So I was picking up some of what the Psychophage was thinking. Why? Because one of his thoughts was linked to one of mine. And from any link in the chain, any other link can be found, like those holographic picture that can be reconstructed, the whole of it from any part.
The book said the chain was unbreakable.
“We're here, pal,” said the cabbie.
I saw buses crowded around the station like frozen whales, pale in the flat neon glare from the parking lot spotlights.
“That'll be $12.50.” I had raised my head, so he got his first good look at me.
Twelve dollars? He might as well have asked me for twelve million. I lunged for the door handle, but he had already locked the door with his remote switch, trapping me inside.
“You're not even thinking of trying to stiff me, are you, jerk?”
“I can give you the coat. It's worth more than the fare.”
“You stole it.”
“But you have to help me! There's someone chasing me; it's trying to kill me! I've got to get out of town. I'll–I'll pay you back!”
“Shut up, loser,” he said, disgusted. He had seen through my disguise and now he knew how poor I was. Pity was only for people with money, I guess. “I'll drive you to the police station. My cousin Antonio is at the Twelfth Precinct. And don't worry, this trip's on me, pal!”
And he pulled away from the curb. We rolled up over the crest of a hill. Behind me, I saw the bus station, my only hope of getting out of town, sinking away into the distance. It was like a drowning man's last view of a ship sailing over the horizon, a ship filled with people laughing and smirking at him. I never felt such biting fear, or such pure hatred. In that moment, I wished the cabbie dead.
In another part of the city, the Simulacrum was in a subway station, standing in front of a dirt-streaked, fly-specked plastic panel which held the city map. The Twelfth Precinct Station was clearly marked. There. It was in no hurry. I would be trapped there all night. The creature stepped onto an empty train. The doors snapped shut behind it. With a shriek and rattle, the rocking subway car began to move. Windows flashed bright and dark as the underground lights streaked past.
I tapped on the glass separating the back seat from the driver. “Hey–driver! Look here! I've got my wallet right here in my pocket! You said the fare was six-fifty, right?”
And I tried to understand him. I tried to anticipate his thoughts. He was going to say the fare was twelve fifty. He's going to be annoyed, impatient.
“Twelve-fifty,” he said, irked.
He is annoyed because he hates this damned job, and the damn dispatcher doesn't speak any good English. He is abrupt because he's afraid that someday some crazy in the back with a gun will…
Fear. Of all the passions, fear is supreme.
Without warning, I started screaming at him, high-pitched lung-wrenching shrieks, and I slammed one fist against the glass, again and again. My other hand I placed in a coat pocket, thumb up and index finger out, lifting and pointing the flap of my coat just the way people do in bad sitcoms when they are pretending they have a gun in their pocket.
“I've got a gun! I've got a gun!” I screamed. I could feel him thinking. My God, what if he really does have one? “Gimme the money! Gimme the goddamn money or I'll blow your stinking head off!” I followed the demand with a loud, inarticulate scream, a wordless, meaningless cry of hate and fury. The whole time I was kicking the back of his seat with both feet.
He was thinking of his wife. I saw her in my mind's eye, a thick-waisted, bad-tempered woman in a gray housecoat, wearing her hair up in a plastic scarf. They argued all the time and yet he could not imagine life without her. He could imagine, however, her stern face beginning to fall as an unsympathetic cop explained how he had been blown away by some hop-head, and now she was alone, no one to argue with, no protection, no love, nothing, forever and ever.
The Operator can introduce his own thoughts and passions into his victim's souls. But they have to be his thoughts. I was terrified. Now he was terrified too.
And I knew what it was like to suddenly lose the only one you'd ever loved in your life. He was wondering how his wife would feel if her beloved husband died?
So I showed him. I gave him my pain.
It acted like a match; his fear was like a pool of gasoline igniting. Somehow, I was warmed by that sudden blaze of smoke and flame.
He slammed on the brakes, hit the switch to open my door, and threw his roll of bills—a rubber band held everything he had made that evening—out the window. He thought I would jump out the door to get the money. I jumped, but I just wanted out. But he almost took my leg off, roaring away while I was still half inside.
I stumbled and fell. Then I picked up the little green-and-white cylinder of bills from the gutter nearby. “Hey!” I shouted at his receding taillights. “I didn't really want your damn money!”
I didn't need to count it. The cabbie—his name was Brian Delveccio—knew how much he had made that night. It had been a long shift, and the guy from the Cobolt Hotel had been a particularly good tipper. I had $283 now, mostly in singles and fivers. I would have liked to give it back to him. I knew exactly what effort it had cost him to make this.
But instead, I got to my feet and began to walk up the hill. Once I crested the summit, I could see the station before and below me. I was sorry about stealing the man's coat and I was sorry about robbing the cabbie. I would have been a lot sorrier if the Soul Slayer got me, though.
The Simulacrum was probably still riding on the subway, going the wrong direction, unable to get off until the train's next stop. I had a little time, if only I could use it right.
I handed the ticket seller a handful of cash without looking at the bills, and asked him for a ticket to go as far as that would take me. By some miracle, mostly because I kept my eyes fixed on the floor, and I kept shouting down and interrupting anyone who tried to help me or to get me on the right bus, I managed to buy a ticket without looking at it. I even managed to get aboard a bus without knowing where it was going.
