The Game-Players of Titan

  We would not be facing them across a Game-board. They would simply kill us, as they killed Luckman and Hawthorne, and that would be that.

  A car descended, now, its headlights flashing; it came to rest at the curb, behind the other cars, and its lights switched off. The door opened and shut and a single figure, a man, came striding toward Pete.

  Who was this? He strained to see, not recognizing him.

  “Hi,” the man said. “I dropped by. After I read the article in the homeopape. It looks interesting, here. No fnool, I say, buddy-friend. Correct?”

  “Who are you?” Pete said.

  The man said coolly, “You don’t recognize me? I thought everyone knew who I am. Awop awop woom. May I sit in on your group, tonight? Buddy, buddy, buddy; I know I’d enjoy it.” He approached the porch, stood now beside Pete, his movements confident and alert, hand extended. “I’m Nats Katz.”

  Bill Calumine said, “Of course you can sit in on our Game, Mr. Katz. It’s an honor to have you here.” He waved the members of Pretty Blue Fox into momentary silence. “This is the world-renowned disc jockey and recording star Nats Katz, whom we all watch on TV; he’s asked to sit in on our meeting tonight. Does anybody mind?”

  The group was watching, uncertain how to react.

  What was it Mary Anne had said about Katz? Pete thought. Is Nats Katz the center of all this? he had asked her. And she had said yes. And, at the time, it had seemed true.

  Pete said, “Wait.”

  Turning, Bill Calumine said, “Surely there’s no valid reason to object to this man’s presence here. I can’t believe you’d seriously—”

  “Wait until Mary Anne gets here,” Pete said. “Let her decide about Katz.”

  “She’s not even a part of the group,” Freya Gaines said.

  There was silence.

  “If he comes in,” Pete said, “I go out.” “Out where?” Calumine said. Pete said nothing.

  “A girl who isn’t even part of our group—” Calumine began.

  “What’s your basis for opposing him?” Stuart Marks asked Pete. “Is it rational? Something you are able to express?” They were all watching him, now, wondering what his reason was.

  Pete said, “We’re in a much worse position than any of you realize. There’s very little chance that we can win against our opponents.”

  “So?” Stuart Marks said. “What’s that have to do—”

  “I think,” Pete said, “that Katz is on their side.”

  After a moment Nats Katz laughed. He was handsome, dark, with sensuous lips and strong, intelligent eyes. “That’s a new one,” he said. “I’ve been accused of just about everything, but hardly that. A wop woom! I was born in Chicago, Mr. Garden. I assure you; I’m a Terran. Woom, woom, woom!” His round, animated face radiated a potent cheerfulness. Katz did not seem offended, only surprised. “What will you see, my birth certificate? You know, buddy-friend Garden woom, I really am well-known here and there, no fnool. If I were a vug it probably would have come to light before now. Wouldn’t you think? Correct?”

  Pete sipped his drink; his hands, he found, were shaking. Have I lost contact with reality? he asked himself. Maybe so. Maybe I never fully recovered from my binge, my temporary psychotic interlude. Am I the person to judge about Katz?

  Should I be here at all? he wondered.

  Maybe this is the end for me, he said to himself. Not for them; for me. Personally. At last.

  Aloud, he said, “I’m going out. I’ll be back later.” Turning, he set his drink glass down and left the room; he descended the porch steps and arrived at his car. Getting in, he slammed the door and sat in silence for a long, long time.

  Maybe I’m more of a detriment to the group than an asset at this point, he said to himself. He lit a cigarette, then abruptly dropped it into the disposal chute of the car. For all I know, Nats might even come up with the idea we need; he’s an imaginative guy.

  Someone was standing on the porch, calling him; the voice drifted to him faintly. “Hey, Pete, what’re you doing? Come on back inside!”

  Pete started up the car. “Let’s go,” he ordered it.

  “Yes, Mr. Garden.” The car moved forward, then lifted from the pavement, skimmed above the other parked cars, beep-beeping, then above the rooftops of Carmel; at last, it headed toward the Pacific, a quarter mile west.

  All I have to do, Pete thought idly, is give it the command to land. Because in another minute we’ll be over water.

