Pstalemate

  Pstalemate

  By

  Lester Del Rey

  Copyright ® 1971, by Lester del Rey All rights reserved

  Published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons

  All rights reserved which includes the right

  to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

  any form whatsoever. For information address

  G. P. Putnam's Sons

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  ISBN 425-02292-7

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  200 Madison A venue

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK ® TM 757, 375

  Printed in the United States of America

  Berkley Medallion Edition, AUGUST, 1975

  First Printing, January, 1973

  This was to be dedicated to

  Judy-Lynn Benjamin, a most welcome Primate.

  Now, happily it is to

  JUDY-LYNN DEL REY,

  a most charming wife!

  I. HELL

  Martha woke to the muted sound of steps outside her door. In the brief moment before she heard the cover of the spyhole being slipped back, she slitted her eyes enough to scan the illusion of the room.

  It was still there, small but comfortable, imitating a private room in an expensive sanatorium. A sturdy door faced a thick-paned window, now showing night outside. Soft light fell on the subdued cheerfulness of draperies, rugs, a padded chair, a quilted table under a mirror that was set into the wall, and a bed that almost hid its hospital functionalism. There was even an image of her, counterfeited into the mirror—a stout figure in flowered pajamas and robe, lying with pulled-up knees, staring back with slitted eyes. Year after year, the evil ones had aged the image until the hair over the slack-sullen face was almost completely gray. Had she been weak enough to live, she might have looked something like that by now.

  The creatures were subtly thorough—and always too quick for her. In twenty of the Boy's years, she had never caught them before the room and the image were complete.

  She heard the spyhole cover move and closed her eyes before the alien thing could see her. From the heavy breathing, she knew it was wearing the MacAndrews this time. Then the door opened, and she heard heavy steps moving—

  Henry!

  —reproving asthmatic voice with its wheezing kindness and worry she had expected from the MacAndrews. "Well, Martha, what's all this the nurse tells me about your not eating again? We can't have that, you know. You don't want us to go back to forced feeding now, do you?"

  The voice halted, waiting for an answer, but she couldn't be tricked into an argument that easily. In spite of all their wiles, she had accepted her apparent control of her body as only more illusion, and she was tired of their attempts to prove that she wasn't dead—to break down her resistance—to reach that part of her which held her firmly locked between here and the tunnel to the world.

  She drew back down the slippery ramp in her mind, back near the deep well that went blackly down and down. Once that had frightened her; it would have been so easy to slip and go spinning into the depths, never to land, plummeting forever deeper into the blackness of herself while they took over where she had been. But now she was used to it, and she retreated until she could barely hear the murmur of the MacAndrews voice, still cajoling her. He was being silly. She wouldn't eat the food with the drugs to make her confess any more than she would ever believe all the lies they spread around her. She knew she was dead, and she knew where she was, just as she knew that eventually she must go where they wanted. But not yet—not before she could complete her duty to the Boy!

  In the end, of course, she must be damned for the thing she had done to herself. Perhaps these were only lesser creatures, trying to do their proper work on her. But they couldn't send her on until they could prove she had done it to herself or trick her into admitting it. So far they'd failed. She'd been too clever for them; she'd made what happened to her seem like an accident, she'd seen through their illusions, and she would never confess. She couldn't go with them or down into the depths of herself while the Boy was still there, thick with her taint— Henry!

  —faint sound of the MacAndrews sighing. She crept back from the black well and waited, listening to the scuff of the carpet, the click of the door, and the final sound of the steps down the hall, before the MacAndrews could change back into what it really was. She had won again.

  She was sure that they'd turned off the room, but she was too tired to look, knowing it was useless. It was better this way, in the damp blackness around her, where she could lie curled hair so pretty roses in the vase for ashes to ashes all over her head like a cloud of doom for the slightest sin in the back seat of judgment...

  She caught herself, grabbing frantically for the slithery walls that were already dropping to the bottomless pit. She clawed and fought, until she found the ladder of the old verse—the one she'd had revealed to her after the Change. She felt a skittering memory of alienness and things ran ahead of her awareness, but then she had begun the words of the poem that summed her needs, and she was reciting it over and over, climbing back toward the stability between the pit and the illusion beyond her:

  Mating hating, waiting sating, Slip to sleep in sleuthy slumber;

  Humble fumble, mumble jumble— Kill the cub that cawls encumber.

  Sometimes now she could no longer understand it all, but it still served. Distilled from her frantically escaped mind, the words still drew her back, let her relax to something that would be almost sleep in the living. She could no longer find the way out when her mind was tense. Once the whole world was open at all times, but now there was only the single tunnel to the Boy, and she could not reach that until everything else was blanked from her mind and she could draw help from the symbol she had planted. Such a tiny opening toward him—

  Henry!

  —grim, desperate urgency in her need to get back. But at last the murky thread appeared, and she could will her way into the tunnel it marked. She moved outward through infinities of distance, swimming toward the once-familiar goal. Slowly, a richness and width appeared in the tunnel. Then well-known pathways and perception scenery, a parting to let her in. For a second, the familiarity soothed her, until the horror of the developing patterns of what might be, must be, struck her again. Here, still, she could catch the faint wisps of what was to come, though the tainted power no longer operated through either her will or the awareness around her.

  The patterns of dark possession were shaping there—patterns that must not be. There was the Man in White, a dim figure from before, just dawning again on the pattern of the Boy. She'd thought the Man in White was erased long before, but he wouldn't rest. Lately, his shadow had come back, to meddle and to ruin, as he'd done to her plans for the Boy when she had first meant the Love Death. Evil was to be let in again—evil that the Man in White himself had sealed out with unknowingness! And there was the Grim Man, with his yearning and his unclean desires for an evil that should not be his, bringing with him something...

  She strained in the closed area, and for a brief moment her mind seemed to clear and she could see. It was the Girl—the Tainted Girl! Taint to take the Boy from her, to warp him to the Man in White, to lead him to horror!

  Martha wanted to cry for the forlornness of the Girl, but she had only tears enough for her own impotency. Even now, the veils were closing on her, too strong for the force of her own dead mind. They were like dust to foretell the wind, and she could do nothing directly. Was all her love for the Boy to come to nothing, all her willing of his death at the cost of her own sure damnation to be denied? There must be some impossible way to reach him, to s
helter him from what was inevitable somehow, to prevent foretold and certain evil again. But she was so tired, so weak, and the thing that they had grown in her brain was hurting again—

  Henry!

  —pain!

  II. STAIRS

  As he drove the modified Citroën up Washington Street, Harry Bronson was aware that he was a fool for even thinking of stopping in at the Primates instead of heading directly home. No sensible man should be out at all on such a night, when the unseasonably late and heavy snowfall had already turned from slush to ice on the streets, making Manhattan a disaster area for everything that moved.

  Ordinarily, Harry was anything but an outdoor man, even in good weather, though his natural wiriness and effortless coordination often fooled the sports cultists into making unwelcome overtures. His skin seemed well pigmented, but it burned horribly in the summer sun. His eyes were overly sensitive, adjusted for a lower-than-normal light level. His brown hair was baby fine, falling in a tangle across his face at the whim of the faintest breeze. Finally, his nose had been broken in a high school rocket experiment and now ached and developed sniffles at the first touch of cold air. Generally, he regarded the rigors of nature with as little favor as he did any needless athletics or things like parlor guessing games.

  But the storm had come up unexpectedly to refute all weather predictions. He'd listened to the early reports, then decided he couldn't wait longer to locate the duplicates of the engineering reports his partner, Sid Greenwald, had carelessly left behind. Sid's house was forty miles out in New Jersey, but that should have been less than an hour's drive each way. Besides, Harry rather wanted to give the car a decent test in snow again, now that he'd retuned his engine.

  He hadn't counted on the pileup of flashy, overpowered, and undertractioned Detroit cars at the turnpike exit or the stupidity of the average driver on icing roads. He'd been held up for nearly two hours while cars were slowly pulled off the icy ramp ahead of him. Then he'd decided against the parkway, where traffic would also be thick, and had somehow managed to get lost on the back roads. By the time he reached Sid's house and managed to locate the papers in Sid's files, it was already fully dark outside. He'd debated staying the night but had given up the idea when he found nothing left that was fit to eat. Mercifully, the roads were almost free of traffic on the way back, but it was nearly eleven before he finally wheeled through the Holland Tunnel.

  A light ahead of him turned red, and he came to a cautious stop, though no traffic control was needed on the deserted streets and the nearest police were probably holed up in some warm diner. He bent forward, staring through the windshield at the gloom and ugliness of the old street. Even snow and darkness couldn't make anything pleasant of the sordid slums and squalid remains of the former meat-handling plants. Most of the windows were dark, but on the fourth floor of one building lights indicated that the Primates were in session. That didn't mean that anyone would have braved the weather, however; Dave and Tina Hillery would open up anyway, since they lived across the hall in a companion flat. Fred Emmett, whom Harry was supposed to see, was probably home in bed.

  Besides, the brief note from the sports car editor had merely said that he'd met Sid Greenwald in Europe and would give details at the meeting of the Primates. There was no indication of anything important; surely even Sid would have cabled if an emergency had come up or if he'd made any real progress in marketing their engine to one of the foreign car makers during the two months he'd been abroad. Sid would hardly have used Emmett as a messenger; the editor was a bore at best, with his fixation on brute power and pure speed, and he'd be even more of a bore now that he'd glutted himself on German and Italian racing designs.

  Harry had almost persuaded himself to head for home when the light finally turned green. Then he spotted a parking space nearly free of snow directly in front of the building and reversed his decision. He swung in and cut power. The heater blower slowed to a stop, and he shivered at the suddenly audible whine of the wind outside. He braced himself, threw the door open, and dashed across the rutted ice and into the dimly lighted hallway beyond.

