The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick

Bluffing, he thought. Telepaths. Hobbling through medication that acts as a thalamic suppresser, dulls the extrasensory area of the brain. It could be dulled to various degrees, damped to some extent but not entirely; gradations can be obtained, depending on the amount of medication. Ten milligrams of a phenothiazine would dampen it; sixty would obliterate it.

And then he thought, his mind careening, Suppose we didn’t look at the cards we drew? There would be nothing in our minds for the Titanians to read because we wouldn’t know what number we’d obtained . . .

To Mutreaux, Patricia said, “He’s almost managed it, Dave. He forgets that he’s not going to be playing on the Terran side, that he’s going to belong to us by the time he seats himself at the Game board.” She brought out a little overnight bag, now, hurrying to fill it.

Pete thought, If we had Mutreaux, if we could regain him, we could win. Because I know how, finally.

“You know,” Patricia said, “but how is it going to help you?”

Aloud, Pete said, “We could dampen his pre-cog faculty to an undetermined degree. So that it becomes unpredictable.” Through the use of phenothiazine spansules he realized, which act over a period of hours at a variable rate. Mutreaux himself would not know if he were bluffing or not, how accurate his guess was. He would draw a card, and, without looking at it, move our piece. If his pre-cog faculty were operating at maximum force at that instant his guess would be accurate; it would not be a bluff. But if at that instant the medication had a greater rather than a lesser effect on him—

It would be a bluff. And Mutreaux himself would not know. That could easily be arranged; someone else would prepare the phenothiazine spansule, fix the rate at which it would release its medication.

“But,” Patricia said softly, “Dave isn’t on your side of the Game-table, Pete.”

Pete said, “But I’m right. That’s how we could play against the Titanian telepaths and win.”

“Yes,” Patricia said, and nodded.

“He’s worked it out now, has he?” Mutreaux asked her.

“He has,” she said. “I feel sorry for you, Pete, because you’ve got it and it’s too late in coming. Your people would have a lot of fun, wouldn’t they? Preparing the grains of medication within the spansule, using all kinds of complex tables and formulae to work out the rate of release. It could be random, too, if you wanted it that way, or at a fixed but so elaborate rate that—”

To Mutreaux, Pete said, “How can you sit there and know you’re betraying us? You’re not a Titanian national; you’re a Terran.”

Calmly, Mutreaux said, “Psychic dynamisms are real, Pete, as real as any other kind of force. I foresaw my meeting with Nats Katz; I foresaw what was going to happen, but I couldn’t prevent it. Remember, I didn’t seek him out, he found me.”

“Why didn’t you warn us?” Pete said. “When you were still on our side of the board.”

“You would have killed me,” Mutreaux said. “I previewed that particular alternative future. In several, I did tell you. And—” He shrugged. “I don’t blame you; what other course would you have? My going over to Titan determines the outcome of The Game. Our acquiring you proves that.”

“He wishes,” Patricia said, “that you had left the Emphytal in his medicine cabinet; he wishes he had taken them. Poor Pete, always a potential suicide, aren’t you? Always, as far as you’re concerned, that’s the ultimate way out. The one solution to everything.”

Mutreaux said restlessly, “Doctor Philipson should have been here by now. Are you certain the arrangements were understood? Could the moderates have sequestered his services? Legally, they hold the—”

“Doctor Philipson would never yield to the cowards in our midst,” Patricia said. “You’re familiar with his attitude.” Her voice was sharp, laden with dread and concern.

“But he’s not here,” Mutreaux said. “Something’s wrong”

They looked at each other, silently.

“What do you preview?” Patricia demanded.

“Nothing,” Mutreaux said. His face, now, was pale.

“Why not?”

“If I could preview, I could preview, period,” Mutreaux said bitingly, “Isn’t that obvious? I don’t know and I wish I did.” He got to his feet and went over to the window to look out. For a moment he had forgotten Pete; he held the heat-needle slackly, squinting to see in the evening darkness that lay outside. His back was to Pete, and Pete jumped toward him.

