Finesse concentrated—but could not seem to make the lobo retreat. “Don’t’ you know what happened?” Piebald gasped. “Your anti-precog baby, who has been such a thorn—he’s more than that. He’s anti-psi. He was improperly raised, unhealthy, but now better feeding and the healer have restored some of his vitality. His full ability is beginning to manifest, and now it is blocking your psi too. Your own ally is betraying you! You have become like me. Your psi is gone!”
Finesse reacted immediately. She jerked on the red handle. A fat spark jumped as the connection broke. “CC is gone too!” she cried.
“No, not yet,” Piebald said, continuing toward her. “It will take several minutes for CC’s circuits to fade out. That computer is planet-sized, remember. There is considerable current in the wiring. I can restore it.”
She attacked him, her hands clawing at his face. But Piebald, even weakened by burns and stungas, could handle himself physically. He blocked her arms aside, then delivered a savage right hand blow to her face. Again Finesse’s nose was smashed. She fell back, blood pouring out. It was the most devastating strike he could have made, physically and psychologically.
Knot, his face on the floor, saw it all; he happened to be pointed the right way. He winced, but his body did not respond. He could do nothing.
Piebald reached for the switch, to close it and restore power to the computer—but Finesse tackled him from behind. He had made the error of assuming that the smashed nose would send her into crying helplessness. But underneath, she was as tough as any man. Now she was a blood—smeared demoness, intent only on victory. Any notion she might have had of feminine wile or helplessness had been vanquished with her nose. Her hands passed around his head, nails going to his face, gouging his eyes. She hated this man every bit as much as Knot did, and with reason.
It was an awful struggle. Knot, immobilized, caught only snatches of it, mostly by ear. The woman he loved, against the man he loathed, both reduced to animalistic level in this terrible conflict—and still Knot could do nothing. He was forgotten—of course. Though perhaps not primarily because of his psi; if Piebald’s theory were true, Harlan was canceling out Knot’s psi too.
Aahh, you bit me!
For a moment Knot thought it was a cry from one of the visible combatants. Then he recognized Hermine’s thought. The weasel had been caught by one of the poisonous snakes. And still he, Knot, could do nothing. He could not even send the healer. Hermine, perhaps his closest friend, dying—
Knot concentrated in a fury of helpless anger. There had to be some way!
He saw one of the rats, Rondl, crawling across the floor, partially incapacitated by the drug, but getting stronger. Of course—the drug was a form of poison, and the psi fleas neutralized it in the rat’s body. That was their symbiotic service. Too bad Knot himself did not have such a resource.
Didn’t he? Pyridoxine! he thought to the bee. Summon Rondl here.
The bee remained immobilized physically, but aware mentally. She concentrated.
Nothing happened. Her power was too small, by itself.
Knot realized that she needed a boost. Relay! he ordered her. Rondl, come here! The bee could relay much more of his power than generate her own.
Now the rat responded. In a moment she changed course and came to him, as though he had put his hand down for her.
Tell the fleas to bite me, Knot thought urgently. Many of them, now! To nullify the poison.
He felt the minute stings of several bites. Never had he been so glad to be attacked by insects! The immobility of his body began to abate. The effect spread outward from the sites of the bites, until he had control again. His rage at what was happening to Finesse and Hermine had accelerated it; he really wanted to recover.
Knot climbed to his feet. Piebald was choking Finesse—and had been for some seconds. Her face was purple under the mask of blood. Still she fought, her fingers like claws, reaching for his face. He shifted his grip quickly, grabbed her hair on either side, lifted her head, and rammed it down against the metallic floor. He was trying to kill her—and this would accomplish that very soon.
In these few seconds Knot was lurching forward, his strength resurging. He knew his own eyeballs were turning bloodshot with the effort, for the view before him was blurring. Only Piebald showed clearly, like a figure hung on the cross hairs of a gunsight. There was his target!
Knot came up behind the man. He took careful, almost gentle hold of the lobo’s own mottled hair. He held the head firm—then lifted his large right knee in a savage blow to the side of his enemy’s face.
Once again he had underestimated his opponent. Piebald yanked his head aside as Knot moved, drawing him off balance. The knee only grazed the lobo. Piebald let go of Finesse and caught at Knot’s uplifted leg.
Then it was elementary savagery again—only this time the lobo faced a man, not a woman. Knot, his scruples damped by shock and hate, attacked with insane fury. Fists, feet, teeth—anything. Piebald, at first taken aback by the sheer ferocity of it, soon began to exert his calculating strategy. He countered Knot’s strokes, tied up his limbs so that they could move only ineffectively, and maneuvered him gradually from the offensive to the defensive. He entangled Knot’s left arm in a bruising arm lock and started working toward a strangle with his legs. Knot resisted, but was unfamiliar with this particular mode of combat; it had not been covered in his brief course. As it turned out, legs were more clumsy than arms, but had far more power, and they could indeed be tightened about the neck in a strangle, if a person knew how to do it. Piebald knew how, and the lobo had the leverage. When Knot’s strength expired, as it had to, Piebald would have him helpless. Once again, the lobo was winning.
Finesse remained unconscious, perhaps in coma. Blood pooled on the floor by her face, and there was a pallor to the rest of her visible skin that boded ill. That terrible strike of her head on the floor: concussion—or death?
Knot knew he needed help. But where could it come from? The room was sealed—and if it weren’t, the lobos would be charging in to help Piebald. The healer Auler was unable to heal himself, while stunned. Harlan—was only a baby. The rats—
Bee Six—tell the rats to attack Piebald!
But Roto and Rondl were too timid. They hung back. They were not like the tough rats of the Macho solar station; they were gentle white-collar rats, harmless. They had done all they were psychologically capable of when they lent the use of their fleas to rouse Knot.
Then Mit the hermit crab emerged from Knot’s pocket. His shell had protected him from most of the battering, and his clairvoyance told him what to do. Perhaps it wasn’t psi, now, in the ambiance of Harlan’s nullpsi, but elementary crab sense. He was little, but he had fighting spirit.
Mit scrambled up the lobo’s arm, going for the face. Piebald could not deal with the crab, because then he would have to let go of Knot and lose his advantage. But they both knew that Mit knew exactly where to pinch to do the most damage. Perhaps a key nerve complex in the neck; perhaps an eyeball...
Piebald’s nerve broke. He had lost his psi long ago; he did not want to lose his sight too. He grabbed for the crab—but Mit was already dropping to the floor, knowing precisely when to make his move. Clairvoyance could not be readily surprised, even when largely nulled out. Knot wrenched his right arm free, grabbed the lobo’s hair again, and jerked Piebald’s head around. Now the initiative was his!
He went for a strangle of his own, but the lobo blocked it. They fell into a position of impasse, neither man having an immediate advantage, neither being able to initiate a new sequence without putting himself at a disadvantage. Had this been a polite competition match, the referee would have separated them, setting up for a new round. But this was real, and there was no way out.
But the master switch was down. CC was dying, as its residual power inevitably drained. The longer the impasse held, the closer Knot came to victory, and death. For once the computer passed below a certain stage, its electronic banks woul
d suffer, like brain cells dying in a man, and then even the reversal of the master switch would not restore its full function. There would have to be extensive replacement of units, and reprogramming, before it functioned again, and without CC’s directives to bring the supply ships, it might be years or decades before such repair was possible. Civilization could collapse in that interim. CC was the brain; cutting off its power was like cutting off the supply of blood to the human brain. Certainly the lobos would not benefit. Already the illumination was dimming, and the air was becoming close.
“This is pointless!” Piebald gasped. “No one gains if we all die!”
“How true,” Knot agreed, hanging on. He reveled in the fading light, knowing it spelled his victory, of a sort. CC was shutting off every nonessential power drain, conserving its rapidly dwindling resources for its key units, clinging to the facsimile of life it knew. But, like Finesse, it would soon be unconscious.
