Mute

  Ooo, naughty man. The weasel was apprehensive and delighted.

  Knot reached the limited badlands, however, unobserved. But they are closing in, Hermine warned. They know this is a good place for you to hide.

  Lead me to the man I can most readily overcome, he directed her.

  Mit located the man. He was scouting a copse in the steepest section of the gully, using a flashlight. This depression appeared to be a natural cavity left as a flood-overflow; the base of it glistened with water when the man’s light shone that way. The weeds were tall and robust, and the trees were achieving fair size. Probably fertilizer from the fields got washed in here, enriching it.

  Knot stopped the stilter and waited in ambush behind a gnarly trunk. The help of the psi animals made this virtually child’s play; he knew whom the man was, what his call—code was, and where he was going. As the man passed the tree, Knot stepped out behind him. “Please freeze in place; I have you covered.” Now am discovered; now I revise the rules.

  Fire! Hermine thought. He’s attacking.

  Knot fired his beam as the man spun about. The laser caught the man on the side; a puff of smoke rose from his shirt. Then he dropped.

  “Sorry about that,” Knot murmured. He had run afoul of a conditioned reflex, thus had not anticipated it through Hermine’s reading of the man’s prior thoughts. Such reflexes were invoked without thought, triggered by the situation. The lobos had well-drilled troops.

  Knot was not yet immune to the horror of maiming or killing men, but he knew he had no choice in this case. Had he not fired, the man would have beamed him down. In addition, the memory of Finesse’s broken nose went far to alleviate his scruples about what he did with these people. In fact, by their torture of Finesse, the lobos had converted Knot into a far more dangerous man than he had been before. They had reduced him to a more primitive viciousness. He hoped that he would be able to return to civilized behavior, after all this was over; he did not like himself as he was now.

  But I like you, Hermine thought. Now you understand about hunting, and about rats.

  Yes, now he understood. The lobos were indeed like rats, tough, cunning, unrelentingly malignant, ubiquitous. One had to keep fighting them desperately, merely to slow the progress of defeat.

  He undressed the man efficiently and changed into his uniform. This was a little tight about the right side, but would have to do. He put his own farmer’s clothing on the lobo. The man was not dead; the beam had penetrated his side as he turned, possibly holing a lung, but such wounds were cauterized as they were made and bleeding was not extreme. The survival rate of those injured by laser was much higher than that of those with similar injuries by projectiles. Knot was relieved; at least he had not done more damage than he had to.

  He picked up the rifle, tucked the pistol away, and addressed himself to the communicator box. “Truller here,” he announced, using the name Hermine had picked from the lobo’s mind. “I have apprehended the fugitive.”

  The response was immediate. “Good for you! Alive, incapacitated, or dead?”

  “I tried to take him alive, but he attacked when challenged, and I had to hole him. I think he’s still alive, but I may have punctured his lung.”

  You lie so well it becomes the truth, Hermine thought.

  “The directive says that man is a psi. We want him for interrogation. A truck will pick you both up in a moment.”

  Knot waited, idly twining threads from the hole in the shirt so that they tended to draw it together. Probably no one would notice that the uninjured captor had the holed clothing while the injured captive’s apparel was whole, but it wasn’t worth risking. Knot hauled up a section of the shirt on the lobo, placed the muzzle of his pistol against it, and triggered a brief burst. The cloth puffed into ash. Then he tucked the shirt back into the belt. That would have to do.

  Soon the truck arrived. Knot stood in the open and waved his arms, signaling it in. When it stopped, he helped the driver lift the unconscious man into the back, then joined him in the cab.

  In the light of the interior, the driver turned, suddenly realizing that he had picked up a stranger. But Knot’s pistol now looked him in the right eye. “Drive carefully out of here, exactly as you would if everything were in order,” Knot said with deadly softness. He didn’t want the lobos to learn about Hermine or Mit, but needed to convince this man that he had no chance to resist. “If you attempt to betray me, I will know it before you act. I am a telepath. Think a thought.”