  Would the Rushmore circuit do that? Probably.

  “Where are we?” he asked it, to see if it knew.

  “Over the Pacific Ocean, Mr. Garden.”

  “What would you do,” he said, “if I asked you to set down?”

  There was a moment of silence. “Call Doctor Macy at—” It hesitated; he heard the unit clicking, trying different combinations. “I would set down,” it decided. “As instructed.”

  It had chosen. Had he?

  I shouldn’t be this depressed, he told himself. I shouldn’t be doing things like this; it isn’t reasonable.

  But he was.

  For a time he managed to look down at the dark water below. And then, with a turn of the tiller, he steered the car into a wide arc until it was skimming back toward land. This way isn’t for me, Pete said to himself. Not the ocean. I’ll pick up something at the apartment, something I can take; a bottle or so of phenobarbital, maybe. Or Emphytal.

  He flew above Carmel, going north, and presently his car was passing above South San Francisco. And a few minutes later he was over Marin County. San Rafael lay directly ahead. He gave the Rushmore circuit the instructions to land at his apartment building; settling back, he waited.

  “Here we are, sir.” The car bumped the curb slightly. The motor clicked itself off; the car dutifully opened its door.

  Pete stepped out, walked to the building door, put his key in the lock and then entered.

  Upstairs, he reached the door of his and Carol’s apartment; the door was unlocked and he opened it and passed on inside.

  The lights were on. In the living room a lanky, middle-aged man sat in the center of the couch, legs crossed, reading the Chronicle.

  “You forget,” the man said, tossing the newspaper down, “that a pre-cog previews every possibility that he’s later going to know about. And a suicide on your part would be big news.” Dave Mutreaux rose to his feet, hands in his pockets; he seemed completely at ease. “This would be an especially unfortunate time for you to kill yourself, Garden.”

  “Why?” Pete demanded.

  Mutreaux said quietly, “Because if you don’t, you’re on the verge of finding an answer to the Game-problem. The answer to how one bluffs a race of telepaths. I can’t give it to you; only you can think it up. But it’s going to be there. Not, however, if you’re dead ten minutes from now.” He nodded in the direction of the bathroom and its medicine cabinet. “I’ve done a little rigging along the lines of the alternate future I’d like to see become actual; while I’ve been here I’ve disposed of your pills. The medicine cabinet is empty.”

  Pete went at once into the bathroom and looked.

  Not even the aspirin remained. He saw only bare shelves.

  To the medicine cabinet he said, angrily, “You let him do this?”

  Its Rushmore Effect answered cringingly, “He said it was for your own good, Mr. Garden. And you know how you are when you’re depressed.”

  Slamming the cabinet door, Pete walked back into the living room.

  “You’ve got me, Mutreaux,” he conceded. “At least in one respect. The way I had in mind—”

  “You can find some other way, of course,” Mutreaux said calmly. “But emotionally you lean toward suicide by oral means. Poisons, narcotics, sedatives, hypnotics and so forth.” He smiled. “There’s a resistance to doing it by any other means. For instance, by dropping into the Pacific.”

  Pete said, “Can you tell me anything about my solution to the Game-playing problem?”

  ?
??No,” Mutreaux said. “I can’t. That’s entirely up to you.”

  “Thanks,” Pete said sardonically.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, however. A hint. One which may cheer you or it may not. I can’t preview it because you aren’t going to show your reaction visibly. Patricia McClain is not dead.”

  Pete stared at him.

  “Mary Anne didn’t destroy her. She set her down somewhere. Don’t ask me where because I don’t know. But I preview Patricia’s presence in San Rafael within the next few hours. At her apartment.”

  Pete could think of nothing to say; he continued to stare at the pre-cog.

  “See?” Mutreaux said. “No palpable reaction of any sort. Perhaps you’re ambivalent.” He added, “She’ll only be there a short time; then she’s going to Titan. And not by Doctor Philipson’s Psionic means but in the more conventional manner, by interplan ship.”

  “She’s really on their side, isn’t she? There’s no doubt of that.”

  “Oh yes,” Mutreaux said, nodding. “She’s really on their side. But that’s not going to stop you from going, is it?”