“You are a mutant,” Piebald argued. “A double mute, like me. You know the horrors of the present system. Ninety-nine failures for every successful mutation. Death for many, enclaves for the rest. All this is known—and deliberately fostered by the present CC program. Those mutations have to be stopped!”
“What do you care?” Knot demanded, “When you got control of CC, you didn’t turn it off. Now you’re fighting to preserve it—program and all.”
“I care! I am a mutilated mutant—a mute-mute—as all lobos are. I, unlike you, have lost the redeeming part of my mutancy. I know even better than you do, the evils of the system.”
“So why didn’t you turn CC off?” Knot demanded, bothered by the appeal of Piebald’s statement. It disturbed him deeply, this superficial similarity between them. Both had been born min-mutes physically, max-mutes psionically.
“Because the answer is not to destroy CC. Only the ignorant believe that. Many of those ignorant are lobos; we know that. We tell them what they are capable of grasping. But we leaders know better.”
“Like your wife?” Knot demanded, remembering her blithe insanity.
“Her most of all. She speaks for lopsi, our ultimate authority.”
Knot was astonished. “You believe that?”
“Of course I believe in lopsi! That belief motivates my whole life’s work! Everything I do is for the furthering of that reality!”
Was Piebald crazy too? “Yet you want to convert CC to your own aggrandizement! Why change the system, when suddenly it serves your selfish interests?”
“Our interests are close to your interests, if only you realized!”
“Oh, sure. I love to smash the noses of beautiful women, torture old men to death, burn down houses with sleeping people in them, feed women to monsters, kill people freely when—”
“We have tried to kill you,” Piebald said evenly. “You have been our most dangerous opponent, as the present crisis indicates. You destroyed our Macho headquarters, killing many of our people. I radioed a general evacuation, but not all could escape in time. I regard those losses as your responsibility, not mine. Just as you killed many mutants in the chasm enclave, in order to effect your escape. When balked you attack, always. Do you consider your own hands clean?”
That set Knot back. He had, indeed, killed many people in the course of this mission, and he was not proud of it. And Piebald had not, after all, callously left the lobos of the volcano villa to die; he had warned them from the truck, and saved many. Knot had been too ready to believe too much evil of his enemy. Piebald was bad, very bad, but not as bad as Knot had thought. “No, my hands are dirty, soiled with blood. I am not fit to govern. I’m fit only to stop monsters like you. The present system may not be perfect, but it is surely better than what your kind offers. If you will simply admit that, and let one of our number apply the new override code to make CC ours, your people on this planet may survive. Otherwise—”
“The present system is far from perfect—but it can be vastly improved,” Piebald said. “This is our intent. First we must cut off the generation of mutants. Then—”
“I tried that, in an alternate future sequence. It led only to the collapse of galactic civilization, and chaos.”
“Because you were equating civilization with empire. Like the ancient Romans, you thought the only future lay with the organization in power. But the Roman empire fell—”
“And led to the dark ages—”
“And thence to modern Europe, and on into the space age. Even in the depths of darkness, it was only Europe that suffered; the Arabian sphere and the Chinese sphere flourished in golden ages. This must happen again. The old CC program, like the decadent Romans, actually stands in the way of progress. It offers temporary political stability, at the price of ruinous mutation and grief. A mutiny against that order is essential. As the dinosaurs had to be eliminated before the superior mammals could rise.”
“You’re quite a scholar,” Knot said. “You should be happy CC has been turned off. There will certainly be chaos, and an end to mutation and successful mutinies all over the galaxy!”
“But the chaos can be greatly lessened if CC is not destroyed!” Piebald cried, and he seemed amazingly sincere. “If CC is used to direct the new order, shaping it sensibly, with long-range human history in mind, instead of allowing a crash—”
“We’ve been through that!” Knot said. “I have seen how you lobos direct things. I’d rather let there be chaos.”
“You have seen us doing research.”