  Gray two toad fly, Hermine thought, relaying it.

  “Gray two toad fly,” Knot repeated, pausing to let the significance sink in. “I have shot your companion; I will shoot you and drive this truck myself if I have to. Your practical choices are between driving healthy and riding wounded or dead. In either case you will not succeed in taking me to your superiors, so you need have no feeling of dereliction if you cooperate. I suggest you not even think of causing trouble for me.”

  Cowed, the lobo drove the truck. It was not that he was a coward; Knot’s prompt action and logic had bypassed the man’s conditioned reflexes and left him reasonable. It was indeed better to cooperate, when all that could be gained by non-cooperation was his own malaise. He knew Knot was not bluffing; the condition of the lobo in back attested to that.

  As they emerged from the rough ground, the vehicle communicator spoke. “Fash, have you located Truller yet?”

  Knot made a little gesture with his hand toward the speaker grille. This unit, Mit had ascertained, was keyed by a signal from either end. It had been off while Knot spoke, but now was on. The lobos limited reliance on this sort of equipment was now costing them security; they were better off without it. Probably they had to use it, in deference to the normals who governed this planet; left to their own devices, they might have used a system of flag signals or blinking lights. Even that, however, would not have stopped Knot; he knew how to use those signals. More and more, he was coming to appreciate the wisdom of CC’s choice in agents.

  Tell him to answer—as I wish him to, Knot thought to Hermine. Apply a background of alert menace.

  Fash jumped when the prompting came; evidently he had not before experienced telepathic communication directly. But had he had any doubt at all of Knot’s power, this abated it. “I have picked him up,” the lobo said nervously. “The—the fugitive is in back, unconscious.”

  “Proceed directly to our hospital station. Out,” the communicator said, and clicked off.

  “That was well performed,” Knot said. He kept his laser oriented on the man’s head.

  They bumped over the field, finally intersecting the road. The truck accelerated. Knot checked with Mit, then reached over to put the communicator on non-receive; now it would not be activated from the other end. He wanted to be able to talk freely.

  “You will actually drive to the bridge across the enclave chasm, passing as close to the lobo hospital station as is feasible. After passing the station you will accelerate to the maximum permissible velocity. Should you deliver me without attracting attention to the place I am going, I will release you and your truck unharmed. Otherwise you will either be shot, or will share my fate. Do you understand?”

  He understands, Hermine thought. He knows that the only way he can escape is to help you escape.

  “I see that you do,” Knot said gravely. “Now, Fash, since we have a little drive ahead of us, let’s get to know each other better. I am a CC telepath sent here in the company of a normal to investigate certain illicit lobotomies on psi-persons. I know that you lobos are responsible. I can understand why the leaders do this, but not why ordinary people like you support this mischief. Feel free to comment honestly.”

  The lobo swallowed. “It’s a job,” he said. “Macho normals don’t like minorities. Lobos understand what lobos suffer.”

  He speaks truth, Hermine thought.

  “I see you are speaking the truth, as you understand it,” Knot said, “Still, some lobos are skilled workers who co
uld obtain work anywhere. Why do they choose to work with the lobo organization? They could conceal their nature and never suffer discrimination.”

  “I don’t know,” Fash said, genuinely perplexed. “There is something—lobos just have to work with lobos. That’s the way it is.”

  What compulsion is this? Knot asked Hermine. Hypnotic?

  Not hypnotic. I can’t identify it.

  Knot tried a different tack. “Are you not aware that the lobo leaders may have caused your own lobotomy?” He had started on this theme with a prior lobo, Viveka; now he hoped to pursue it more seriously. Perhaps he had a notion that would insidiously undermine the amazing unity of these people. Divide and conquer.

  “No,” Fash said sullenly.

  “This is what they intend to do to me,” Knot argued. “Lobotomize me and convert me to your cause. Because once I’m a lobo, the only ones who will understand my situation will be other lobos. As with you. How can you know they did not do this to you?”

