top of the turbulent currents, giving up thought direction
and fighting only for the integrity of my own mind. Then I
was suddenly up and splashing through the pillar of foamy
water that roared into the black, heavy sky; like a bullet
out of a rifle, whining, spinning, was I. Splashing, sputter-
ing, I showered out of the mind of Child.
The room was dark. The hex signs glowed on the walls,
partially illuminating the serious faces of the generals and
the technicians. They were all grimacing, like gargoyle
masks.
“He threw me out,” I said in the quiet which stretched
to the breaking point.
Everyone stared at me with what was obviously a bad
case of doubt. I wished I had been more conciliatory in
the days past, so that this incident would not appear so
suspicious.
“He just threw me out of his mind,” I said. It was the
first time it had ever happened to me. I explained that.
They listened. Somewhere, I was certain, Child was laugh-
ing. …
VIII
Rumors of war.
The Chinese had slaughtered the skeleton staffs manning
the last two Western Alliance embassies in Asia. One was
in what had once been called Korea, the other on the home
islands of Japan. The Japanese denied any responsibility for
the massacre on their own soil. The story was that citizens
of Japan and Chinese ancestry had forced their way past
the police detailed to protect the Western delegates, had run
wild in an orgy of destruction. The Japanese press pointed
out that the West, perhaps, should have been expecting this
for years, their own silly trade practices—from which
China had always been excluded—drawing the wrath of a
poverty-stricken people who felt cast aside from the main
commerce of the world. Other reports, from eyewitnesses
in Japan, said that the Japanese police did not resist the
mob at all and actually seemed to be directing its blood-
thirsty attack on the foreign consulate offices.
The Tri-D screen showed headless bodies for the benefit
of those with shallow imaginations. In the streets of
Tokyo, masses marched, holding those heads speared on
the ends of sharpened aluminum poles. Dead eyes of our
countrymen looked back at us from the other side of the
screen….
The Pentagon, the same morning, announced the dis-
covery of the Bensor Beam, which was capable of shorting
out all synapses in the nervous system of the human body,
leaving the brain imprisoned in a mindless hulk. Named
after its creator, a Dr. Harold Bensor, the beam was
already being referred to (by Pentagon officials and their
cronies in the War Bureau of Moscow) as “the turning
point in the cold war.” I knew the idea had come from
Child; I recognized it the way one recognizes a bad dream
that someone has made into a movie. But the censors had
learned from the mistakes they had made with me in the
past; the public would never hear of Child.
I wondered, for the briefest of moments, what sort
of inhuman fiend this Bensor must be to want his name
attached to such an inglorious device. Then I lost my
facade of superiority when I considered that the weapon
might just as likely have been called the Simeon Kelly
Beam, for I had been the middleman who had brought it
into existence. I was more responsible than anyone, even
Child, for whatever might be done with this damn thing.
Pictures on the screen showed two Chinese prisoners on
whom the weapon had been used. Spastic, they flopped
about on the gray floor of their cell, eyes sightless, ears
unhearing, bodies pulled by strings that none of us could
really understand.
I turned it off.
I pushed my unfinished breakfast away from me, and
got my coat from the closet. I was to meet Melinda at her
apartment for another session with the tapes, and I did not
want to miss that. Besides, seeing her might somehow
purge the strain of guilt running through me.
AM the interviews were at her apartment, for she had a
ton of equipment there and preferred not to have to move
it. That evening, we were going to the theater—and that