  There was a thick stench of mold, cooked cabbage, and soaking clothes. Plaster was cracking from the filthy walls, and the narrow, twisting stairs were sagging and worn. Harry winced: he had a dislike of stairs, and these were completely depressing. Half a flight up, a door had lost its glass and been stuffed with a torn blanket. Now from behind it there came the shriek of a drunken woman's voice raised in foulmouthed anger. It chopped off in mid-speech to the sound of a heavy blow, then picked up in rising stridency. A dog began barking, and there was a scared wailing of children.

  Harry shrugged and started up the steps. He'd heard the voice of poverty—or was it merely humanity?—here before. It faded behind him as he twisted his way up the creaking boards. Dim bulbs marked the landings, but all the other doors were dark and silent. One had a cheap, luminescent crucifix fastened to it.

  Henry!

  The voice from his nightmare screamed at him, jolting him and cutting into his mind with a blast of raw fear that froze his lungs and heart. He caught his breath and staggered back a step, tensed with the same horror that had sometimes brought him awake in a cold sweat from his sleep. He had to get out of here! Up there, something foreign to all human feelings was waiting for him, something that must never...

  Then he mastered it. A trace of dread remained, along with his surprise at being caught by it while awake; the call usually came only in the middle of deep and otherwise dreamless sleep. He took a slow breath, rubbing sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, then started up the stairs again. Most of the reaction had passed by the time he reached the top landing, where a hand-lettered sign indicated the Primates headquarters. From behind the door came a surf-drone of voices that proved the meeting was going on. Apparently the weather had served only as a challenge to bring the members out. There was no way of predicting when there would be a good turnout.

  Now he hesitated, suddenly obsessed again with the feeling that he had no business here. But before the unease could master him, he threw back the door and stepped in.

  The old apartment was well filled. Smoke was thick in the air, mixing with muggy heat and the odor from kerosene heaters. The smoke, Harry knew, was all from pipes and cigarettes; oddly, these gatherings had never turned into pot parties. The dirty walls and windows had been largely covered with yards of cheap draperies of assorted patterns. Rickety chairs and decrepit couches were lined along the walls of the rooms beyond what had been the kitchen, but half the members were standing, dumped into little groups.

  Harry threw his trench coat onto a table where others were piled, just as a small man and a large, heavy-busted girl came from across the hall, dressed in thick layers of sweaters and warm outer coats.

  "Hi, Harry," Dave Hillery called happily. "Just in time. We're running out of supplies." He held out a box with a red sign inked onto it: No representation without taxation. "How about looking at my typewriter this time? It's skipping all the time now."

  Harry nodded, remembering a previous promise, and threw a couple of dollars into the box. The Primates had once been an organization of fantasy writers, complete with stiff dues and a constitution, but that had all worn away. Now Harry and a few others donated the low rent here, and the only expense was for beer. No formal list of membership was kept any longer. Though still composed mostly of writers, artists, and engineers who were interested in fantasy, those who came to the monthly meetings were united only by a common enjoyment of argumentation as the highest form of entertainment They resembled some of the Greenwich Village groups of a former generation, but there was little of the conscious artiness and stylized unconventionality that constituted most modern Village gatherings.

  "Any sign of Fred Emmett?" Harry asked.

  Dave grunted something from under the table where he was gathering beer bottles into cartons. Tina's flat face broke into an amused grin as she answered. "Nora Bley's got him in tow. I guess sh
e wants to find out if he learned anything from European women."

  "Nope." Dave came erect again and began stacking the cartons onto Tina's stout arms. "He was here, but Nora dragged him off early. Said he'd call you later about Sid. Anything important?"

  "Who knows? Probably not" If the message from Sid was a request for more money, it would have to wait; Harry had already sent all that he could pry from Grimes, his guardian under the trust in which his money was held.

  Dave nodded and followed Tina out, carrying two extra bottles as his share of the load. The Hillerys usually lacked the money to contribute for beer and made up for it by errand work, probably enjoying the chance to display their self-chosen poverty. Dave was a first-rate artist, but he preferred to turn out forth-class fiction instead, with the obvious approval of Tina for whatever he wanted.

  Harry shrugged and headed for the front room, momentarily feeling a last prick of what had hit him on the stairs. But there was no sign of monsters lurking there—only a fairly normal-looking bunch of people, most of whom he'd known for years.

  Within a few minutes, however, he realized that his hunch was right and that coming here had been a mistake. He was in no mood for a Primates meeting, and the chief topic wasn't something to change his mind; it seemed to center on some magazine story about telepathy and other psi phenomena—a current fad in science fiction which left him too bored to read the stories.

  Even the conversation among the smaller groups seemed dull and all too familiar: ". . . Try using a dozen five-inch speakers in an infinite baffle to cut down the Doppler distortion ... the way Parrish used his blue in those mountain scenes. I start out with a wash .. . Nora's just looking for security. Something to do with her penis envy. She has to try to destroy every man she meets, hoping she'll find one stronger than she is. If she can crack him, she drops him. If he won't crack, she works harder at it. And she's got more drive... both deadlines past, nothing done, and right in the middle of my annual slump. So I made up my mind, no matter what drivel came out, I'd write thirty mechanical pages every day until I had the books. And you know what that editor said?... even my analyst wouldn't believe me. No, I mean it. He said my Electra complex didn't fit ..."