  Now Fash was very uncomfortable. “That can’t be true!”

  “It is hardest to believe what you don’t want to believe,” Knot said sadly. “The lobos took you in, helped you through your initial disorientation, gave you a job and a measure of self-respect. Yet how can that ever make up for what they took from you?”

  He was a minor pyro, Hermine thought. Mit says the planetary authority convicted him of arson and lobotomized him, not the lobos.

  “You were a pyro, were you not?” Knot continued smoothly. “They told you that the government lobotomized you—and you believed it.”

  Ooo, naughty man! Hermine thought. Your lies thrill me!

  “Well, the government did—” But now Fash wasn’t sure. The insidious seed of doubt had been sown, and was beginning to grow. “Still, what can I do, except what I’m doing?”

  That made Knot uncertain. This was no highly trained person; his options were curtailed. “Fash, I can’t answer that. But have you thought of it this way: can you really see yourself helping the lobo management to make new lobos? Do you want everyone to be like you?

  “No! I want no one to be like me! I want my psi power back! Show me a way to get it back, and I’ll do anything!” For the moment he had forgotten that he was hostage to a fugitive; this was his fundamental feeling emerging.

  “I believe I would feel the same,” Knot said. “I think you can understand why I am fighting so hard to avoid being lobotomized myself. Without my psi, I would be a blind normal.”

  “Yes! It is horrible,” Fash agreed.

  They lapsed into silence on this note of agreement. Knot changed the communicator setting again, so that the truck’s silence would not seem suspicious. And he wondered again: why were the lobos doing this? If the ones Finesse had been interviewing were typical, the average lobo had been rendered desolate by the loss of his psi. That desolation never abated, as his talk with Fash showed. The lobos should not be actively depriving others of their psi, unless crazy with rage or jealousy—and he found no trace of such emotions in Fash, here. It seemed a criminal or psychotic element had assumed control of the lobo organization. There were certainly many criminals among them; that was why they had been lobotomized. But why would the noncriminal lobos go along with it? Because they had no choice? In that case, eliminate criminals such as Piebald, who was torturing Finesse, and the lobos would be all right. Yet mere criminals and dupes should not account for the extreme difficulty this movement was giving CC, threatening to overwhelm the Coordination Computer within a few years. Knot kept running up against the missing element, the thing that made all this rational and feasible. There had to be something! But, like CC, he could not locate it.

  His thought drifted to the opposite aspect. From what did psi itself derive? What was mutation, except the mutilation of the genetic blueprint of the species? Every mutant had in fact been deprived of his just normalcy. Ninety nine percent of all mutations were unsuccessful to a lesser or greater degree. Physical failures, such as missing digits or limbs or organs, or extra ones, or misarrangement of them. Mental failures, such as separated lobes of the brain, or inability to think or feel or remember, or unhealthy concentration of intellectual resources in a non-survival area, such as super-awareness of the left kneecap. Only the flukes derived any advantage from mutation.

  Yet there had to be the potential within the human and animal scheme for psi, or none would ever occur. Could it be that the small percentage of successful psi mutations was merely a short-circuiting of the natural barriers, enabling some aspect of that tremendous capability to manifest? Was it theoretically possible to open the entire psi-capacity and have people who could do it all? Telepathy, clairvoyance, pyrotechnic, telekinesis, precognition, transmutation and the hundreds of psi-skill variants that defied easy classification? What a cornucopia that would be!

  “You know, Fash, I think your lobo organization is misguided,” Knot said. “You are destroying psis, making them resemble you in their mutilation, as though an organization of one-legged men went about amputating the legs of normals. You can’t improve your own lot by dragging others down with you. You should be turning your efforts toward positive things. Such as research. You want some method to restore your powers, or to share those of other psis. To lift yourself up again, instead of bringing misery on others.”

  “Yes...”

  Think what it would be like to be a telepath, Knot thought, knowing Hermine would catch the cue and relay the thought directly to the lobo’s mind. To read others’ thoughts, share their secrets.