“Dave!” Patricia barked, dropping her armload of books.

Mutreaux turned, and a bolt from the heat-needle zoomed past Pete; he felt the peripheral effects from it, the dehydrating envelope that surrounded the laser beam itself, the narrow, effective beam that was so useful both in close quarters and at a distance.

Raising his arms, Pete struck the man with both elbows, in the unprotected throat.

The heat-needle rolled away from both of them across the

floor. Patricia McClain, sobbing, scrambled after it. “Why? Why couldn’t you predict this?” She clutched at the small cylinder, frantically.

His face sickly and dark, Mutreaux shut his eyes and dwindled into physical collapse, pawing at himself, inhaling raucously, no longer concerned with anything else beyond the massive, difficult effort to live.

“I’m killing you, Pete,” Patricia McClain gasped, backing away from him, holding the heat-needle waveringly pointed at him. Sweat, he saw, stood out on her upper lip; her mouth quivered violently and tears filled her eyes. “I can read your mind,” she said huskily, “and I know, Pete, I know what you’ll do if I don’t. You’ve got to have Dave Mutreaux back on your side of the board to win and you can’t have him back; he’s ours.”

Throwing himself away from her he tumbled out of the path of the laser, snatching at anything. His fingers closed over a book and he hurled it; the book fluttered open and dropped at Patricia McClain’s feet, harmlessly.

Panting, Patricia backed away, still. “Dave will recover,” she whispered. “If you had killed him perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much, because then you couldn’t get him for your side and we wouldn’t—”

She broke off. Swiftly turning her head she listened, not breathing.

“The door,” she said.

The knob turned.

Patricia raised the heat-needle. Slowly, her arm bent and twisted, inch by inch, until the muzzle of the heat-needle was pointing at her face. She stared down at it, unable to take her eyes from it. She said, “Please don’t, okay? I gave birth to you. Please—”

Her fingers, against her will, moved the stud. The laser beam flicked on.

Pete looked away.

When he looked back at last the door of the apartment stood open. Mary Anne, framed in the outline of darkness, walked in, slowly, hands deep in the pockets of her long coat. Her face was expressionless. She said to Pete, “Dave Mutreaux is alive, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” He did not look at the heap which had been Patricia McClain; he averted his eyes from it and said, “We need him so leave him alone, Mary.” His heart labored slowly, horribly.

“I realize that,” Mary Anne said.

“How did you know about—this?”

Mary Anne said, after an interval, “When I got to the condominium apartment in Carmel, with Joe Schilling I saw Nats and of course I understood. I knew that Nats was the organization’s overall superior. He outranked even Rothman.”

“What did you do there?” Pete said.

Joe Schilling, his face puffy with tension, entered the apartment and went up to Mary Anne; he put his hand on her shoulder but she jerked away, going alone over to the corner to stand and watch. “When she came in,” Schilling said. “Katz was fixing himself a drink. She—” He hesitated.

Mary Anne said tonelessly, “I moved the glass which he held. I made it go five inches, that’s all. He was—holding it at chest level.”

“The glass is inside him,” Schilling said. “It very simply cut his heart, or part of his heart, out of his circulatory system. There was a good deal of blood, because the glass didn’t go in all the way.” He was silent then; neither he nor Mary Anne spoke.

On the floor, Dave Mutreaux, gargling, struggled, his face blue, trying to get air into his lungs. He had stopped stroking his throat now, and his eyes were open. But he did not seem able to see.

“What about him?” Schilling said.

Pete said, “With Patricia dead and Nats Katz dead, and Philipson—” He understood, now, why Doctor Philipson had failed to appear. “He knew you would be here,” he said to Mary Anne. “So he was afraid to leave Titan. Philipson saved himself, at their expense.”

“I guess so,” Mary Anne murmured.

Joe Schilling said, “I can hardly blame him.”

Bending down, Pete said to Mutreaux, “Will you be all right?”

Mutely, Dave Mutreaux nodded.

Pete said to him, “You must show up at the Game-board.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *