No. Not dead. There was blood, surely, pooling about the concert guitarist’s head, but that same head was also moving, nodding in near unconsciousness, but nodding nonetheless. Ti settled his mind into the comfortable interior of the receiver and operated the voice box. “Lenny!”
It was almost impossible for him to believe the musician was hurt—maybe mortally hurt. A good friend never dies. Never! The shock of the situation echoed back his trace pathway on the Mindlink beam and jolted through his body, trying to make that dumb hulk of flesh understand the horror of the situation.
“Lenny, what happened?”
Taguster raised his head a little, enough for Ti to see the thin dart buried half in his throat. Taguster tried to say something, but he could manage only a thick gurgle, like syrup splattering against the bottom of a galvanized bucket.
Darts? Who would want to kill Leonard Taguster? And why hadn’t they finished the job?
The musician was gurgling frantically as if he desperately needed to communicate something. Ti’s mind swam inside the receiver, as if it were trying to break free and dissipate its charge. He was fighting off panic, and he knew it. Taguster wanted to say something. But how could that be accomplished with his pale throat violated? He could not talk. And from the looks of it, the dart had been tipped with something that made it impossible for him to walk, something that had partially paralyzed him. He scrabbled a limp hand against the wall as if writing without implement, and Ti got the idea. He turned the head of the receiver around so that the cameras showed him most of the room. There was a desk with various writing tools lying on it, and it was only twenty feet away, against the far wall. But a receiver was not mobile—and Taguster could not move. Ti thought of retreating from the receiver and returning to his body, calling the police from his house. But from the looks of him, Taguster could not last that much longer, and the man’s desire to communicate was too intense to ignore.
Ti had never thought to experiment to see if his psi power traveled with his mind when he entered a receiver, but this was as good a time as any to find out! He squinted eyes that he didn’t have (the cameras could not rightfully be called eyes, and his own orb was at home, lying lopsided in his irregular head) and forced his psi energies to coalesce in the vicinity of the desk. He reached out and toyed with the pencil. It flipped over and almost rolled onto the floor! He doubled his effort, lifted it, and floated it across the room to where Taguster lay dying. He imagined he was sweating.
Taguster picked the instrument up and held it as if he were not exactly sure what to do with it. He coughed up blood and stared at that a moment.
“Lenny,” the mutant urged. “Write it. Write . . . it.”
Taguster looked blearily up at the receiver screen, seemed to nod. He raised his hand and wrote on the wall: MARGLE. The letters were shaky and uneven, but they were readable,
“What does that mean?”
Taguster seemed to sigh, dropped the pencil.
“Lenny!”
Taguster looked at the screen again, fumbled with the pencil, lifted it and scribbled under the word “Margle”: NAME.
So Margie was a name. And now that the connection had been made for him, Ti seemed to have remembered hearing it somewhere, though he could not place the source or context. Well, anyway, the musician had named his would-be killer, and the mutant felt justified in leaving the scene long enough to notify the police. But then, someone screamed.
It was a woman’s scream, high and piercing. It started full strength, turned to a gurgle much like Taguster’s, and trailed away. It had come from the direction of the bedroom. There was another receiver in there, an extension of the living room box, and Ti vacated his present perch for the bedroom set.
It was a woman. She had been trying to get out of the window, but her flimsy nightdress had caught on the window latch, delaying her just a moment too long. There were three darts in her back, and the yellow negligee was running with red, red blood. Ti looked to the right, hunting the killer. He had assumed the man had left, but he had only disabled Taguster, then had gone quickly on to the woman to kill her before she could escape. The blood had now soaked her negligee and was dripping onto the floor from the frilly lace edging. He shifted the camera to the left, and he saw his killer. And it wasn’t a man . . .