The bus rolled on into the night leaving the lights of the city behind.
There wasn't much light inside the bus. I mostly saw my fellow passengers as silhouettes and shadows around me. They were sad-faced women and bitter-looking, tired men, huddled up in dull-colored coats, everyone sitting alone. Here and there were one or two young students, too poor to afford any better form of travel, sleeping on their duffle bags and backpacks.
Maybe they were not as noble as I'd like to believe, my race. But they were not food-animals.
I'd heard that in Virginia, you could buy a gun without a five-day waiting period. And maybe getting real drunk would disorganize my thoughts enough for the Soul Slayer to lose track of me. Or maybe, if I rode far enough away, a good night's sleep would do it.
The rocking motion of the bus was lulling me to sleep. The bus rolled on, leaving my enemy farther and farther behind me. I was safe… for now.
I fell asleep and dreamed of the Slayer, who despite the distance between us was no further away than my own thoughts. I dreamt the Slayer sent its Simulacrum to hunt Mr. Delvecchio. The cab driver never got lost and he always knew where he was; it was part of his job. It was simplicity itself for the Simulacrum, looking human in the dark, to flag down a cab, to lean across the seat, to reach a glove through the little window-slot and touch the driver's shoulder.
It was simplicity itself to turn all the little man's fearful thoughts into thoughts of infinite, insane, all-destroying panic. It was simple to sever certain nerve trunks by means of hypnotic psycho-somatic force, the placebo effect in reverse, so that Mr. Delvecchio could no longer move or speak or see or feel. A second touch drained his vital essences, destroying his higher brain functions, so that only the endless, animal agony of fear was left. No, it was not even animal. The thalamus and hypothalamus were drained and destroyed. Only the brain-stem, with its simple reptilian functions, was left, full of terror on the most blank, mo
st primitive level.
And it was simplicity itself to shove the body to the passenger side and drive to the hospital, where the native medical science would keep Mr. Delvecchio's body alive, draining away his widow's cash, while an ongoing feast of fear-energy fed into the absorption cells of the Psychophage. It was ironic how peaceful a comatose body looked. Just because the muscles of the face could no longer move, and the voice-box no longer scream, his doctors would assume Mr. Delvecchio slept in dreamless peace.
But unconscious bodies and sleeping bodies were still of use to the Great Race. Without a waking mind to interfere, the victim's mind, even on its lowest functional level, still responded as if outside thoughts arose from one's own brain, didn't it?
I woke up screaming.
And dancing. I was naked. When I woke up, I found myself prancing up and down the aisles of the motionless bus, wrestling with the bus driver, spitting and shrieking and pulling people's luggage off the overhead racks. It took me a moment realize what was going on. And when I opened my mouth to ask a question, someone put a fist in it.
The bus driver threw me headlong down the stairs of the forward door. I was just glad he was angry enough for me to put the thought in his head that he wanted to throw something else at me. Otherwise he might not have chucked my fancy coat and ratty clothes at me, or winged my shoes toward my head.
The bus vanished in the distance, taking all light and sound with it. I was naked. I was cold.
I stifled a scream. That cab driver, the one I'd robbed… he was dead. He was worse than dead. Lobotomized, paralyzed, helpless, in constant pain. He was in Hell.
My link to his thoughts still was there. I could hear him faintly in my head, screaming and screaming.
And he had fallen into his torment so quietly and softly. It had been like falling asleep; at first, a shock of cold, but then numbness, darkness, and silence. In the end, the victim was left alone with nothing but his terror.
I pulled on my clothes quickly. I could feel the roll of banknotes still in the coat pocket. Limping (for I could only find one shoe), I made my way down the country road. There was no traffic.
For a long while, as I walked, I felt nothing but fear and terror and helpless fury over what the Soul Slayer had done to Mr. Delvecchio. What it wanted to do to me. But the walk was tiring and gradually the feeling faded.
I wondered why the Slayer had manipulated my sleeping body to pull such antics on the bus. I assumed the Slayer had expected the bus driver to turn me over to the police or some other easily located authority, not to throw me out somewhere along the highway.
The Slayer had guessed wrong about what the human driver would do. But if there was some sort of clue here, I was too tired to see it.
At the crossroads was a truckstop, with a gas station and a diner. It was called Dave's Diner. I laughed. Good luck, Soul Slayer. Even if I had known the bus's destination, I didn't know where I had been thrown off. I didn't even know what state I was in. If all the Slayer knew about me was that I was in a Dave's Diner, somewhere in the world, it would never find me.
I ordered the trucker's special from the tired old waitress, eggs and hash browns. I was careful not to speak to the waitress, or to do anything but grunt and point at the menu. I did not try to understand her. She did not die.
And the food helped. I won't say that my prospects started to look any brighter, but my fear was beginning to turn into anger.
I didn't have the faintest notion what to do, though.
There was a public telephone right next to the booth I slid into. It was within arm's reach behind me. Old habits die hard: even though I had money, I reached into the coinbox in search of any lost quarters. Then I noticed the phone number inscribed above the dial. My attention was drawn to it almost against my will. I read the area code and the number.