  “No,” Pete said, and started from the apartment.

  “May I come along?” Mutreaux asked.

  “Why?”

  “To keep her from killing you.”

  Pete was silent a moment. “It’s really like that, is it?”

  Mutreaux nodded. “It certainly is, and you know it. You watched them shoot Hawthorne.”

  “Okay,” Pete said. “Come with me.” He added, “Thanks.” It was hard to say it.

  They left the apartment building together, Pete slightly ahead of David Mutreaux.

  As they reached the street, Pete said, “Did you know that Nats Katz, the disc jockey, showed up at the con-apt in Carmel?”

  Nodding, Dave Mutreaux said, “Yes. I met him an hour or so ago and talked to him; he looked me up. It was the first time I had ever run into him, although of course I had heard of him.” He added, “It’s because of him that I crossed over.”

  “Crossed over?” Halting, Pete turned toward Mutreaux, who followed after him.

  And found himself, incredibly, facing a heat-needle.

  “With Katz,” Mutreaux said calmly. “The pressure simply was too much on me, Pete. I couldn’t effectively resist it. Nats is extraordinarily powerful. He was chosen to be leader of the Wa Pei Nan here on Terra for a good reason. Come on, let’s continue on our way to Patricia McClain’s apartment.” He gestured with the heat-needle.

  After a moment Pete said, “Why didn’t you just let me kill myself? Why intervene at all?”

  “Because,” Dave Mutreaux said, “you’re coming over to our side, Pete. We can make good use of you. The Wa Pei Nan doesn’t approve of this Game-playing solution; once we manage to penetrate Pretty Blue Fox, by means of you, we can call The Game off from this end.” He added, “We’ve already discussed it with the moderate faction on Titan and they’re determined to play; they like to play and they feel this controversy between the two cultures ought to be resolved within a legal framework. Needless to say, the Wa Pei Nan does not agree.”

  They continued along the dark sidewalk, toward the McClain apartment, Dave Mutreaux slightly behind Pete.

  “I should have guessed,” Pete said. “When Katz showed up, I had an intuition but I didn’t act on it.” They had penetrated the group and directly, it seemed, through him. He wished now that he had managed to find the courage to drop his car into the sea; he had been right; it would have been better for everyone concerned. Everyone and everything he believed in.

  “When The Game begins,” Mutreaux said, “I will be there and you, too, Pete, and we will decline to play. And perhaps by that time Nats will have managed to persuade others. I can’t see that far ahead; the alternative courses are obscure to me, for reasons I can’t make out.” They had almost reached the McClain apartment, now.

  When they opened the door to the apartment they found Pat McClain busy packing two suitcases; she hardly paused to acknowledge their presence.

  “I picked up your thoughts as you came down the hall,” she said, carrying an armload of clothes to the suitcases from the dresser in the bedroom. Her face, Pete saw, had a craven, caved-in look on it; in every way she had collapsed from the disastrous clash with Mary Anne. She worked feverishly to complete her packing, as if struggling against an inexorable and yet unclearly seen deadline.

  “Where are you going?” Pete asked. “Titan?”

  “Yes,” Patricia answered. “As far away from that girl as I possibly can get. She can’t hurt me there; I’ll be safe.” Her hands, Pete saw, shook as she tried, and failed, to close the suitcases. “Help me,” she said, appealing to Mutreaux.

  Obligingly, Dave Mutreaux closed the suitcases for her.

  “Before you leave,” Pete said to her, “let me ask you something. How do the Titanians play The Game being telepaths?”

  “Do you think you’re going to care?” Patricia said, pausing, lifting her head and regarding him bleakly. “After Katz and Philipson are through with you?”

  “I care now,” he said. “They’ve been playing The Game for a long time, so evidently they’ve found a way to incorporate their faculty or—”

  Patricia said, “They hobble it, Pete.”

  “I see,” he said. But he did not see. Hobble it how? And to what extent?

  Patricia said, “Through drug-ingestion. The effect is similar to what the phenothiazine class does to a Terran.”

  “Phenothiazines,” Mutreaux said. “In big doses that’s given to schizophrenics; in quantity it becomes an antipsychotic medication.”