“Research! I call it torture of innocents!”
“We use coercion to force psi talents to manifest.”
“Which you then extirpate by lobotomy!”
“And try to correct immediately by remedial surgery! Had we been successful, we would have had the key to restore all lobotomized psi-talents. But we have had no success with long-established lobos; our psi-connections are permanently gone, as far as present technology is concerned. So we had to go to new lobos, with strong wills, who might—”
“That’s what you had in mind for Finesse,” Knot grated.
“Yes, and for you. But how much better it would be to replace our necessarily crude methods with the sophistication only CC could employ. We could solve the problems of lobotomy!”
“So that’s your special interest! The death penalty was eliminated in favor of lobotomy, and now you want even that to be undone so criminals can get off entirely free! No restraint at all for crime!”
“We do not condone crime,” Piebald said evenly. “Lobos are the most law-abiding citizens. On many planets, we are the police force itself, and our record is excellent. Lopsi keeps us disciplined.”
Knot had to concede the discipline of the lobos; he had marveled at this himself. “But criminals who are not lobotomized will have no deterrent, no restraint; is that what you seek?”
“There will be restraint. A telekinetic who uses his power to kill a man by stopping his heart from pumping is a murderer who deserves punishment. I too abused my psi, and had to be restrained; I too deserved retribution. But they should not have abolished my valuable psi talent; they should instead have abolished my criminal drive! They did it backwards, preserving the criminal while sacrificing the psi.”
Knot, startled, almost lost his leverage. Eliminate the criminal aspect of man, not the psi! So obvious!
“We lobos seek a better way—for us and for everyone,” Piebald continued. “Research—not only to cure lobotomy and criminality, but to penetrate the mystery of mutation itself. So that man will be able to control mutation. To produce given psi powers at will, with no failures. Only the tremendous resources of the Coordination Computer can do this effectively. But that means removing CC from its present, unsound program, even if chaos results for a time.”
“I know. The dinosaurs and the mammals. I simply don’t believe—” But the lobo leader’s vision of the future threatened to overwhelm his doubt. The answer to the whole mutation problem—including the developing mutinies by the animals. Because this would put human mut
ation on a par with that of the more psi-evolved animals. Humans, too, would have controlled psi for every individual. Not the cessation of all mutation, with its attendant disruptions and further loss of power to the animals, but domination of mutation. All the good with none of the evil. Yet how could he believe that this murderer would really usher in such a miracle?
“Then believe this,” Piebald said. “Our prime initial ambition is to eliminate lopsi.”
Knot laughed. “To destroy the alleged source of your power? That disembodied alien force that makes all lobos cooperate? I doubt that.”
“It is a dangerous force. The only way to preserve civilization long-term is to control mutancy and psi, lest they multiply cancerously and destroy the parent body. Mutancy we can cut off only at the source, preventing mutant births. Lopsi we can drain away, like releasing the sluices of a dam about to burst from flooding. By restoring the individual psi powers to decriminalized lobos, making then complete and useful citizens again. What a golden age it could be, once mutancy in all its forms has been tamed to serve instead of to chasten man!”
Knot hated this ruthless lobo. But Piebald’s words were making a lot of sense. Suppose—
Then he looked at Finesse, lying still and bloodied, and his unbelief hardened. He knew that she, if she lived, would never be deluded by this glib package of promises. And if she died—
“I do not trust you or your dream. I can meet most of my commitments to the animals and to myself by letting CC die. This way is painful but sure.”
Piebald, seeing his persuasion fail, struggled desperately. But he could not free himself from the balk-position they shared. “You are deluded! It’s such a waste!”
“Yes, isn’t it,” Knot agreed, smiling as the wan light faded to darkness. The air was now almost unbreathable, too. They would die when CC did.
Suddenly the light brightened, and a fresh draft of air wafted across the room. Both Knot and Piebald looked up, blinking, startled.
A man stood by the master switch. He had just closed it, restoring power to CC, and the response had been almost instant. He was a CC teleport.