To Pete Garden, Rothman said, “I’m the main bulwark against the vugs, Mr. Garden, and it’ll be a long time before they penetrate me.” His leatherlike face was impassive. “This is a dreadful discovery we’ve made here today, but our organization can surmount it. What about you, Garden? You’re going to need our help. For an individual it’s different.”
Somberly, Pete nodded.
“We must kill E. B. Black,” Patricia said.
“Yes,” Dave Mutreaux said, “I agree.”
Rothman said, “Go easily, here. We’ve never killed a vug. Killing Hawthorne was bad enough, sufficiently dangerous but necessary. As soon as we destroy a vug—any vug—it’ll become clear to them not only that we exist but what our final intentions are. Isn’t that so?” He looked around at the organization for confirmation.
“But,” Alien McClain said, “they obviously know about us already. They could hardly penetrate us without knowing of our existence.” His voice was sharp, edged with exasperation.
The telepath Merle Smith spoke up from her seat in the
corner; she had taken no part in the colloquy so far. “Roth-man, I have been scanning each person here in the motel and I find no indication that anyone has been penetrated in addition to Mary Anne McClain and the non-P Garden whom she wanted brought here, although there is a peculiar inert area in David Mutreaux’ mind which should be looked into. I wish you other telepaths would do that, right now.”
At once Patricia turned her attention on Dave Mutreaux.
Merle, she discovered, was correct; there was an anomaly in Mutreaux’ mind and she felt at once that it implied a situation unfavorable to the interests of the organization. “Mutreaux,” she said, “can you turn your thoughts to—” It was difficult to know what to call it. She had, in her hundred years of scanning, never run into anything quite like it. Puzzled, she passed over Mutreaux’ surface thoughts and probed into the deeper levels of his psyche, into the involuntary and repressed syndromes which had been excluded as part of his ego-character, of the conscious self-system.
Now she was in a region of ambivalent drives, and of nebulous and stillborn wishes, anxieties, doubts interwoven with regressive beliefs and libido wishes of a fantastic nature. It was not a pleasant region but each person had it; she was accustomed to it, by now. This was what made her existence so rife with difficulty, running into this hostile area of the human mind. Each perception and observation which Dave Mutreaux had rejected in himself existed here, imperishable, living on in a kind of half-life, feeding deeply on his psychic energy.
He could not be held responsible for these, and yet there they were anyhow, semi-autonomous and—feral. Opposed to everything Mutreaux consciously, deliberately believed in. In opposition to all his life aims.
Much could be learned about Mutreaux’ psyche by this examination of what he chose to—or had to—reject from consciousness.
“The area in question,” Patricia said, “simply will not open up to scanning. Can you control it, Dave?”
Mutreaux said haltingly, a bewildered expression on his face, “I don’t understand what’s being discussed. Everything
in me is open to you, as far as I know; I’m certainly not deliberately holding back.”
Now she had picked up the pre-cognitive region of Mutreaux’ mind, and by entering it she made herself, temporarily, a pre-cog; it was an eerie sensation to possess this talent as well as her customary one.
She saw, as if arranged in neat boxes, a supple, viable sequence of time-possibilities, each one obviating all the others, strung so as to be knowable simultaneously. It was pictorial, and oddly static rather than dramatic. Patricia saw herself, frozen in a variety of actions; some she blanched at—they were hideous, sequences in which she yielded to her most deranged suspicions and—
My own daughter, she thought bleakly. So it’s possible that I might do that to her, possible but not probable. The majority of sequences showed a rapproachement with Mary Anne, and a healing of the split within the organization rather than a widening. And yet—it could happen.
And, in addition, she saw in one swift instant a scene in which the telepaths within the organization pounced on Mutreaux. And Mutreaux himself certainly was aware of this; the scene after all existed in his consciousness. But why? Patricia wondered. What could he do that would warrant this? Or what could we discover?
Mutreaux’ thoughts became diffused, all at once. “You’re evading,” Patricia said, and glanced at Merle and then at the other telepaths in the room. “It’s the arrival of Don,” she said to them. Don was the missing telepath, on his way now from Detroit; he would arrive any time. “In Mutreaux’ pre-cog area there’s a sequence in which Don will, on his arrival here, ferret out the inlet area involved, will open and explore it. And—” She hesitated, but the three other telepaths had picked up her thought anyhow.
And will destroy Mutreaux because of it, she thought.
But why? There was nothing to suggest the vuggish power about it or about him; this was something else, and it completely baffled her.
Was it certain that Don would do this? No, only probable. And how did Mutreaux feel, knowing this, knowing
that his death was imminent? What did a pre-cog do under such circumstances?
The same as anyone else, she discovered as she scanned Mutreaux’ mind. The pre-cog ran.
Mutreaux, rising to his feet, said huskily, “I’ve got to get back to the New York Area I’m afraid.” His manner was easy, but inside the opposite! “Sorry I can’t stay,” he said to Rothman.
“Don is our best telepath,” Rothman said meditatively. “I’m going to have to ask you to remain until he gets here. Our only defense against the penetration of our organization is the existence of four telepaths who can dig in and tell us what’s going on. So you must sit down, Mutreaux,”
Mutreaux reseated himself.
Closing his eyes, Pete Garden listened to the discussion between Patricia McClain, Mutreaux and Rothman. This secret organization, composed of Psi-people, stands between us and the Titanian civilization, its domination over us or some such thing; his thoughts ran together muddily. He still had not recovered from last night and the manner in which he had been awakened this morning—that, and Hawthorne’s pointless, shocking death.
I wonder if Carol’s all right, Pete thought.
God, he thought, I wish I could get out of here. He thought of the moment when Mary Anne, through her psycho-kinetic talent, had made him a floating particle, and tossed him into and through the material wall of the room, and then somehow, for reasons unclear to him, had let him come back; she had changed her mind at the last instant.
I’m afraid of these people, he said to himself. Of them and their talents.
He opened his eyes.
In the motel room, discoursing in shrill, chattery voices, sat nine vugs. And one human being besides himself. Dave Mutreaux.
He and Dave Mutreaux, standing in opposition to the rest of them. Hopeless and impossible. He did not stir; he simply stared at the nine vugs.
One vug—it spoke in the voice of Patricia McClain—said
agitatedly, “Rothman! I’ve picked up an incredible thought from Garden.”
“I have, too,” another vug said in agreement “Garden – perceives us all as—” It hesitated. “He sees us, with the exception of Mutreaux, as vugs.”
There was silence.
The vug which spoke as Rothman said, “Garden, this implies then that the penetration of our group is complete? Is that right? Complete with the exception of David Mutreaux, at least.”
Pete said nothing.
“How can we consider this,” the vug calling itself Rothman said, “and keep on being sane? We’ve already lost, if Garden’s perceptions are to be believed. We must try to consider rationally; possibly there’s some hope. What do you say, Mutreaux? If Garden is right, you’re the only authentic Terran among us.”
Mutreaux said, “I have no understanding of this.” He glanced at Pete. “Ask him, not me.”
“We’ll, Mr. Garden?” the vug Rothman said, calmly. “What do you say?”
“Please answer,” the Patricia McClain one pleaded. “Pete, in the name of all we hold holy—”
Pete said, “I think you know now what there is in Mutreaux that your telepaths couldn’t scan. He’s a human being and you’re not. That’s the difference. And when your last telepath gets here—”
“We’ll destroy Mutreaux,” the Rothman vug, said slowly, thoughtfully.
XIII
JOSEPH SCHILLING said to the homeostatic informational circuit of the vidphone, “I want the attorney-at-law Laird Sharp. He’s somewhere on the West Coast; I don’t know any more than that.”
It was past noon, now. Pete Garden had not returned
home and Joe Schilling knew that he was not going to. There was no point in contacting the other members of Pretty Blue Fox; Pete wasn’t with any of them. Whoever had taken him lay outside the group.
If this identity problem has actually already been solved, he thought, if Pat and Al McClain did it, then why? And killing the detective Hawthorne, a mistake, whatever their reasons. No one could convince him of the rightness of such an action as that.