  “It lessens the schizophrenic delusions,” Patricia said, “because it obliterates the involuntary telepathic sense; it eradicates the paranoiac response to the picking up of subconscious hostilities in others. The Titanians possess medication which acts along the same lines on them and the rules of The Game, as they practice it, require them to lose their talent or at least to abort it by some extent.”

  Mutreaux, glancing at his watch, said, “He should be here any time now, Patricia. Surely you’re going to wait for him.”

  “Why?” she said, still gathering up articles here and there in the apartment. “I don’t want to stay; I just want to get out. Before something else happens. Something more that has to do with her.”

  “We’ll need all three of us to exert sufficient influence on Garden, here,” Mutreaux pointed out.

  “You get Nats Katz, then,” Patricia said. “I’m telling you I’m not going to stay one minute longer than I have to!”

  “But right now Katz is in Carmel,” Mutreaux said, patiently. “And we want to have Garden thoroughly with us when we go there.”

  “I can’t help,” Patricia said, paying no attention to him; she could not seem to stop her headlong flight, her rushing blindly. “Listen, Dave, honest to god, there’s only one thing that matters to me; I don’t want to undergo again what we went through in Nevada. You were there, you know what I’m talking about. And next time she won’t spare you, because you’re with us. I really advise you to get out, too; let E. R. Philipson handle this, since he’s immune to her. But it’s your life; you have to decide.” She went on, then, and Mutreaux somberly seated himself, with the heat-needle, waiting for Doctor Philipson to show up.

  To himself Pete thought, Hobble it. Hobble the Psionic talents on both sides, as Patricia said. It could be an agreement with them; we make use of the phenothiazines, they use whatever it is they’re accustomed to. So they were cheating when they read my mind. And then he thought, And they’ll cheat again. We can’t trust them to hobble themselves. They seem to feel that their moral obligations end when they encounter us.

  “That’s right,” Patricia said, picking up his thoughts. “They’re not going to hobble themselves when they play you, Pete. And you can’t compel them to because in your own playing you don’t recognize such a stipulation; you can’t show them a legal basis on your side for demanding that.”


  “We can show them that we’ve never allowed Psionic talents at the board,” he said.

  “But you are now. Your group is voting that daughter of mine in and Dave Mutreaux in, right?” She smiled at him crookedly, heartlessly, her eyes lusterless and black. “So that’s that, Pete Garden. Too bad. At least you made the try.”

  Bluffing, he thought. Telepaths. Hobbling through medication that acts as a thalamic suppressor, dulls the extrasensory area of the brain. It could be dulled to various degrees, damped to some extent but not entirely; gradations can be obtained, depending on the amount of medication. Ten milligrams of a phenothiazine would dampen it; sixty would obliterate it.

  And then he thought, his mind careening, Suppose we didn’t look at the cards we drew? There would be nothing in our minds for the Titanians to read because we wouldn’t know what number we’d obtained …

  To Mutreaux, Patricia said, “He’s almost managed it, Dave. He forgets that he’s not going to be playing on the Terran side, that he’s going to belong to us by the time he seats himself at the Game-board.” She brought out a little overnight bag, now, hurrying to fill it.

  Pete thought, If we had Mutreaux, if we could regain him, we could win. Because I know how, finally.

  “You know,” Patricia said, “but how is it going to help you?”

  Aloud, Pete said, “We could dampen his pre-cog faculty to an undetermined degree. So that it becomes unpredictable.” Through the use of phenothiazine spansules, he realized, which act over a period of hours at a variable rate. Mutreaux himself would not know if he were bluffing or not, how accurate his guess was. He would draw a card, and, without looking at it, move our piece. If his pre-cog faculty were operating at maximum force at that instant his guess would be accurate; it would not be bluff. But if at that instant the medication had a greater rather than a lesser effect on him—

  It would be a bluff. And Mutreaux himself would not know. That could easily be arranged; someone else would prepare the phenothiazine spansule, fix the rate at which it would release its medication.

  “But,” Patricia said softly, “Dave isn’t on your side of the Game table, Pete.”