thoughts, the deepest id dreams which would horrify him
and which would make him cringe with shame. The one I
chose was of him and his eleven-year-old sister—a whip
and a chain and all the horrors of sexual perversion those
symbols represented. And I pushed them up into his con-
scious mind with such force that they became reality for
him, so that he lost sight of me for only a split second and
fell back, reeling, under the force of the ugliness which
had welled up from the center of him.
Then I got out of there.
He was bent over the desk, clutching the corner of it,
gagging, shaking his head, moaning to dispel the vision
which he refused to believe could be his. I stepped for-
ward, producing a pistol from my pocket, and struck him
across the side of the head. He went down, hard, and
stayed there. I wrestled him behind the desk, took off his
jacket, ripped the arms loose, tied his ankles and wrists. I
stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, rolled the bulk of the
jacket up, and tied the handkerchief in place.
And then I took his keys and opened the prisoner file,
found her cell number. It was eight floors further down.
Committed to this insanity now, I used another of his keys
to open the restricted elevator which led to the lower
levels. I went down.
When the elevator doors opened again, there was an-
other guard waiting, though this one was more alert than
the first. He looked at me and saw that I had not come
with an escort, even though I was obviously not a regular
traveler in these halls. He unsnapped his holster with a
clean, swift move, slipped fingers over the butt of his gun
with the reactions of a trained fighter.
I pried open his mind and found his id.
I wallowed in it.
I dredged up a vision of his own basic blood lust, a
gruesome, mad match that even he would never have
known existed inside him. It involved his unvoiced, unreal-
ized, unknown desire to—as an adolescent boy—rise up in
the middle of the night and slaughter both his parents in
their bed. There were spraying blood, harsh and strangled
screams, terrified faces of two gentle people, the boy’s
hands wielding an ax whose blade gleamed wickedly in the
thin light which streamed through the bedroom window
from the iron street lamp beyond. . . .
When I got out of his head, he had dropped his pistol
and had turned to the wall, where, screaming, spitting, on
the verge of losing his sanity, he smashed his fists into
unyielding, gray concrete. I clubbed him mercifully with
one of my pistols. The vision would not return when he
woke, and he would probably not even remember what
had given him his fit. But knowing that didn’t make me
feel any more heroic.
When he was tied and gagged, I took the cell block keys
from the desk and went after Melinda.
She was sitting in her cell; her reading lamp was on,
and she was absorbed in some propaganda literature she
was permitted to read. I rattled the key in the lock and
swung the door open before she looked up. When she saw
it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before
closing it and taking a much needed breath.
“If I’m interrupting a good book, I’ll come back later,”
I said, nodding at the propaganda.
She threw it down. “That drivel is really fascinating,”
she said. “The guy who writes it is either the biggest con
man in existence or he believes it himself—in which case
he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question.”
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” I asked. “Aren’t you going
to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?”
“You can’t be in my midst, because I’m only one
person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison
baggies do make me look like more than one woman.”
She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. “You’re here. I never
expected you, don’t know how you managed it, and doubt
if we’ll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies