Its Rushmore Effect answered cringingly, “He said it was for your own good, Mr. Garden. And you know how you are when you’re depressed.”
Slamming the cabinet door, Pete walked back into the living room.
“You’ve got me, Mutreaux,” he conceded. “At least in one respect. The way I had in mind—”
“You can find some other way, of course,” Mutreaux said calmly. “But emotionally you lean toward suicide by oral means. Poisons, narcotics, sedatives, hypnotics and so forth.” He smiled. “There’s a resistance to doing it by any other means. For instance, by dropping into the Pacific.”
Pete said, “Can you tell me anything about my solution to the Game-playing problem?”
“No,” Mutreaux said. “I can’t. That’s entirely up to you.”
“Thanks,” Pete said sardonically.
“Ill tell you one thing, however. A hint. One which may cheer you or it may not. I can’t preview it because you aren’t going to show your reaction visibly. Patricia McClain is not dead.”
Pete stared at him.
“Mary Anne didn’t destroy her. She set her down somewhere. Don’t ask me where because I don’t know. But I preview Patricia’s presence in San Rafael within the next few hours. At her apartment.”
Pete could think of nothing to say; he continued to stare at the pre-cog.
“See?” Mutreaux said. “No palpable reaction of any sort. Perhaps you’re ambivalent.” He added, “She’ll only be there a short time; then she’s going to Titan. And not by Doctor Philipson’s Psionic means but in the more conventional manner, by interplan ship.”
“She’s really on their side, isn’t she? There’s no doubt of that?”
“Oh yes,” Mutreaux said, nodding. “She’s really on their side. But that’s not going to stop you from going, is it?”
“No,” Pete said, and started from the apartment.
“May I come along?” Mutreaux asked.
“Why?”
“To keep her from killing you.”
Pete was silent a moment. “It’s really like that, is “it?”
Mutreaux nodded. “It certainly is, and you know it. You watched them shoot Hawthorne.”
“Okay,” Pete said. “Come with me.” He added, “Thanks.” It was hard to say it.
They left the apartment building together, Pete slightly ahead of David Mutreaux.
As they reached the street, Pete said, “Did you know that Nats Katz, the disc jockey, showed up at the con-apt in Carmel?”
Nodding, Dave Mutreaux said, “Yes. I met him an hour or so ago and talked to him; he looked me up. It was the first time I had ever run into him, although of course I had heard of him.” He added, “It’s because of him that I crossed over.”
“Crossed over?” Halting, Pete turned toward Mutreaux, who followed after him.
And found himself, incredibly, facing a heat-needle.
“With Katz,” Mutreaux said calmly. “The pressure simply was too much on me, Pete. I couldn’t effectively resist it. Nats is extraordinarily powerful. He was chosen to be leader of the Wa Pei Nan here on Terra for a good reason. Come on, let’s continue on our way to Patricia McClain’s apartment.” He gestured with the heat-needle.
After a moment Pete said, “Why didn’t you just let me kill myself? Why intervene at all?”
“Because,” Dave Mutreaux said, “you’re coming over to our side, Pete. We can make good use of you. The Wa Pei Nan doesn’t approve of this Game-playing solution; once we manage to penetrate Pretty Blue Fox by means of you, we can call The Game off from, this end.” He added, “We’ve already discussed it with the moderate faction on Titan and they’re determined to play; they like to play and they feel
this controversy between the two cultures ought to be resolved within a legal framework. Needless to say, the Wa Pei Nan does not agree.”
They continued along the dark sidewalk, toward the Mc-Clain apartment, Dave Mutreaux slightly behind Pete.
“I should have guessed,” Pete said. “When Katz showed up. I had an intuition but I didn’t act on it.” They had penetrated the group and directly, it seemed, through him. He wished now that he had managed to find the courage to drop his car into the sea; he had been right; it would have been better for everyone concerned. Everyone and everything he believed in.
“When The Game begins,” Mutreaux said, “I will be there and you, too, Pete, and we will decline to play. And perhaps by that time Nats will have managed to persuade others. I can’t see that far ahead; the alternative courses are obscure to me, for reasons I can’t make out.” They had almost reached the McGlain apartment, now.
When they opened the door to the apartment they found Pat McClain busy packing two suitcases; she hardly paused to acknowledge their presence.
“I picked up your thoughts as you came down the hall,” she said, carrying an armload of clothes to the suitcases from the dresser in the bedroom. Her face, Pete saw, had a craven, caved-in look on it; in every way she had collapsed from the disastrous clash with Mary Anne. She worked feverishly to complete her packing, as if struggling against an inexorable and yet unclearly seen deadline.
“Where are you going?” Pete asked. “Titan?”
“Yes,” Patricia answered. “As far away from that girl as I possibly can get. She can’t hurt me there; I’ll be safe.” Her hands, Pete saw, shook as she tried, and failed, to close the suitcases. “Help me,” she said, appealing to Mutreaux.
Obligingly, Dave Mutreaux closed the suitcases for her.
“Before you leave,” Pete said to her, “let me ask you something. How do the Titanians play The Game being telepaths?”
“Do you think you’re going to care?” Patricia said, pausing, lifting her head and regarding him bleakly. “After Katz and Philipson are through with you?”
“I care now,” he said. “They’ve been playing The Game for a long time, so evidently they’ve found a way to incorporate their faculty or—”
Patricia said, “They hobble it, Pete.”
“I see,” he said. But he did not see. Hobble it how? And to what extent?
Patricia said, “Through drug-ingestion. The effect is similar to what the phenothiazine class does to a Terran.”
“Phenothiazines,” Mutreaux said. “In big doses that’s given” to schizophrenics; in quantity it becomes an anti-psychotic medication.”
“It lessens the schizophrenic delusions,” Patricia said, “because it obliterates the involuntary telepathic sense; it eradicates the paranoiac response to the picking up of subconscious hostilities in others. The Titanians possess medication’ which acts along the same lines on them and the rules of The Game, as they practice it, require them to lose their talent or at least to abort it by some extent.”
Mutreaux, glancing at his watch, said, “He should be here any time now, Patricia. Surely you’re going to wait for him.”
“Why?” she said, still gathering up articles here and there in the apartment. “I don’t want to stay; I just want to get out. Before something else happens. Something more that has to do with her.”
“We’ll need all three of us to exert sufficient influence on Garden, here,” Mutreaux pointed out.
“You get Nats Katz, then,” Patricia said. “I’m telling you I’m not going to stay one minute longer than I have to!”
“But right now Katz is in Carmel,” Mutreaux said, patiently. “And we want to have Garden thoroughly with us when we go there.”
“I can’t help,” Patricia said, paying no attention to him; she could not seem to stop her headlong flight, her rushing blindly. “Listen, Dave, honest to god, there’s only one thing that matters to me; I don’t want to undergo again what we went through in Nevada. You were there, you know what I’m talking about. And next time she won’t spare you, because now you’re with us. I really advise you to get out, too; let E. G. Philipson handle this, since he’s immune to
her. But it’s your life; you have to decide.” She went on, then, and Mutreaux somberly seated himself, with the heat-needle, waiting for Doctor Philipson to show up.
To himself Pete thought, Hobble it. Hobble the Psionic talents on both sides, as Patricia said. It could be an agreement with them; we make use of the phenothiazines, they use whatever it is they’re accustomed to. So they were cheating when they read my mind. And then he thought, And they’ll cheat again. We can’t trust them to hobble themselves. They seem to feel that their moral obligations end when they encounter us.
“That’s right,” Patricia said, picking up his thoughts. “They’re not going to hobble themselves when they play you, Pete. And you can’t compel them to because in your own playing you don’t recognize such a stipulation; you can’t show them a legal basis on your side for demanding that.”
“We can show them that we’ve never allowed Psionic talents at the board,” he said.
“But you are now. Your group is voting that daughter of mine in and Dave Mutreaux in, right?” She smiled at him crookedly, heartlessly, her eyes lusterless and black. “So that’s that, Pete Garden. Too bad. At least you made the try.”