aid? He was ready to pretend he hadn’t noticed, but he didn’t get that chance either. For suddenly Polly was moving away, disappearing into the crowd, not as if she were in any hurry, but as if she remembered something she ought to do, some niggling detail she might as well take care of now. Matt tried to follow her, but the sea of humanity closed behind her.
The hearing aid, he told himself. It called her. But he stayed by the bar, resisting the pressure that would have borne him away. He was getting very drunk now, and glad of it. He didn’t believe it had been the hearing aid. The whole thing was too familiar. Too many girls had lost interest in him just as suddenly as Polly had. He was more than disappointed. It hurt. The vodka helped to kill the pain.
About ten-thirty he went around to the other side of the bar. The kid playing bartender was happily drunk and glad to give up his place. Matt was gravely drunk. He dispensed drinks with dignity, being polite but not obsequious. The crowd was thinning now. This was bedtime for most of Mount Lookitthat. By now the sidewalks in most towns would have been rolled up and put away till dawn. These revolutionists must be a late-rising group. Matt served drinks automatically, but he wasn’t having any more himself.
The vodka began to run low. And there wasn’t anything but vodka, vodka converted from sugar and water and air by one of Earth’s educated bacteria. Let it run out, Matt thought viciously. He could watch the riot.
He served somebody a vodka grapefruit, as requested. But the hand with the drink did not vanish to make room for someone else. Slowly Matt realized that the hand belonged to Laney Mattson. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi. Want a stand-in?”
“Guess so.”
Somebody changed places with him—one of Laney’s tall escorts—and Laney led him through the thinning ranks to a miraculously unoccupied sofa. Matt sank deep into it. The room would start to whirl if he closed his eyes.
“Do you always get this looped?”
“No. Something bugging me.”
“Tell me?”
He turned to look at her. Somehow his vodka-blurred eyes saw past Laney’s makeup, saw that her mouth was too wide and her green eyes were strangely large. But she wore a smile of sympathetic curiosity.
“Ever see a twenty-one-year-old virgin male?” He squinted to, try to read her reaction.
The corners of Laney’s mouth twisted strangely. “No.” She was trying not to laugh, be realized. He turned away.
She asked, “Lack of interest?”
“No! Hell, no.”
“Then what?”
“She forgets me.” Matt felt himself sobering with time and the effort of answering. “All of a sudden the girl I’m chasing just”—he gestured a little wildly—“forgets I’m around. I don’t know why.”
“Stand up.”
“Hmph?”
He felt her hand on his arm, pulling. He stood up. The room spun and he realized that he wasn’t sobering; he’d just felt steadier sitting down. He followed the pull of her arm, relieved that he didn’t fall down. The next thing he knew, everything was pitch black.
“Where are we?”
No answer. He felt hands pull his shirt apart, hands with small sharp nails which caught in his chest hair. Then his pants dropped. “So this is it,” he said, in a tone of vast surprise. It sounded so damn silly that he wanted to cringe.
“Don’t panic,” said Laney. “Mist Demons, you’re nervous! Come here. Don’t trip over anything.”
He managed to walk out of his pants without falling. His knees bumped something. “Fall face down,” Laney commanded, and he did. He was face down on an airfoam mattress, rigidly tense. Hands that were stronger than they ought to be dug into the muscles of his neck and shoulders, kneading them like dough. It felt wonderful. He lay there with his arms out like a swandiver, going utterly limp as knuckles ran down the sides of his vertebrae, as slender fingers pulled each separate tendon into a new shape.
When he was good and ready, he turned over and reached out.
To his left was a stack of photos a foot high. Before him three photos, obviously candid shots. Jesus Pietro spread them out and looked them over. He wrote a name under one of them. The others rang no bell, so he shuffled them and put them on the big stack. Then he stood up and stretched.
“Match these with the suspects we’ve already collected,” he told an aide. The man saluted, picked up the stack and left the flying office, moving toward the patrol wagons. Jesus Pietro followed him out.
Almost half of Harry Kane’s guests were now in patrol wagons. The photographs had been taken as they entered the front door earlier tonight. Jesus Pietro, with his phenomenal memory, had identified a good number of them.
The night was cool and dark. A stiff breeze blew across the Plateau, carrying a smell of rain.
Rain. r />
Jesus Pietro looked up to see that half the sky was raggedly blotted out. He could imagine trying to conduct a raid in a pouring rainstorm. He didn’t like the idea.
Back in his office, he turned the intercom to all-channel. “Now hear this,” he said conversationally. “Phase two is on. Now.”
“Is everyone that nervous?”
Laney chuckled softly. Now she could laugh all she wanted, if she wanted. “Not that nervous. I think everyone must be a little afraid the first time.”
“You?”
“Sure. But Ben handled it right. Good man, Ben.”
“Where is he now?” Matt felt a mild gratitude toward Ben.
“He’s—he’s gone.” Her tone told him to drop it. Matt, guessed he’d been caught wearing a hearing aid or something.
“Mind if I turn on a light?”
“If you can find a switch,” said Laney, “you can turn it on.”
She didn’t expect him to, not in pitch blackness in a strange room, but he did. He felt incredibly sober, and incredibly peaceful. He ran his eyes over her lying next to him, seeing the tangled ruin of her sculptured hairdo, remembering the touch of smooth warm skin, knowing he could touch her again at will. It was a power he’d never felt before. He said, “Very nice.”
“Makeup smeared over forgettable face.”
“Unforgettable face.” It was true, now. “No makeup over unforgettable body.” A body with an infinite capacity for love, a body he’d thought almost too big to be sexy.
“I should wear a mask, no clothes.”
“You’d get more attention than you’d like.”
She laughed hugely, and he rested his ear over her navel to enjoy the earthquake ripple of abdominal muscles.
The rain came suddenly, beating against the thick coral walls. They stopped talking to listen. Suddenly Laney dug her fingers into his arm and whispered, “Raid.”
She means Rain, Matt thought, turning to look at her. She was terrified, her eyes and nostrils and mouth all distended. She meant Raid!
“You’ve got a way out, don’t you?”
Laney shook her head. She was listening to unheard voices through the hearing aid.