  Fash almost drove the truck off the road. Knot had to grab the wheel.

  “Oh, God, if only it could be so—” Fash breathed.

  “With a positive attitude and the right application—”

  “Tell CC that!” Fash replied with sudden curtness. “Even if what you say is true, CC is behind most of the lobotomies!”

  “True,” Knot agreed, moved. “I plan to tell CC, once I extricate myself from the clutch of your associates. I don’t necessarily agree with all CC’s policies any more then you agree with all the lobo policies.”

  But if lobotomy were halted, how would society deal with psi criminals? Knot had no ready answer for that. He could not condone going back to the barbarity of killing them, any more than he could condone killing partly—successful mutants of any kind, or confining them involuntarily to enclaves. Yet it was hardly feasible to allow a killer psi to run loose amidst the populace. Better that adverse mutants and criminals never be born.

  There was the answer! Discover what genetic influences predisposed individuals to criminality, and eliminate those influences. Maybe criminality was another mutation—one that was triggered by local planetary radiation on a more or less random basis. Identify that radiation, and—

  The lobos have caught on, Hermine warned. They are closing on this truck.

  Which explained why there had been no recent communications, despite his reopening of the channel.

  “Your friends are about to make things difficult,” Knot said. “Stop the truck and get out; there is no need for you to be hurt.”

  Fash glanced at him nervously. “You seem like a decent guy, for a telepath.”

  “You seem like a decent guy for a lobo. So let’s not get us both in trouble with our own camps. Get out now, before this gets rough.”

  The lobo hesitated, then braked the truck. He jumped out. “Take your friend too,” Knot said. “I believe he will survive if you get him to the hospital quickly.”

  Fash went to the rear and hauled the wounded lobo off. Knot moved to the driver’s seat, following Mit’s instructions, and got the vehicle moving.

  “Good luck, psi!” Fash called. Then all was lost in the effort to handle the truck and keep track of the converging vehicles.

  “Now for the action,” Knot muttered. “I used to thrill to old-fashioned vehicle chases on kiddie-holo, but I don’t have much taste for them now.”

  Mit says there is a way through, Hermine thought. She d
id not seem worried. But of course weasels lived a rougher life than men; she was acclimatized to the tensions of pursuit.

  Knot turned off the communicator again. He wished he had been more alert to its silence; he didn’t like depending too much on Mit’s clairvoyance, since that did get swamped at times by complexity. Also, what would he do if Mit were not with him? He needed to keep developing his own resources.

  However, the radio silence might be good news in one respect. The lobos could not have broadcast any general alert, because that would have triggered his set along with all the others. So they had had to seek other means, which were undoubtedly more clumsy, talking to each truck individually and trying to organize the chase piecemeal. It would take more than that to trap a good psi-mutant team.

  But lobos were good at low-technology activities. They could run him down pretty well in radio silence, not alerting the non-lobo authorities to what was going on. Knot was not going to alert those authorities either; they could only detain him. This was a private matter between him and the lobos.

  They have deduced your approximate position, Hermine thought. They are blocking off this road.

  They can’t block off all avenues without attracting undue attention. We have another tactical contest here. Where is the best loophole?

  Next right turn, onto a dirt road. The weasel was enjoying this again; she really liked discovering what Knot’s ready human mind could do with Mit’s ready information and her own communication.

  He swung right, bouncing on the road and stirring up dust. Mit gave specific directions, and Knot followed them without question, turning from one back road to another, waiting two minutes, then reversing course to retrace part of his route.

  We are almost clear, Hermine thought. Pull into the parking lot you will see in five minutes, and wait there half an hour. Then we will be secure.

  Knot visualized vehicles casting about, searching for him, their headlights linking like confused eyes, passing the parking lot by. The lobos assumed he would be blindly fleeing; this would fool them, and enable him to thread his way cleanly through their disorganizing net as they turned their attention farther afield.