And the pay phone rang.
I slowly raised my hand and picked up the receiver. I didn't bother to say hello. It knew I was listening.
Its voice was thin and high-pitched, soft and melodic, like the voice of a little girl. “You will serve me. Either you will gather others on whom I may feed or you will yourself be consumed.”
I said nothing.
“Your escape was permitted so that you might learn the ease with which the contamination can be spread; anyone who understands your words and thoughts can be your prey. Some of my servants desire to arrange the affairs of your civilization into patterns more to their liking or to accumulate the objects and signs of esteem valued by your life-configuration. If there are particular individual victims, warlords or princes or merchants, brought into your section of the mind-web which you find useful for such pastimes, I will spare them, provided your activities produce more victims for my use.”
“Arrange affairs of… what do you mean?”
“The time-space manifestation you call Earth and History displays a behavior called civilization. Major sections of this civilization-behavior have been usurped by my servants and they secretly direct many actions of the peoples. This allows them to acquire objects they find valuable, such as shiny metal, or rectangles of paper which symbolize such metals. They also murder or torture their enemies, and enjoy the acquisition of various sexual partners. This fulfils desires they possess, but does not hinder my purposes.”
“What purposes?”
“You have read it in the book-object. Fear is the supreme of passions among the slave-species; fear-energy orients all thought-lines into useful configurations. Pain is magnified, life fails, entropy increases, the psychosphere disintegrates. Those are the purposes.”
“Who–what are you?”
“You will never understand us. You will never apprehend our nature.”
“Us? There's more than one of you?”
“Yes. No. The introduction of an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere to this planetary era has limited the exercise of certain of our manipulators. Conditions will be returned to the prior anaerobic configuration.”
It was incomprehensible. And, suddenly, unexpectedly, I did not feel frightened. Because fear is not the strongest passion. Hope drives out fear.
And I had hope. For the first time, I had hope.
“You sure don't talk like something that understands human beings very well. I don't think you are alive, not what we call alive. And I don't think you understand me at all. Maybe Mr. Hobbes thought I was just a homeless bum, or a nutcase. I sure looked like one, I guess. But I've got an education, and I had a job and a life, once. And I had a wife.”
It said nothing.
“Did I ever tell you about her? We were married on a green hill in a park on Midsummer's Day. She liked reading and taking long walks, no matter the weather. She smiled when it rained and she smiled when it shined. We were going to have kids, but we got a cat in the meantime. She named him Rumpelstiltskin; Rumples for short. She used to make lunches for me, even though she sometimes worked longer hours than I did, and she used to write little notes to me on the napkins she put in the lunchbag. Imagine napkins in a lunchbag! She was very neat and clean. Everything in order and just right. She knew where everything was. I lost everything. After she was gone, I never found anything again. After she was gone, I stopped. The company… I was a demolitions engineer for Guthrie Construction… the company gave me a certain amount of bereavement leave. Time to find my life again. But I couldn't find it. I couldn't find the will to work. I couldn't find the rent money. I lost everything. And do you know what is so funny, Mister alien brain-eating horror? I can't seem to find your thoughts in my head any more. Why is that, do you suppose?”
There was silence on the line.
“The way I figure, creatures like you could not have any families or communities. Or friendship. Or love. Any time you understood each other, that would form a mental link, and you would eat each other's souls. And so you can't understand when I talk about love, and you can't read me when I do.”
The horrible voice spoke again. “We ruled the Earth before green life poisoned
the atmosphere with oxygen. We do not die. We shall rule again once life-effects have ceased. Already, human slaves are gathered to aid us in the culmination of this project. You will serve us. You cannot elude or escape us. No one can escape the chains of thought.”
“Yeah. Right. That's what the book said. That's what this voice of yours is saying over the phone. But print can lie and so can voices. But if it actually is true, then put the thought directly into my head so I will know you're telling the truth. Or, better yet, tell me what my plans are now. You can't, can you?”
“You observe that my Simulacrum has drained Mr. Delvecchio in a fashion which does not involve pain or death. You observe that I do not have the behavior-emotion of finding a partner to make a small and weak copy or version of myself, the entities you call babies. From this you draw a conclusion. But your thoughts are unclear or irrelevant. I do not care what your thought is. You will serve me, willingly or unwillingly.”
I hung up on the monster.
My thoughts were clear enough to me. I did not need a gun. I knew the warehouse where Guthrie Engineering, my old firm, kept some of its supplies. I knew the combination to the safe-box where the blasting caps were kept. And every gas station sells gasoline.
And I knew from experience that on one point, the book was not lying.
I still had plenty of money left over as well as change from the bus ticket. I slipped another quarter into the phone, called information, found the number, and dialed.
As the phone rang, I tried to understand. I knew the sort of vicious, hatred-eaten coward who would sell out his own kind to an inhuman monster. I knew because I had been tempted myself. Yes, there was that same viciousness and hatred and cowardice in my own heart. I understood him only too well. And I knew his thought. He would answer the phone and say: “Hello. Hobbes's Rare and Curious Book Shoppe.”