“Then why should it make any difference to me?” Axwen said gently.
Telzey didn’t reply immediately. That gentleness overlay a mental rigidity strained to the breaking point. Axwen could hardly have avoided having uneasy intimations by now of what she was leading him to. But he still wouldn’t let himself see it; and if the barriers against understanding he’d developed over the years were to be broken down, he’d have to do it himself—immediately. His personality was too brittle, too near collapse under pressure as it was, to be tampered with at this point by a psi—certainly by a psi whose experience was no more extensive than her own.
Just now, in any case, she’d have no time at all for doubtful experiments.
“I never heard of a psi with anything like your potential in some areas, Mr. Axwen,” she told him. “I didn’t know it was possible. You’ve shoved control of all that power over to your other personality. He’s been learning how to use it.”
Axwen made a sudden ragged breathing noise.
“So he’s who has been haunting you this past half year,” she went on. “Really, of course, you’ve been haunting yourself.”
* * *
If it hadn’t been for the careful preliminary work she’d done on him, Axwen’s reaction, when it finally came, might have been shattering. As it was, she was able to handle it well enough. Some five minutes later, he said dully, “Why would he do such a thing to me?”
It was progress. He’d accepted one part of the situation. He might now be willing to accept the remaining, all-important part. “You said you thought he was trying to drive you out of your mind,” Telzey said. “He is, in a way. After he’s reduced you down to where you can barely think, he’ll be the controlling personality.”
Axwen said, in desperation, “Then he’ll succeed! I can’t hope to stand up against his persecution much longer!”
“You won’t have to,” Telzey told him.
He looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Telzey said, “I’ve checked this very carefully. You can take psi control away from him if you’ll do it at once. I can show you how to do it and help you do it. I know people I could send you to who could help you better than I, but we haven’t nearly enough time left for that. And we can do it. Then—”
Axwen’s jaw had begun to tremble; his eyes rolled like those of a frightened animal. “I will not associate myself with whatever that creature has become,” he said hoarsely. “I deny that he’s part of me!”
“Mr. Axwen,” she said, “let me tell you some more about him, about the situation. I’ll talk about him as if he weren’t really you. He’s one kind of psi; I’m another. In a way, he’s much stronger than I am. I couldn’t begin to tap the kind of energies he’s been handling here, and if I could, they’d kill me.
Telzey pushed her palm across her forehead, wiped away sweat.
“There’s a lot he doesn’t understand. I’m the first psi he met—he didn’t know there were others. He thought I was dangerous to him, so he tried to kill me, his way.
“I can’t do any of the things he does. What I’ve done mainly when I had the time was study minds. What they’re like, what you can do with them. Like I studied you today—and him. He didn’t know I was doing it for a while, and when he knew that he didn’t know how to stop me. He’s been trying to do things that will kill me. But each time I confuse him, or make him forget what he wants to do, or how to do it. Sometimes he even forgets for a while that we’re here, or what he is. I’m holding him down in a lot of different ways.
“But he keeps on trying to get away—and he is tremendously strong. If I lose control of him completely, he’ll kill me at once. He’s drawn in much more energy to use against me than he can handle safely—he still doesn’t know enough about things like that. He’s trying to find out how I’m holding him, and he’s catching on. I can’t talk to him because he can’t hear me. If I had the time, I think I could get him to understand, but I won’t have the time. I simply can’t hold him that long. Mr. Axwen, don’t you see that you must take control? I’ll help you, and you can do it—I promise you that!”
“No.” There was the flat finality of despair in the word. “But there is something I can do . . .”
* * *
Axwen started climbing to his feet, dropped awkwardly back again.
“That would be stupid,” Telzey said.
He stared at her. “You stopped me!”
“I’m not letting you dive into the bay and drown yourself!”
“What else is left?” He was still staring at her, face chalk-white. His eyes widened then, slowly and enormously. “You—”
Telzey clamped down on the new horror exploding in him.
“No, I’m not some supernatural thing!” she said quickly. “I haven’t come here to trick you into spiritual destruction. I’m not what’s been haunting you!”
Something else slipped partly from her control then. Far back in the forested cleft behind them, high up between the cliffs, there was a sound like an echoing crash of thunder. Electric currents whirled about her.
“What’s that?” Axwen gasped.
“He’s got away.” Telzey drew a long unsteady breath. “He doesn’t know exactly where we are, but he’s looking for us.”
She blotted consciousness from Axwen’s mind. He slumped over, lay on his side, knees drawn up toward his chest.
She couldn’t blot consciousness so easily from the other personality. Nor could she restore the controls it had broken. The crashing sounds moved down through the cleft toward them. There was one thing left she could do, if she still had time for it.
She drew a blur of forgetfulness across its awareness of her, across its purpose. The noise stopped. For the moment, the personality was checked. Not for long—it knew what was being done to it in that respect now and would start forcing its way out of the mental fog.
Psi slashed delicately at its structure. It was an attack it could have blocked with a fraction of the power available to it. But it didn’t know how to block it, or, as yet, that it was being attacked. Something separated. A small part of the personality vanished. A small part of its swollen stores of psi vanished with it.
She went on destructuring Dal Axwen’s other personality. It wasn’t pleasant work. Sometimes it didn’t know what was happening. Sometimes it knew and struggled with horrid tenacity against further disintegration. She worked very quickly because, for a while, it still could have killed her easily if it had discovered in this emergency one of the ways to do it. Then, presently, she was past that point. Its remnants went unwillingly, still clinging to shreds of awareness, but no longer trying to resist otherwise. That seemed to make it worse.
It took perhaps half an hour in all. The last of Axwen’s buried personality was gone then, and the last of the psi energy it had drawn into itself had drained harmlessly away. Telzey checked carefully to make sure of it. Then she swallowed twice, and was sick. Afterwards, she rinsed her mouth at the water’s edge, came back and brought Axwen awake.
* * *
A search boat from the resort village picked them up an hour later. The resort had considerable experience in locating guests who went off on the lake by themselves and got into difficulties. Shortly before midnight, Telzey was in her aircar, on the way back to Pehanron College. All inclination to spend the rest of the weekend at the lake had left her.
The past hours had brought her an abrupt new understanding of the people of the Psychology Service and their ways. Dal Axwen was a psi who should have been kept under observation and restraint while specialists dissolved the rigid blocks which prevented him from giving sane consideration to his emerging talent. If the Service people had discovered him in time, they could have saved him intact, as she’d been unable to do. And there might be many more psi personalities than she’d assumed who could be serious problems to themselves and others unless given guidance—with or without their consent.
It seemed then that in a society in which psis were a factor, something like the Psychology Service was necessary. Their procedures weren’t as arbitrary as they’d appeared to her. She’d keep her independence of them; she’d earned that by establishing she could maintain it. But it would be foolish to turn her back completely on the vast stores of knowledge and experience represented by the Service . . .